There was a time when people could stroll around the White House grounds and even walk into the White House on their own without getting arrested or making headlines.
The “People’s House” was highly accessible to the public for much of its history.
Thomas Jefferson wanted to ensure that the people of the new nation felt his house was also their own. He welcomed the public into the White House most days, although not early in the morning. He staged exhibitions—including a showcase of artifacts from the Lewis and Clark expedition—to draw more people into the Executive Mansion.
He even displayed two “perfectly gentle” and “quite good humored” grizzly bear cubs in an enclosure on the White House lawn for two months.
Andrew Jackson’s and William Henry Harrison’s presidential inaugurals resembled Executive Mansion frat parties, with scores of rowdy, drunk partygoers coming and going.
And then there was Jackson’s 1,400-pound block of cheese, a gift he decided to share with the public nearly two years after receiving it. On February 22, 1837, he opened the White House to anyone who wanted some cheese, which was placed in the foyer. It wasn’t so much a chance to get to know his constituents—he was weeks from the end of his presidency. It was, quite ingeniously, one of the biggest regifting opportunities in history.
The cheese did not stand alone that day. Thousands of visitors flocked to the Executive Mansion, not put off by the ripe cheese’s odor, which one observer described as “an evil smelling horror” whose potent stench reached far beyond the White House. Prominent journalist Benjamin Perley Poore wrote about the event in his Reminiscences:
For hours did a crowd of men, women, and boys hack at the cheese, many taking large hunks of it away with them. When they commenced, the cheese weighed one thousand four hundred pounds, and only a small piece was saved for the President’s use. The air was redolent with cheese, the carpet was slippery with cheese, and nothing else was talked about at Washington that day. Even the scandal about the wife of the President’s Secretary of War was forgotten in the tumultuous jubilation of that great occasion.
It was not the end of the cheese, though. It lives on, at least symbolically. In the fictional White House TV drama, The West Wing, Big Block of Cheese Day referred to an annual tradition of granting White House access and attention to obscure interest groups one day a year.
The Obama administration continued the theme of opening the White House to the public through three annual, daylong Big Block of Cheese Day social media events. The public was invited to chat with White House staff, the First Lady, senior cabinet members, and others via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. Bad cheese puns abounded. (“It’s That Time of Gruyère: Big Block of Cheese Day Is Back” was the title of the 2016 event’s White House blog entry.)
During the centuries between the original block of cheese and today’s version, White House security became far tighter. Threats and dangers, and questions about the safety of its residents, gradually chipped away at the idea of an open house of the people and for the people. Fences got stronger. Gates became locked and fortified. A lone “watch box” for sentries built during Jackson’s presidency became a security force thousands strong—including an impressive group of canines.
World War II saw the end of free public access to the grounds. Following the bombings of the Marine barracks and U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983, concrete Jersey barriers, later replaced by bollards, went up around the White House complex. As a result of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the portion of Pennsylvania Avenue flanking the north grounds of the White House complex was permanently closed to vehicular traffic.
Until 9/11, people who wanted to tour the White House could show up during open times and walk in. Tour demand became high enough that in 1976, a booth was set up for first-come, first-served tickets.
After 9/11, access dramatically changed. The current system of applying through congressional representatives and being screened through a security process means would-be visitors have to apply at least a few weeks ahead of their intended visits.
But whether entry to the White House involved few barriers or many, there have always been people who didn’t want to play by the rules.
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Agents and officers have heard it all.
“You’d be amazed how many people have appointments with the president,” jokes Bill. “For some reason, they’re not usually on his calendar.”
Some genuinely think they can walk in and tell the president what’s on their minds. They ask officers or agents how they can be let in through the gate and into the White House to speak with the president. When they discover that it’s not how it works, there’s disappointment, sometimes embarrassment, occasionally anger.
Others don’t ask. They just find a way to get in. These men and women usually make headlines now, but the White House has been dealing with such interlopers since the beginning.
In 1800, John Adams became the first president to live in the White House. It didn’t take long for a deranged man to walk into the White House and threaten to kill him.
There would be no Secret Service for sixty-five more years, and it wouldn’t be until 1901 that the agency began its mission of presidential protection. Still, the second president of the United States could have cried out for help and found able-bodied assistance. Instead, he sat down with the man in his office and calmed him on his own. The man, he would later note, never returned.
