Security Held…Now, Let’s Talk About What Didn’t

The evening of April 25, 2026, was supposed to be a celebration. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton – the annual gathering of press, politicians, and power – was notable this year as the first time a sitting President Trump had attended. Instead, it became the scene of the third reported assassination attempt against him, as a 31-year-old gunman named Cole Tomas Allen fired shots near the main security screening area before being subdued by the Secret Service. One officer was struck in a ballistic vest and is expected to recover.

Security professionals across the country spent the days after the attack processing what happened, and doing what they always do: asking hard questions. This column will ask two of them – questions that go beyond the Secret Service’s performance and land squarely in our own industry’s lap.

First, Let’s Be Clear: The System Worked

Before raising criticisms, intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what went right. Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent and CNN law enforcement analyst who covered the event in real time, was direct in his assessment on the news network: The security plan worked as designed. The attacker was stopped at the point of first meaningful contact – he never reached the ballroom or the President.

Paul Eckloff, also a retired Secret Service agent, framed it well when asked by NewsNation whether the incident constituted a security failure. He wrote on LinkedIn: “Protective security is not designed to eliminate all risk. It can’t. Not in an open society, not at a public venue, and not without sacrificing the very freedoms it exists to protect. When a threat emerges, the measure is not whether it appeared. The measure is what happened next.”

Juan Alicea, a retired Secret Service Resident Agent in Charge and current security manager at Volkswagen Group of America, widened the lens further: “Last night’s events should serve as a clear signal: the environment we operate in demands vigilance, respect for expertise, and a willingness to invest in safety before tragedy forces our hand,” he wrote. “Security is not an accessory to an event – it is a foundational element of it.”

Don’t Give Them a Platform

The shooter called himself the “Friendly Federal Assassin.” He wrote about his motives in a manifesto that ran in nearly every major media outlet within hours of his arrest.

I want to be direct about this, because it’s a conversation our industry – and frankly, our society – needs to have: the moment you fire a weapon at a sitting president or any publicly elected official, you have forfeited your platform. Full stop.

Free speech is a foundational right; however, it is not an unlimited one. Publishing a would-be assassin’s manifesto verbatim, in its entirety, under headlines that echo his chosen nickname, is not journalism in the public interest. It is advertising. It tells the next grievance-driven actor with a gun that the path to amplification runs through a White House security checkpoint.

The security industry has a voice in this conversation. When you speak to clients, policymakers, and the public about threat environments, it should be clearly articulated that the amplification of violent actors’ ideologies is itself a security threat. When Alicea described the “intersection of volatility, intent, and opportunity,” it doesn’t dissolve at the moment of arrest. The manifesto keeps that intersection alive.

Upgrades Needed

Now let’s talk about the cameras. In the hours after the shooting, investigators and media outlets turned to the Washington Hilton’s surveillance footage for answers. What they got was grainy, pixelated imagery that looked like it was captured on equipment installed during the Clinton administration.

Charles McGilvary Johnson, PSP, FCP, a board-certified physical security professional and 30-year industry veteran, put it with appropriate bluntness: the Washington Hilton “might want to consider an upgrade to the circa 1993 analog video cameras and VCR recording system they have installed.”

He is not wrong. And this is not the first time we’ve been here. Remember the Brown University shooting in December 2025? Same story: High-profile incident and law enforcement scrambling for usable imagery. The surveillance footage was so poor that it complicated the investigation and embarrassed every stakeholder associated with the university’s security infrastructure.

We live in an era when a $200 consumer doorbell camera shoots 4K with night vision. The technology to capture clear, actionable surveillance footage is not exotic or cost-prohibitive; nor is it difficult to install or maintain. What it requires is a client willing to invest in it; and, critically, a trusted security advisor who has made the case compellingly enough to close that sale.

That’s where the security integration and consulting industry’s accountability begins. Poor surveillance infrastructure at high-profile venues doesn’t just reflect poorly on the venues; it reflects poorly on our industry. It tells law enforcement that the security professionals responsible for protecting those spaces either didn’t notice the problem, didn’t prioritize it, or didn’t persuade the client to fix it. None of those are good answers.

The Washington Hilton is not a Motel 6 in Tulsa. It is a landmark venue that has hosted the Correspondents’ Dinner for decades. It hosts the President of the United States. If the surveillance system at that facility is still analog, it leaves you wondering how many other high-profile, high-consequence venues are running on equally obsolete infrastructure – and what our industry is doing about it.

The officers at the Washington Hilton checkpoint did not hesitate. They identified the threat, responded, and held the line. An officer took a round to his vest and is going home to his family. That is, by any professional measure, a successful outcome. But the cameras were inadequate. And a violent actor’s manifesto ran verbatim in dozens of outlets, seeding the next one.

As Alicea framed it, security is a foundational element to an event, not an accessory – and that philosophy must extend beyond the checkpoint. It must include the camera at the end of the hallway, the relationship built with a venue before an incident forces the conversation, and the industry-wide willingness to say publicly that amplifying an assassin’s ideology is itself a threat vector.

The Secret Service did its job on April 25. The question for the rest of us is whether we’re doing ours.