= new reply since forum marked as read
He said there must have been some failures to be looked at, and he didn't want to second guess, but he put a lot of the blame on Trump and not the police. It seems he should have gone a lot further and said what went wrong.
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/954216229/former-capitol-police-chief-on-why-the-u-s-capitol-has-been-breached
(EXCERPTS)
TERRY GAINER: Well, there are some failures we're going to have to figure out, Mary Louise. And, you know, I was up there for nearly 10 years in those two positions, so we've done a lot of things to try to make it secure. We've made suggestions from a security point of view that have been rejected. But all that notwithstanding, they breached the Capitol. And I wouldn't have bet a million dollars that that would have been easily done or so easily done, so I had to definitely suspend my disbelief. And the protesters were on the Senate and House floor doing what they were doing, that they were attacking the police officers in there. But I was pleased that the police officers, both inside and outside the building of the Capitol Police, did one of their primary jobs, and that is to protect the leadership, the members and the staff notwithstanding how scary it was for everybody. We never like to see property damage, but that's secondary to the main job of protecting people. But that having been said, I feel like we security types have failed somehow to let this get this way. And the darn president of the United States did not help any of us by inciting people as he did.
GAINER: Well, they're full law enforcement - federal law enforcement officers, and they're trained at the federal law enforcement training center in Quantico. And they go through about a six-month training there. Then they come back and go to a training facility in Maryland. And they are - do training - regular training on a weekly and daily basis, depending on the rotation it is. So they are well-versed in their duties. And I think - I don't think individual officers or sergeants weren't doing what they were supposed to do. But somehow, clearly, we lost control of the steps and the areas around the exterior of the Capitol where the skin of the Capitol can be a bit more vulnerable because we don't anticipate that vigilantes and riotous people are up there that close.
GAINER: Well, the would-have-should-have-could-have is pretty easy. In retrospect, the fence should have been up. In retrospect, there should have been more officers brought in. But again, I do respect them as I've been second-guessed enough times - that they thought they had this under control. I think I'm not trying to throw all the blame, but there is a certain responsibility that the president of the United States had inciting these people to be so angry and hateful not only what he said today, not only what he tweeted today but what he's been doing since he lost this election. So it's hard to control people who are so hateful and so hurtful.