Tightening security through the years hasn’t stopped those intent on making their way into the Executive Mansion. Some have appeared quite sane and proven perfectly harmless.
In 1930, a well-attired man strode into the White House and interrupted the dinner of President Herbert Hoover before the Secret Service apprehended him. He turned out to be a curious and intrepid tourist.
During World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was watching a movie in the White House with some guests. “When the lights came on, a neatly dressed young man, a complete stranger, was standing next to FDR,” Margaret Truman wrote in her book The President’s House. The man asked for the president’s autograph, which FDR gave to him before the Secret Service escorted him away.
The intrusions that stir the most public concern tend to involve people jumping over the fence, or crashing into it, or flying aircraft over or onto the property.
The 1970s saw some of the most dramatic breaches.
In 1974 an Army officer stole a helicopter and ended up landing it on the South Lawn after the Secret Service opened fire. On Christmas Day the same year, Marshall Fields, the son of a retired American diplomat, crashed his Chevy Impala into a White House gate. He was wearing “Arabic style clothing,” according to reports, and said he was the Messiah. He wore what he claimed were explosives strapped to his body and negotiated for four hours with the Secret Service until he surrendered. The explosives turned out to be flares.
The next year, on the night before Thanksgiving, Gerald Gainous Jr. managed to scale a wall on the south grounds and evade detection despite setting off alarms. He spent between an hour and a half and two hours on the grounds and was caught only after approaching President Gerald Ford’s daughter, Susan, as she unloaded photography equipment from a car.
It wouldn’t be Gainous’s last attempt. By the following August, he had scaled the fence three more times.
In 1976, a Secret Service officer fatally shot a cab driver wielding a three-foot metal pipe while the president was in residence.
Dennis Martin, who would go on to become an inspector with the Secret Service’s Special Operation Division, is still haunted by an event that took place during the Carter administration when he was posted at the White House as a Uniformed Division officer.
“We were like human dogs. We would wait and wait and wait, and somebody would come over and you get that crash alarm at the White House and then you get this adrenaline rush and you go like a dog after him to get him.
“Back in the day when Pennsylvania Avenue was open, people would ram the fence with vehicles. The fence was reinforced in the 1970s, but a lot of people didn’t realize this. One night a guy with an Oldsmobile Delta 88, he is out on Pennsylvania Avenue going about thirty-five miles an hour. This is probably nine thirty at night. There’s nobody out in the street but I remember that car turned to the fence and hit it. The force catapulted the car back to Pennsylvania Avenue.
“I ran out there and pulled my gun and grabbed the guy and put him against the column and started handcuffing him. Then I heard another door open on the car. I was out there alone and there’s a door opening and I see there’s a little girl, maybe five years old, coming out from under the dashboard. He had brought his daughter with him. What was he thinking?
“I remember the guy saying, ‘I want to see the preacher! I want to see the preacher.’ He was talking about President Jimmy Carter.”
The man did not get an audience with Carter, but he did get charged with destruction of property and unlawful entry. Martin still wonders what became of that frightened little girl, and what, if anything, she remembers from that night.
Each breach of the White House grounds causes the Secret Service to review security to see how it can be improved. Fence reinforcement was a result of this kind of review. If it hadn’t been strengthened when the man rammed his heavy car into it, the situation could have ended very differently.
Secret Service canines have been part of the answer to bolstering White House safety since dog teams began working there in 1976. Canines have been an integral part of the security plan for decades, greatly increasing in job scope and number since the program’s inception.
Handlers from the program’s pre-9/11 years say the policy about how they could use their dogs on the White House property was much more conservative than it is today. They could release their dogs to apprehend intruders only under dire circumstances.
“Either I had to be in fear of my life or I needed to be able to articulate that someone else’s life was in danger when that individual came over the fence,” says former handler Sergent.
They never had to release a dog on the grounds to apprehend a suspect. The main job of dogs after a fence infiltration was to check the grounds to make sure the suspect hadn’t left behind anything that could do harm. They also made sure no one else had charged in and hidden while officers were distracted with the other suspect.
Because the patrol and apprehension portion of the dogs’ skill set wasn’t being used much, in 1997, the dogs went from dual purpose to single purpose, focusing entirely on detecting explosives. Noses were in, teeth were out. At least for a few years.
