Not necessarily..
Kirk is a private citizen.. he isnt POTUS, or a governor, or even a major metro area mayor..
His estimated net worth at the time of his death was +/- $12M.
Do you have any idea what a professional protective detail costs?
My budget when I ran the PPU at the World Bank was just north of $4M annually.. and we were under manned, under equipped, etc for the mission set we were expected to perfom.. and that was 20 years ago.. that same detail today would easily cost $7M+ a year minimum..
There are only so many potential threats that can be addressed.. Assume Kirks personal security team was 4 guys (which would be pretty heavy for someone of his prominence, exposure, etc... most celebrities, entertainers, senior executives in the fortune 50, etc roll with 1-2 people MAX plus a trained driver).. they then get augmented by the University Police Department, who ARE NOT trained in protective services, but generally handle crowd control and petty crimes issues related to any event on the university campus..
The most obvious and most prevailing threat to Kirk almost certainly was physical attacks onstage or when inbound or outbound to/from the stage.. with a limited security apparatus, you prioritize threats and address what you can with what youve got.. if there was a KNOWN threat of assassination, it is highly unlikely Kirk would have been at the event at all, or there would have been a major plus up of University and local municipal police requested to help mitigate that threat..
In the private security world when threats like that become known the most common threat mitigation technique is simple avoidance... you just dont go "there" or do "whatever" it is you were scheduled to do..
While at the WB I also had something called the "Watch Office".. the budget for our watch office was close to $12M a year.. it was staffed with a significant number of former CIA, DIA, NSA, etc personnel... their job was to monitor global information sources and to conduct analysis of that information to help us understand the threats to WB leaders we were charged with protecting..
They did a good job of detecting things in advance for us.. like at one point we knew the "activist" that had "pied" Bill Gates and others was planning to do the same thing with our protectee.. we were able to coordinate with local law enforcement (we were doing a series of events in Europe at the time) and have them detain the guy when he entered the controlled area of the event..
99.99999% of the protective details in the private sector dont have access to a "Watch Office".. they dont truly know what active threats are out there.. sometimes if a federal agency like the FBI becomes aware of a threat, they will contact the security team and let them know and share information... but far more often than not, they dont....
Its a pretty safe bet that Kirks security people were doing the best possible job they could with the very limited resources and assets they had available to them.. and that the University PD was in the same boat.. you cant possibly mitigate or avoid every conceivable threat out there.. the only way to do that is to lock the protectee in a lead lined basement 20 stories underground and never let them come out to see or be seen.. They simply dont have the same kind of resources that even a major metro area mayor has (like Chicago's Barry Johnson who has 150 personnel assigned to his protection... or back when I was doing that sort of work, the Memphis, TN Mayor had 18 personnel assigned to his protective detail (no clue how many are assigned today).. and they definitely dont have the same level of resources or assets of a major state governor, or a POTUS, VPOTUS, or even a FLOTUS..
I wouldnt be so quick to blame the security people here..
