If you can’t storm a room with an element of surprise then you’re left with a noisy delayed entry. What response do you expect from someone who was killing children indiscriminately? I would expect the sound of screaming children as they’re mowed down. .
Based on pictures we have seen of the windows there’s no way to physically enter through them in a timely manner because of the aluminum grids. You would be picked off at the shooter’s leisure.
If they can’t quickly get through the door or the window then the next best thing is a sniper.
Yes, and I hear universal agreement from experts that if this is all you have for immediate entry, this is what you must do. And that training and documented procedures were clear about this.
He has already done that, and wounded children inside are bleeding out.
I mean, perhaps you might try to make excuses for the wrong decision to wait on some basis of inadequate experience, confusion, command structure, whatever - but I’m scratching my head that you still seem to be disputing that it WAS the wrong decision when there seems to be universal agreement about that.
100% agreed. When I talk about “terror,” I think you’re thinking I’m using the term to call the cops “cowards.” I am not doing that. I have no interest in judging their moral fibre. I’m just talking about how humans behave in the system as it’s set up. While there are training regimens that work to overcome human propensities–see Green Berets et al–it’s just not practical to have all small-town cops go through that level of training.
As you say, if we’re serious about preventing mass shootings, police response cannot be our primary focus. To the extent that the police response here is worth discussing, it’s because this is incredibly strong evidence that this approach doesn’t work.
Per the link above the killer shot out the door window so there was likely access to the lock. The officers should have been able to check the lock mechanism from other classroom doors to see how they release and entered quietly using a diversion from the window side of the room.
The border patrol, the ones who eventually went in, used the janitor’s keys. I’m sure they didn’t have their own keys to the school. I’m not talking about them; I’m talking about the school district police.
Man, it’s a good thing then that they denied the shooter the opportunity to finish what he started, by remaining outside sitting on their thumbs.
But certainly a police department specifically for the school district would have training for an active school shooter situation. Even if it was the only thing they were trained for.
I have never before heard of a school district having its own police force. Is that common?
6 school cops in a town of 15k - which also has an ostensible SWAT Team? I would very much like to see the budget/training/gear the school police and SWAT Team received over the past decade or so. The SWAT Team visited the schools - in full battle regalia - to suss out the lay of the land. But NONE of these morons thought for a second, “How do we get through a locked door?”
I’m not a LEO, but my impression is that a large component of increased school security is intended to address armed attackers. Doesn’t some small portion of such planning (and spending) consider how to deal with the attacker if they breach the perimeter?
This is just a complete, massive fail. This is the one worst case scenario that justifies these entities’ existence, and they got an F-. I don’t care how many Officer Friendly and “Say No to drugs” sessions they conducted. And yeah, confronting an armed person sounds hella scary. But if you aren’t willing to do that part of your job, then you should look for another job. Moreover, if your training is worth a damn, a tried police force ought to have considerable advantages over an emotional suspect - no matter how heavily armed.
You would think. considering we didn’t have police officers at the schools I went to as a kid I would expect their purpose is to meet the changing social conditions of today.
But that doesn’t really alter @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness’s underlying point. Active shooter training and protocol dictates immediate forced entry by first responders, usually without optimal equipment or backup, leaving themselves horribly exposed and with no certainty of taking down the perpetrator. So even with the bravest and best first responders acting optimally, what we are talking about in this thread amounts to little more than the best possible way to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic. The far more important fundamental issues are for the “political” thread.
Apparently it’s a thing in Texas. (And I never heard of it either, but I graduated high school in 1984 and don’t remember police in any of the schools I attended, and today many schools have police officers in the building, though they’re often called “school resource officers.”)
That’s a fair point, but not exactly what I’m saying. Even if we suppose that a “go toward the gunfire” approach would have worked the people trained in that approach didn’t take it. We can’t rely on people following training that tells them to do something that goes against instinct, unless the training is like green-beret-level training, and that’s not practical on a wide scale. Changing the words of the training, when it’s clear folks won’t follow it, is the deck-chair rearrangement.
In my classroom, I have some different tricks to get students to shut up and pay attention. If a trick doesn’t work–and they often don’t, especially in this year of the feral child–I try something else. I don’t blame the kids, I blame the system I’m using, and I use a different system.
I would say that their training should be specific to the school(s) they are tasked to protect. The purpose of training for different scenarios is so that you have a solid base to work with when needed. You’re not going to have all the answers but the goal is to react and improvise quickly using previous training.
Nah. The problem isn’t with the training. They had the training that they needed. The problem is with the disconnect between training and actual human response to crisis.
Just a couple of months ago, the Uvalde CISD police department (including the incident commander in this event) held active shooter training. They’re responsible for the eight schools in the district, including this one, although they held the training at the high school and probably thought that was the most likely target.
Does it open inward? If I understand you correctly you say you push on it to enter the classroom, but also say it can’t be forced from the outside because it’s in a steel frame. Can you elaborate on that?
It doesn’t matter because the windows slide up to open. There are plenty of pictures of people evacuating kids thru the open windows on the opposite side of the building.
The windows slide up to open, they didn’t have to break thru anything. They had 4 windows they could have used to observe and breach if they wanted to. There is no need to create obstacles to excuse police action when we already know they didn’t exist.
Not only all that, but the head of policing for the school district apparently had no idea how to get a key, or worse, didn’t think of trying to get a key for almost an hour.
No one needs Special Forces training for this, that’s not what they do. And yet these small town cops did have training for school shootings, as recently as two months ago. No one is saying they were untrained. What failed here is people ignoring the simplest safety protocols and doctrine for school shootings.
No, in this case it was one human beings reaction that caused all the problems. Unfortunately, he was in charge. Other officers had no problem reacting to evacuate kids from the other end of the school. Other officers finally called his bullshit and breached the room on their own.
Other way around. From the outside there is an protected lock and a metal handle. Door opens outwards - has to, per Fire Code. The inside latch mechanism is the crush bar I referenced previously.
