Daniel Schuman: June 30th marks one year on the job. How are things going?

Chief Michael Sullivan: Terrific. This is an incredible organization with an incredible mission, much different than other jobs that I’ve had in major municipal cities. Really focusing on what we do here, which is protecting members, protecting this place, and protecting the legislative process.

And that protective mission-- while policing is certainly part of that mission -- security and the protection piece is something that is much stronger than any other place. I would say it’s flip-flopped. I had protective missions in other places; however, it was a small piece of my portfolio. I would argue that protection piece of this place and the members is a much larger piece of the portfolio here at the United States Capitol Police.

Schuman: The legislative branch has tremendous security needs and of course you can’t do everything, you can’t focus on everything. Is there something that you’re focusing on right now?

Sullivan: There’s a lot of things that I’m focusing on right now. I met with a lot of folks over the last year right after my entry, hearing members’ concerns about safety, the concerning emails, phone calls, and threats that were coming to them directly. And, I can tell you there was deep concern across the entire membership that I talked to directly and had those one-on-ones on how we’re handling those. Being able to have those conversations really made me understand that difference in that policing mission versus what I would call a protection or security mission. It was helpful in instructing some of the areas I needed to make sure that I assessed and focused and did the best we can with the resources that we currently have. That’s been part of what I’ve looked at.

I’ve also looked at, making sure -- because this agency made incredible strides since January 6th -- making sure that we have systems in place that embed that progress, that we don’t backslide. We have to make sure that we are always prepared, and a day like that, if it ever comes, that we’re there to meet that day and meet that purpose. I truly believe that we are today, but we’re going to kick the tires and if we’re failing in any way, we’re going to fix it.

Schuman: Can I just stay on this for a second? In prior years, with some of your predecessors, there were questions around are you focusing on training, because training was a big issue, particularly [on January 6th] Are you focusing on communications? Are you focusing on particular aspects of member security? There’s a million things that someone in your role, of course, needs to be paying attention to, and you had spoken about the security mission. You gave us a good top level, but is there a particular thing that you’re trying right now to address?

Sullivan: I can tell you as the chief of a major organization, I have to focus on all those things at once. Training is a huge issue. Making sure that we have leadership training, embedded in this organization.

We have people up in Boston right now at the Senior Management Institute, which is an executive leadership school. I’ll be up there speaking to them and that entire cohort this Friday. That’s incredibly important to me. We’re investing in that. This is a very busy time of year, but we found time to send our senior folks there to get that training.

Then we look at how do we embed the training, because it’s different here, right? Every place else I’ve been there’s been a state post that requires and mandates so much training. We don’t have that here, and making sure that we get our folks the training that they need, whether it’s around their critical needs like just something as simple as... and it’s not simple, but screening at the doors. We can’t just ask people to do that without giving them the training.

We focused on improving policy, improving training. One of the things that I’ve learned over my time ... When I came up in this profession, you’d make a policy change, sometimes a significant policy change, and it would come across to you at roll call, you would sign for it, and after you signed for it, you were responsible for it. That was the impetus of your training of this many times a very important policy. We need to train our folks and if we make a significant consequential policy change, it needs to be followed up with training.

What that training looks like can be many different things depending on what the policy changes are. But policy changes, are great, but they’re only great if they’re actually embedded in the culture, followed up on, and then our people are trained to be able to be held accountable to them.

Chris Nehls: I want to go back to … you mentioned the threats that members have been experiencing, staff have been experiencing. We’ve seen the reporting and the information out from the department is there’s 15,000, almost 15,000 of these threats last year. This is up, almost double from just five, six years ago; but it’s hard for us to understand what that all means in terms of context. First, how do you define a threat?

Sullivan: When we talk about that 15,000-number, we talk about threat cases. Okay. These are concerning cases. Some of them have a criminal nexus. Some of them, I would say the majority of them, do not -- it’s First Amendment protected speech. But I can tell you, as the executive over this organization, if we did not capture something that is a concerning statement and causes a member’s offices concern, and then that person comes up on the radar again, we don’t see that escalation, that would be a bad thing. So, it’s incredibly important for us to make sure that we do our due diligence on each of these concerning statements, threats that are risen to us, because if an office is reaching out to us and has concerns about it, we should have concerns about it.

When I talk about that 15,000, those are 15,000 cases that are threats agents are working and have to manage. Certainly, First Amendment protected activity, that investigation is much different than a full-blown threat investigation where we don’t have somebody identified, where we have to go out and get legal service to be able to identify that person and then we have to engage with the US attorney, whether it’s here locally or somewhere out in the United States, to be able to facilitate a prosecution.