But after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent U.S. engagement in Iraq, the Secret Service examined the frightening reality of what the White House could face at the hands of suicide bombers or other terrorists. The Emergency Response Team was tapped to beef up its presence with a program that would put badass dogs with badass ERT members outside the White House.
“The idea was that if we did encounter a suicide bomber, we could utilize this new tool to intercept the guy, and either cause a premature detonation or at least get our team more time and slow the guy down to get prepared and get in position to mitigate the threat,” says Jim S.
“It’s about putting pressure on the guy and making sure he doesn’t harm the president,” he says. “It’s all for the presidents and their families.”
The ERT Tactical Canine Unit began in 2003. These dogs wouldn’t be trained in bomb detection at all. Their main purpose is to stop bad guys in their tracks. The dog teams, in the words of Stew, “detect [people], extract, apprehend, and deter.”
Dogs are considered a less-than-lethal force. “We aren’t trigger-happy,” Stew says. “No one wants to shoot anyone. These dogs provide additional protection for the White House, team members, and even the suspect.”
In other words, without a dog to help stop someone who looks like a threat, a lethal weapon might become the next option.
Of course, circumstances dictate how and if dogs will be used during a given situation. Anyone who comes over the fence is taken very seriously.
“Every one of our deployments could be a suicide bomber,” says Stew. “We don’t want to kill anyone, we’re not a bunch of cowboys. When we deploy, you have to think these people are coming to take my or my protectee’s life. You can’t assume anyone is safe. Maybe that person who got over really is just an old woman. But she could be a diversion, or strapped with explosives.”
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The Secret Service walks a fine line when it comes to protecting the White House. Yes, anyone could be a terrorist. But in reality, many White House intruders or would-be White House visitors are mentally ill, and often not armed or dangerous.
Most of the prospective uninvited visitors with mental illness suffer from some kind of schizophrenic disorder—usually paranoid schizophrenia. Gainous was eventually diagnosed with this and committed to the ward at St. Elizabeths Hospital, the usual destination for such “visitors” at the time.
These men and women were known by psychiatrists and the Secret Service as “White House cases.” They were usually held at St. Elizabeths for one to three weeks, with the goal of getting them properly medicated so their psychoses came under control.
Many people with paranoid schizophrenia hear voices. (Some who try to get to the White House think the voices are messages from members of the Secret Service.) They may believe they are being spied on 24/7, or that great harm is going to come to them or important people. In an effort to make everything better, they set off to get help from the most powerful person they know: the president of the United States.
“Most of those who are White House Cases consider the president a benevolent authority, and they typically come to ask for some intervention on their own behalf, or to advise or warn the President in some way,” according to a 1985 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry, cowritten by David Shore, MD, a top researcher in the field.
E. Fuller Torrey, MD, a research psychiatrist specializing in serious mental illnesses, says some of the mentally ill who seek an audience with the president suffer from bipolar disorder. During periods of grandiosity, they might think they have a direct link to the president, and that they belong in the White House. Others suffering from delusions may think they’re being called by the president, or that the president simply must hear about an important idea or invention of theirs.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Torrey was in charge of the ward at St. Elizabeths where most of the White House cases ended up. Around that time, the cases numbered about one hundred per year—so many that right next to the “name” field on the hospital’s standard admissions form was a yes/no box to check for “White House case.”
Torrey recalls one woman who insisted she was married to President Ronald Reagan.
“She would sit across the street in Lafayette Park day after day, expecting to be let into the White House because she was the president’s wife,” says Torrey, author of American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System.
She was eventually brought to St. Elizabeths, held for a few days, put on medication, deemed relatively harmless, and released. She didn’t stay on her meds and went back to being the “other” Mrs. Reagan.
The men and women who became White House cases flocked to the nation’s capital from across the United States, deeply driven to see the president.
Eugene Stammeyer, chief psychologist at St. Elizabeths at the time, gave this colorful if heartbreaking description of a few White House cases to the Washington Post in 1977:
They really do come barefoot, some of the time. One lady sold her blood to get here. A man lived outdoors near the Lincoln Memorial for six months, eating out of garbage cans behind restaurants, because he spent every penny he could scrounge on phone calls to the President. There was a man who brought a roll of toilet paper all the way from California to give to President Nixon because he was sure Nixon couldn’t afford his own.
