(KRON) – Questions continue about how insurgents made it into the nation’s Capitol building.
KRON4 spoke with local security experts, including a former FBI agent, about what went wrong and why they say it is critical to make sure it never happens again.
“I suspect there is more to this story about what happened because it is unprecedented,” Rick Smith said.
Former FBI agent and head of a local private security firm Rick Smith sharing his expertise on the Capitol mayhem on Wednesday and how it went so wrong, so quickly.
“Based on what I saw, they weren’t prepared, I don’t know how it happened honestly, there is no excuse for it. They overpowered them, they had too many people, they just outnumbered them and also there wasn’t a stand-by contingent – The National Guard wasn’t outside the gate, they weren’t right there,” Smith said.
“Someone said to me, well there should’ve been more arrests. Well, if you are not prepared for a demonstration, you’re certainly not prepared for arrests and deal with the logistics of a mass arrest situation,” Richard Corriea said.
Richard Corriea is a former San Francisco Police Commander and the director of the University of San Francisco’s Institute of Criminal Justice Leadership.
“I was struck by, it looked to me like a complete lack of preparation or anticipation for a possible event,” Corriea said.
Bottom line, both security experts say lessons need to be learned from this, and immediately put into place.
“I think the public needs some disclosures about what happened and what was the lead up to this. The country is jittery right now over this. There are people that think that if there were more minorities in the crowd it would’ve been a different response, and you can’t fault them for wondering that, because we really don’t know what happened, so I think it’s time for the federal government to do some real disclosure here,” Corriea said.
“Some heads are going to roll here, it’s just not acceptable. There’s going to be people fired, and this and that, be a lot of finger-pointing but whatever happened, they’ve got to get it right and can’t happen again like this, I mean, Isis looks at something like that and thinks wow, the United States is, the government is vulnerable and it looked like we were totally vulnerable,” Smith said.