As you talk about these cases, we all want to look at prosecution as the bottom line. That’s a tool that we have in the tool belt. It’s certainly something that we want to use when it’s appropriate, but our mission is to keep these members safe. Sometimes keeping members safe means getting them engaged with family that they’re not engaged with right now because of some issue, mental health, so all of a sudden, this person that has been a consistent issue because of some other challenges that they have in their life. Maybe the prosecution isn’t necessarily the right way to go. Many times, if we can do those interventions, we solved a problem and we kept a member safe in the long run, maybe safer than prosecution.

With that said, we don’t hesitate to prosecute. We can’t stand for people to make, blatant, outright threats, to our members and to this place and to the people that work here. We’re focused on that and focused on keeping people safe.

Nehls: Could you give us a little bit of a sense of how you filter through... It seems like such an enormous amount of work that goes into investigating, as you said, investigating 15,000. How do you manage or filter through what sounds like it might be somebody just calling up randomly who’s mad and yelling at an intern versus things that go higher in a threat matrix? Can you just talk through how the department, works that through?

Sullivan: We stood up a protective intelligence operations center. It’s an operation center, so it manages all those operations that are outside the NCR [National Capitol Region] that are going on with members, making sure that we’re focused on and understanding what that looks like. In addition to doing that, the concern is with 15,000 cases coming in 18 different places, we needed one central collection point. So that one central collection point is our Protective Intelligence Operation Centers. It allows us to triage and then assign the cases. It makes sure that they all have that one entry point so we don’t miss something, which is always the fear that you have, that you miss that one string that you could have pulled.

There are assessments that go on during that process. There has to be communication with the offices because if you’ve given this to us, the follow-up that we have to have -- which has been one of the most challenging, just to be quite frank, one of the most challenging pieces that we’ve had because of the sheer volume -- making sure that we get back and keep members’ offices or other victims apprised of where we are, what we’ve been able to find, whether we’re waiting on maybe potentially legal process or a conversation of this doesn’t meet the level for a criminal prosecution: This is First Amendment protected activity.

This is why sometimes that doesn’t feel good. I’ve had threats personally against me that didn’t rise to the level of something, but threatened my family. It doesn’t feel good, and I can tell you that it doesn’t feel good to members, but being able to have those discussions are incredibly important.

We have talented and very skilled investigative agents look at this, but we also have PhD-level doctors that are skilled and experts in this that take a look to understand this person’s entire picture, to help us look for different mitigation techniques. So being able to filter it all to one place.

This is difficult. While I’m not going to share the number of threat officers I have, I’ve expanded that. It’s expanded significantly since I’ve been here and we have plans to continue to expand.

Nehls: There’s been a discussion about political violence and political language becoming incendiary. Does the department think about how do you get that number to go down from a policing standpoint, or is that not really a way that we should think about that?

Sullivan: I think everybody would like it to go away, but I can tell you we’ve had political violence for years, between Gabby Giffords, Representative Scalise and the baseball game. But it seems like over the last year, year and a half, you have the governor in Pennsylvania, you have Minnesota, you have the president, you have Charlie Kirk, you have the president. The level, it seems to be accelerating and becoming more the norm. Certainly, it’s our job, and I think it’s my job, to speak out against political violence. I have in a number of forums, whether it be on media or at conferences that I’ve talked to folks. It can’t become the norm. When we can hold people accountable, we will.

I’ve worked with federal prosecutors my entire career. Federal cases are some of the hardest to bring. There’s a reason when I came through that they have a 90-plus-percent conviction rate in the federal system compared to the state system: It’s because they only take those cases after they’re fully vetted and they’re confident in where they are. So, that’s a challenge, but I’ve seen a willingness to take some cases that I’d I would just say years ago maybe they wouldn’t take because of where we are today. I thank, the US Attorneys office around the country for their participation with us in that.

In addition to that, I think it’s our outreach. We have incredibly, good relationships with people around the country, and that’s been a focus of mine since I’ve been here. One of the other things that has expanded significantly is a program where we have memorandums of understanding with people around the country. We had about 100 when I got here, and we’re pushing 600 now. That’s because we’ve had a concerted effort. It’s not because we just sat back and said, “Hey, you want to come join us?” No, I’ve been on the phone, I’ve been at conferences, explaining what this program is.

The program really is, hey, let’s have this piece of paper in place, and if I pick up the phone as the Capitol Police and say, “Hey, we need help at this event,” and it’s something that you normally wouldn’t do, it’s outside of your regular course of business but you can provide potentially people to help us -- whether it’s on straight time, whether it’s on overtime -- but it’s for our mission that we will reimburse you.