St. Elizabeths has been taking in White House cases almost since it opened its doors in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane. The number of mentally ill inpatients peaked at seven thousand to eight thousand in the 1950s.
The introduction of the first effective antipsychotics in the mid-1950s primed the pump that would end up purging patients from hospitals over the next few decades. By the 1970s, St. Elizabeths had only about three thousand live-in patients. Today it has fewer than five hundred.
White House cases are no longer called White House cases, and they’re reportedly rarely seen at St. Elizabeths. The Secret Service declines to talk about what happens now when people who appear to be mentally ill need further evaluation, but in 2014, The Atlantic reported that the agency transports them to one of the local hospitals where they can get an emergency psychiatric examination. They may be involuntarily committed for a short time while a treatment protocol is worked out.
The “White House cases” moniker may be gone, but there’s likely no shortage of people who fit the description.
“I will be very surprised if in fact the White House cases are fewer than they were thirty years ago,” says Torrey. “We now have more homeless who are mentally ill, more people in jails and prisons who are mentally ill, and the quality of public services for people with serious mental illness has deteriorated markedly. White House cases have almost surely increased as well.”
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Dozens of men and women have scaled the White House fence since the ERT Tactical Canine Unit began its watch outside the Executive Mansion in 2003.
At least one was a repeat offender. A man who reportedly believed his family was being terrorized and poisoned thought President George W. Bush was the only person who could help. Brian Patterson, of New Mexico, jumped over the White House fence four times between 2004 and 2006 in an effort to meet the president, tying Gainous’s attempts at entry.
An Arkansas man who jumped the fence in 2005 wasn’t intent on an audience with President Bill Clinton, but rather with his daughter, Chelsea. Shawn Cox thought she still lived there (she didn’t) and that he was destined to marry her.
“He insisted that Chelsea Clinton was in the White House as well as President Bush and described how former President Bill Clinton had told him that [Cox] was ‘going to marry my daughter’ when he had met him in Arkansas,” a psychologist wrote in a court document, according to a news report. The document also stated that Cox said his head was “a cell phone implanted by Jesus.”
In 2007, Catalino Lucas Diaz, a spry sixty-six-year-old man, scaled the fence and claimed he had a bomb and he would throw a missile. The Secret Service used a water cannon to destroy the package he brought with him. It contained nothing dangerous.
On the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, a twenty-six-year-old man wearing a Pokémon hat and carrying something in his hands—which turned out to be a Pikachu doll—jumped over the fence and was quickly subdued. The man’s mother said the doll was his best friend since childhood. She said he had been suffering from mental illness for years, and that he may have become despondent when his health insurance wasn’t accepted where he was seeking care.
“He went to talk to the president about his insurance and health care,” she said.
Among the others ending up on the wrong side of the fence since the introduction of ERT dog teams have been a Code Pink protestor who was on a hunger strike for two months, and a Japanese man wearing “military style camouflage clothing,” who later said he was in the U.S. on a visa and had run out of money a couple of days earlier.
In 2014, a toddler managed to squeeze through the bars of the fence just before President Barack Obama was going to brief the press on Iraq. The brief was delayed while the matter was resolved. It didn’t take long.
“We were going to wait until he learned to talk to question him, but in lieu of that he got a timeout and was sent on [his] way with [his] parents,” joked Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan.
The toddler is probably the only fence infiltrator the Secret Service hasn’t been too concerned about, but it’s a safe bet that someone made sure the toddler wasn’t being used as a distraction for something bad going down elsewhere on the grounds.
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Considering all the people who have jumped the fence since the Tactical Canine Unit started, it’s quite remarkable that ERT dogs didn’t need to physically apprehend anyone for more than a decade.
Dogs have been involved in stopping fence jumpers in other ways. The canine teams are trained to deploy out of their vans in an extraordinarily short amount of time. (The Secret Service asks that the number of seconds not be revealed.) They bolt to where the handler deems he and his dog would be most effective and set to work to “convince” the suspect that he or she needs to freeze and then lie down prone.
It’s a team effort, with the handler yelling to the intruder that he will release his dog if the suspect doesn’t cooperate, and the dog barking at the end of the leash and looking like he would dearly love to pitch in with his teeth.
On September 20, 2011, Jim sat in his van on the White House’s north grounds in the middle of the day, watching the crowds at the fence line for anything suspicious. His Malinois, Spike, lay in the back, relaxing but ready for anything if called upon.
