Stone-faced protectors, Service agents are now dealing with the raw emotion of a racism charge.Secret service officers learning to protect the president spend hours inside "shoot houses" on the agency's training grounds in Beltsville, Md. On the outside, the buildings are made up to look like embassies or government offices. Inside, they resemble movie soundstages—big, empty spaces with changeable scenery where trainees, armed with paintball guns, simulate harrowing situations they may face guarding the commander in chief and other VIPs.
About midday on April 16, a
Secret Service trainer unlocked a shoot house to set it up for a drill session. Officers are trained to be ready for anything when they walk inside that building. But the sergeant, who is African-American, wasn't prepared for what he saw: a noose, hanging from the railing of an overhead staircase. "It was a solid rope … about eight feet long, and the noose fell at about neck level," says a witness who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the case.
The Secret Service's response to this incident was, to say the least, cautious. The agency called in its internal-affairs unit to investigate. A white instructor at the facility admitted he'd hung the rope, and was put on paid leave. But
instead of making an example of the officer to signal that racial bigotry won't be tolerated, the agency quibbled over whether it was a noose at all. It "didn't resemble a traditional noose," says Linda Triplett, the agent in charge of the training center.
...
The agency has been similarly defensive about racist e-mails among senior Service officials that emerged last month. One allegedly sent in 2003 was titled "Harlem Spelling Bee," which contained a list of "black" definitions of words. Another e-mail included a joke about a lynching. Service officials call the e-mails "deplorable," and
the agency's director sent out a stern memo telling employees that messages sent from work e-mail accounts "must not reflect poorly" on the Service.
Newsweek
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