While that’s expanded, it doesn’t mean the work’s expanded. What it means is our reach and our ability to reach out and touch people and pull them in to this work that we have is terrific. And it’s been well-received as I’ve talked to chiefs and sheriffs across the country.

Nehls: What else goes into the MOU besides, events? what other activities?

Sullivan: It could be events; it could be there are specific threats. There’re different mitigation techniques that other departments can use. I don’t want to go into the specifics of it, but it’s anything to do with member security and protection when they’re back in their home districts. I know the House and the Senate have their own programs now. It’s an ability for us to leverage all of these different tools that we have to keep members safe, which is what we’re all focused on.

Schuman: With the 15,000 concerning statements, is the language is concerning statements, behaviors, and communications and whatnot? can you break that down? How many of those roughly are deemed to be credible threats?

Sullivan: We break them down into threats and direction of interest cases. Direction of interest could have a whole lot of stuff in there. And like I said, the vast majority are direction of interest cases. It’s a small subset that are threats. I don’t have the breakdown with me.

Schuman: Your predecessor, Chief Manger, was asked about this, and he said it was a couple hundred things that were credible threats. So you’ve got this year it’s, 15,000 directions. But, there’s something out there that’s causing you to look more deeply, so you’ll maybe open a preliminary investigation. You’ll look at it in some facet, you’ll make an assessment.

Then of those you can’t, there’s no way with the resources that you have, even though they’re significant, you can look at all of them. There’s a point where you’re going to winnow it down significantly: these are the ones that are much more concerning we’re going to put more resources in, we’re really going to investigate this.

And then of those that you go and you put more resources into, and you deem them credible or substantive or whatever the term of art is, then there’s, a further cut, right? All right, we’re going to send this over to a prosecutor.

What I’m trying to get a sense of, when the press reports on this, they look at this number that’s gone from 8,000 to 15,000. That’s a huge increase. What I’m trying to get a sense of underneath that big number that can reflect a lot, how much it’s something that is actionable. It’s something that you guys are saying, “We have to go to the next level of investigation and do something about.” I’m not expecting you to have on the top of your head, but just to get a sense of it, is it 10% or 5%? Is it a couple hundred? that’s why I’m asking the question.

Sullivan: No, absolutely. And the vast majority, it’s hundreds versus thousands of DOIs. And of those threat cases, I can have a credible -- I don’t want to use the word credible-- I can have a threat case and it is something that if I identify who made this it’s prosecutable. The first step is identify who that person is, which can be a challenge depending on what media it comes in on and what information we have, what’s been preserved, how long has it been since we received the information. There could be a case that, yes, vis ery concerning. However, we’ve exhausted all our leads, which takes a lot of time, put out subpoenas potentially to the the different places and we can’t get it because of a number of reasons, so you could run into that.

Then, you run into cases, okay, I have the person identified: this person, did they truly have the means? They’re sitting in a basement in Alaska and making a threat about a member who lives on the East Coast. Do they truly have the means to facilitate what they’re doing? Probably getting a prosecutor to pick that up is slim. But those are conversations that we have to have going forward, and goes to my point of why we want to capture all of the escalating behavior potentially behind. Unfortunately, many of the things that we see, this is the first time people pop on our radar when they do something.

Schuman: Do you track the prosecutions? Do you keep track of the number of prosecutions that occur based upon the work that you’ve done?

Sullivan: We have numbers on what that is. I don’t have those with me today. Once again, it’s a subset of those hundreds.

Schuman: What we had heard before was that it was very difficult to get prosecutors to prosecute. The Capitol Police is subsidizing, I think, a couple of AUSAs to help focus so that they’re willing to spend time on something that they wouldn’t necessarily have been willing to do otherwise.

Let me turn my question to a statement. It would be helpful, to have a sense of, looking at the last couple years, just being able to break it down, not as a way of, diminishing the work, but I think to help the members better understand the nature of the work. Because we see every time the new number, the new top-line number comes out, there’s increasing panic from them. Yes, the threat number has gone up to 15,000 or 17,000, but we’re calculating a lot of people by social media. Some of these are threats from people in Tasmania, right? They may have a threat, but they’re not likely to be able to cause any type of injury.

Would you be willing to, or else would you be willing to look at, providing a little bit more detail in the numbers to help break down the directions of interest, the threats, the number of prosecutions, either going backward in time or going forward in time so we can just better understand that environment?