Jim and Spike had been together since 2005 and in 2010 had taken first place in the patrol competition at Vohne Liche’s K-9 Olympics. But Spike was getting older and would be retiring in the next few months. Jim didn’t want to think about what life would be like not having Spike at his side at work every day.
They’d had some exciting times together keeping presidents safe. He wondered if Spike would ever see any action again. He knew that Spike wouldn’t mind one last exciting protective detail before hanging up his leash.
A couple of hours into their shift, Jim saw trouble. A man had swiftly scrambled over the wrought iron fence and was in a dead sprint toward the White House, dashing straight in the direction of their van.
Jim felt like he was moving in slow motion as he and Spike deployed from the van and ran toward the man. The first time he had headed off a fence jumper, without a canine, it felt like it took him an hour, instead of seconds. It’s not an uncommon sensation in this kind of work.
As the man ran toward the White House, and toward him and Spike, Jim shouted for him to stop and get on the ground or he’d release his dog. The man didn’t comply. No other ERT officers had arrived yet.
He wanted the guy to give up without Spike having to bite him. But the fence jumper showed no sign of relenting. Spike barked steadily and pulled at the leash, anxious to move in.
Jim made his warning announcement again and let a few feet of line out of his hands, allowing Spike to run closer. He was going to play it by fractions of a second. He could stop the dog any time. The guy didn’t know this. But when he saw the reality of this dog and those teeth, he gave up and knelt down in the grass.
Jim didn’t need a leash to stop Spike. All it took was a word and the dog halted. Other ERT officers had arrived, weapons drawn in case the man decided to pull a fast one.
Spike continued to bark, front end down, hind end up, ready to help again any time he was needed.
Marshall, who was on ERT but not yet in canine, moved in to handcuff the intruder. He took extra time because as he was patting him down, he felt hard objects up and down the man’s chest. He needed to assess whether these were explosives, part of a suicide vest, or something else. Fortunately they were rocks, loads of them, lining the front of his baggy jacket.
Marshall glanced over at the dog barking to his right—this dog who was so passionate about his work and had just stopped this guy in his tracks—and it hit him. He wanted to be holding the leash of a dog like Spike one day. He decided right there on the green grass of the White House that he was going to do whatever it took to become an ERT dog handler.
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Spike retired a few months later. That deployment would turn out to be his last. Years later, well after Spike passed away, Jim still has a link immediately available on his cell phone. Click it and you’ll see the video of the last part of the action that day, captured by a far-off news crew. It shows his partner barking with a passion and fully immersed in doing what he most loved to do.
Jim has watched it dozens of times, and it still makes him smile.
“I’m going to keep this forever,” he says.
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The White House perimeter fence is seven feet six inches tall with a horizontal railing running under decorative spear points, called finials, at the top. As the dozens who have breached it could attest, the fence is not all that hard to climb.
It’s an issue multiple agencies would dearly love to remedy.
In the summer of 2015, the Secret Service and U.S. Park Police installed a removable anticlimb feature consisting of small, sharp spikes that fit between the finials. The spikes are temporary until there’s a better way of deterring would-be jumpers, or at least slowing down anyone determined to get closer to the Executive Mansion and its occupants.
An independent panel convened by the Department of Homeland Security recommended the fence be made four or five feet taller. The rationale was given in an executive summary of the report:
A better fence can provide time, and time is crucial to the protective mission. Every additional second of response time provided by a fence that is more difficult to climb makes a material difference in ensuring the President’s safety and protecting the symbol that is the White House. Additionally, the ease with which “pranksters” and the mentally ill can climb the current fence puts Secret Service personnel in a precarious position: When someone jumps the fence, they must decide, in a split-second, whether to use lethal force on a person who may not actually pose a viable threat to the President or the White House. By deterring these more frivolous threats, a more effective fence can minimize the instances when such difficult decision making is required.
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Other ideas have already been rejected. Barbed wire, a water-filled moat, and an electrified fence aren’t going to cut it at the White House. Neither is a giant solid wall. The panel noted that it had confidence that adjustments “can be made without diminishing the aesthetic beauty or historic character of the White House grounds.”
A Washington Post editorial in January 2015 noted that “the security of the president and his family must be paramount. But it’s not clear that security depends on or is enhanced by all of the incremental militarization near the White House.”