Sullivan: That was one of the things that I actually asked when I first got here, and I was concerned. We were managing the work that we did in a records management system, which is not the way you manage cases. The ability for me to get detail was very limited. Very limited, very time-consuming, hand counts, Excel spreadsheets.

USCP staff: Do you mind if I was just going to add something just for context. So, try to tell a member of Congress that if they get a voicemail that says, “I wish someone would cut off your f*****g head,” try to tell them that’s not a threat. But it’s not a threat.

Sullivan: It’s not a threat; that’s a direction of interest. So, the hysteria that you guys talk about, that is what they’re bringing to us because they’re getting those calls. We’re not dramatizing the numbers. We’re running down all the threat assessment cases. I think if we tried to say I’m just making a number They’re going to go, “No, it’s not. Do you know how many calls I have? Do you know how many emails I have?” They’re getting them every day. So we’re not causing the hysteria. No. The feeling of that threat is very real every day.

Schuman: Part of our job is to provide better context for them, and I think that’s -- and I don’t, I’m not to put words in your mouth, so I apologize -- but that’s part of your mission as well to help them understand how to be safe and what the threat environment looks like, and how to behave in those circumstances. And you’re releasing a number that is an alarming number. There’s nothing wrong with you releasing it. I think it is appropriate for you to do I think it’s great that you’re doing so. I think that providing these are the terms that we use: here’s a direction of interest. This is a direction of interest versus it’s, a credible threat. We define this way and this that way. We want you to know that we are tracking this well.

It sounds like there have been records challenges, and I’ve heard about that as well that the data has been difficult. Trying to go backward in time, it is not as reliable as one might necessarily want. But even just on a going forward basis, being able to help people understand a little bit better if there’s only a couple of prosecutions, that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re finding ways to divert the attention, if you’re finding, ways to better protect the members. I think that’s fine. Right now, all we have is the statement for each of the years for the last eight years. Would you be willing to, if you could to release it?

Sullivan: That’s one of my first assessments when I got here: this is crazy, we can’t manage 15,000 cases in an RMS system. It’s a records management system: We need a case management system to be able to do that, and we’re in the process of bringing on a modern case management system that will allow us to have better insight.

Schuman: I’ll just put a final button on that and move on: if Congress were to express support for you releasing this number, these numbers in a greater level of detail, you wouldn’t have any objections to doing so?

Sullivan: We work with Congress every day, and we follow their lead, we work to support them.

Schuman: A number of years ago, Congress directed the Capitol Police to create a FOIA-like process and to consult with civil society in developing those regulations. It was in the appropriations bill. Obviously, this is before your tenure. The department, in fact, did issue a FOIA-like policy. There are several legislative branch agencies that have done so. The GAO has a FOIA-like policy, the Library of Congress has one, and the Capitol Police has one.

But in doing so, while there was direction to have consultations with the public, those consultations didn’t occur, and the resulting policy seems to hold back categories of information beyond what would be typical for a law enforcement agency if we’re located in a city or even that applies to the executive branch. So, the information that the FBI normally would release is significantly broader than what’s currently coming out of the Capitol Police.

And by way of example, I had made a public records request for who else is filing public records requests and what were those requests, and that was denied. Those types of FOIA logs are routinely released. Is this something at all that you’ve been tracking? I know you’ve got a million other things going on. Have you been looking at these aspects of transparency? Obviously, your having a conversation with us is a significant commitment to doing so. Are you looking at the records practices as well? Is this something that you might be willing to look at?

Sullivan: Certainly, I’m going to follow the laws that Congress makes for me in this area and it’s something I’m tracking. I know that there’s been challenges and there’s ongoing challenges that are part of the legal process in this area. I rely on my team to make sure that we’re doing that. With that, I think it’s important to get information out and balance the information that the public needs to hear and the security of this campus and the members that we’re challenged with.

So, it’s that balance between the two. But to your point, I’ve sat down with everybody that’s asked and had conversations in the year that I’ve been here, and would continue to do that, making sure that we can get out what we can get out.

Schuman: And we would welcome the opportunity to have a conversation with you or with, with your colleagues about, how to further strengthen that process.

Nehls: I want to just shift: the Architect of the Capitol testified at the House Administration Committee last week. They didn’t really get into it but they’re going to produce a master plan by the end of the fall. Of course, the AOC is on the police board, they work with you on different security structures and things. I’m just curious, as they wrap that master plan up if the department feels like it has the physical infrastructure it needs, or if you feel like you’re getting behind on something.

Sullivan: I’ve only been here a year, and one thing that I’ve learned is you never give up space, and if you can get space, you better grab it and hold on to it. Space is at a premium here.