Many in the Secret Service believe that a beefed-up ERT canine presence could go a long way toward making the White House more secure without making it look militaristic. To that end, the Tactical Canine Unit has been tapped to increase its presence at the White House.
Whatever happens to the fence, there will probably still be those who succeed in scaling it. An enlarged welcoming committee of tactical canines will help do what no fence can do.
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It wasn’t until March 30, 2014, that an ERT canine put the bite on a fence jumper. It was a misty, rainy day, and the press area outside the White House was empty. The event would go largely unreported, garnering three paragraphs in an AP story that didn’t note that a dog was involved.
Subsequent one-paragraph stories did mention a dog, but only with a line from a Secret Service press release, which stated that after “failing to comply with lawful orders, the subject was subdued by a U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division K-9 unit.”
After the man jumped the fence, he ran around erratically on the north grounds, evading capture and not listening to commands to stop, an ERT member would later describe. When he started running once more for the White House, the handler gave another command to halt, and when it went unheeded, he let the dog settle the situation. The dog sped toward the man, grabbed him by the forearm, and took him down.
As soon as the man was under the control of the ERT, the handler asked the dog to release his wrist.
The man was arrested and taken to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries.
The first real-life apprehension by an ERT canine happened with no fanfare. And that was fine with the ERT guys. “We’re not in it for the glory,” says a handler. “We just want to get the job done.”
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When standing among tourists admiring the White House, it’s fairly common to hear comments like one from a man from Massachusetts talking with his wife.
“I think that’s where that man got into the White House. I can’t believe the Secret Service couldn’t stop him. How could that happen?”
The Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security have spent a long time trying to figure out the answer to that question.
Mention “the September event” to those in the Secret Service, and chances are they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about and wish it had never come close to happening. It’s a painful embarrassment, and some take it deeply to heart.
On the evening of September 19, 2014, Omar Gonzalez, an Iraq war veteran battling PTSD, jumped over the White House fence, sprinted across the north grounds, overpowered an officer guarding an unlocked front door to the White House, and ran past a stairway that leads to where the First Family lives. (The president and his daughters had left for Camp David by helicopter from the South Lawn about ten minutes before Gonzalez breached the fence.)
He kept going and dashed into the East Room, where he was tackled by a counterassault agent. Some reports say he got as far as the doorway to the Green Room.
It was a security failure of almost the worst kind. It would have been far worse if he had been armed with something more than the Spyderco VG-10 folding knife he carried in a pocket in his pants.
“If he has [an explosive] device on him and he gets in, he controls the White House. He could have anything on him,” a former high-ranking Secret Service official, speaking anonymously, told the Washington Post.
Gonzalez had come to the attention of the Secret Service twice that year. In July, Virginia law enforcement had found several rifles, shotguns, and handguns in his vehicle during a traffic stop, in addition to a map with a line that pointed to the White House. The Secret Service interviewed him but didn’t find him to be a threat.
In August, Secret Service officers stopped Gonzalez and spoke with him after they spotted him walking near the fence on the south side of the White House with a hatchet in his waistband. They weren’t aware of the earlier incident and let him go on his way after searching his car and finding nothing threatening.
Less than a month later, Gonzalez would somehow make it through several rings of protection that are set up to prevent anything like this from happening.
One of those rings included an ERT dog and handler.
Every moment of the fiasco was examined in a detailed DHS report on the incursion. The executive summary alone is several pages.
“It was one Murphy moment after another,” says a member of the Tactical Canine Unit who spoke under condition of anonymity. “I didn’t sleep for days after the incident.
“It hit us so hard. We were all sick to our stomach about the entire incident. It was a failure on all parts, we failed, everyone failed. It’s not ever going to happen again.”
Almost immediately, the ERT Tactical Canine Unit instituted a significant change in the way dogs are used. Before “the September event,” there had been only one dog team stationed on each side of the White House. After, teams would never be solo again.
The program is also working on outfitting a new kind of vehicle that will make deployment times even faster than they already are, with a front-deploying system specially designed for dogs. Turning around to get a dog out of a minivan can take the focus off the suspect. The new design would not only shave a little time off deployment, but should make it easier for a handler to remain engaged with the subject.
“Good always comes from bad,” says Bill. “It wasn’t our finest moment, but we learned some valuable lessons.”