We certainly need additional space and we certainly are understaffed to complete the mission that we’re asked to do. That means I need to get people here, which many times means parking as they come to and from. It means locker space for them to be able to do this.

One of the things I was surprised at was when I heard roll call, I expected it to be what I had experienced roll call at a table like this. Everybody sits down and you have a nice conversation, pass information along and go forward. Depending on where you are, it’s a very different place, whether it’s down in the Senate roll call room or it’s on the House side or the library side. It could be in a hallway rather than a place that’s conducive to what I would call the most important 15, 20 minutes of the day: to be able to share the information that have gone across.

That being said, we understand, we’re here. They’re not here to support us, we’re here to support this entire operation. Being part of that, we’ve expressed the needs, challenges that we’ve had. I know that we’ve looked at opportunities to move that forward and we’ll continue to work with the Architect in partnership to be able to do that.

One of the other big challenges that we have is training, and the facilities at Cheltenham (Maryland) are less than ideal. We need to have significant investment to be able to get that where it needs to be.

One of the other organizations I came in, the place that we trained was abysmal. There was cardboard and duct tape on the windows. It was a terrible place to bring new employees in and say, “Hey, welcome. This is how much we value you, and we bring you to a place like that.” I’m not saying that’s where we are with Cheltenham, but it’s certainly not ideal.

And then just where we are right now with our staffing with the 9/11 folks that now can retire. This hiring is not going to stop for the foreseeable future, to grow us, and it’s going to take a number of years to get us to where we potentially need to be looking at it forecasting today.

Who knows what technology will be in place and what things that we can put in place in the future. But looking at what it needs just to staff where we are today, if we want to say, “Hey, how can we staff what we want to staff here on campus and on our protective model,” we’re hundreds short on both the protective mission and the mission here on campus.

Schuman: You have, and please correct me, it’s 2,350 authorized, and you need another 300 more?

Sullivan: I have a staffing office that’s working on a report that literally, they’re taking a look at every post that we have, which changes sometimes weekly if somebody wants another door open or there’s another security measure that requires us to fill that. We have the discussions about it, but when we’re asked to do that, it takes a toll on our folks. That means overtime, which means we’re holding people over or drafting people, which is a concern of mine when it comes to wellness of our officers.

Schuman: Part of why we ask about spacing is we know that there are challenges with the Rayburn Building. It’s going to need to be remediated almost immediately, and of course, there are some Capitol Police facilities in the sub-basement there. There are other buildings that are... Longworth is in deep trouble. One or two of the Senate buildings are also in a challenging circumstance and there are challenges inside the Capitol Building as well. And we’re not even talking about Ford and some of the other congressional buildings.

Of course, you have other facilities, that are separate from the main campus. And, we’re seeing House and Senate appropriators trying to grapple with investment in the campus has not kept up with the needs, and the buildings, some of them are in terrible shape.

And I think we’re going to see in the next five or 10 years a tremendous change in the way that we organize all of this. the Capitol Police has more than doubled in size in the last 25 years in terms of people and it’s quadrupled in terms of budget, right? You’re doing a much better job of keeping track of your equipment, which was a challenge for January 6th and before. So, I’m just trying to think about what the physical space needs and how to make sure that you guys can get to where you need to get to. Not to mention that you’re responsible for the entirety of the legislative branch with the exception of GPO, so it’s a tremendously large mission. So that’s why we’re asking about, your needs for the buildings.

Sullivan: Yeah, we have tremendous needs, and we’ll continue to have tremendous needs. There’s ways that we can mitigate that, whether it’s on campus or immediately off and the Architect’s looking at all those in the conversations that I’ve had with that office.

Nehls: What other things would you like to communicate to the congressional community, that we haven’t talked about yet?

Sullivan: We’re lucky that we have an incredibly resilient workforce, a workforce that is so positive. It’s unbelievable the interaction when I go out and talk with officers -- and this comes from somebody that … I’ve had experience across the country with law enforcement, but the positivity with which they look forward to this job is something that is refreshing.

And we have also a very young workforce. I talk about that workforce really changing over. We lost a lot of people after January 6th and we’ve been doing consistent hiring since then. We’re getting to that point that our workforce is getting younger, which means that we have to make sure that we give them the training and supervision that they need to be able to do their job and guide them so they have successful careers and complete and focus on the mission.

I’m incredibly proud to lead them. It’s a challenging mission every day. We’ve been challenged a number of times since I’ve been here and they’ve performed incredibly and will continue to do that every single day. When we fall down, we’re going to learn from it, and we’re going to move forward and be better the next day.

Schuman: Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

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