Police response during mass shooting event {Not Gun Control, 2nd Amendment or Politics}

[silenus]

Yep, those too. I’d feel really protected if it wasn’t for those two big-ass glass windows.

[Riemann]

@mordecaiB

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.

We certainly don’t know that it was just him. As far as I’m aware, we don’t know if evacuating kids from the other end of the school was contrary to his orders; nor do we know if any other local law enforcement expressed dissent from his critical mistake with regard to engaging the shooter. And I’m not prepared to accept the Feds’ self-serving narrative of “just obeying orders for 30 minutes until heroically disobeying orders” until we see a full unbiased account of exactly what transpired among the various forces on the scene. At face value, the Feds seem to be trying to have it both ways in refusing to take any responsibility for the additional 30 minute delay after they arrived on the scene.

[doreen]

@Dinsdale

I have never before heard of a school district having its own police force. Is that common?

I don’t think it’s common - but it’s not unheard of. There are however, two things that strike me as strange. The first is the size of the school district police department - although I don’t think school district police departments are common, there are loads of “specialized” police departments. Just off the top of my head in my immediate area, there have been transit and public housing police departments (the ones in my city merged into the city police around 30 years ago) and there are currently park police, railroad police, sanitation police, hospital police, bridge and tunnel police, public university police, port authority police and so on. None of the ones I know are nearly as small as six officers - it doesn’t seem worthwhile (to me) to have such a small, separate department rather than assigning six city police officers to the schools.

The second thing that seems odd to me is to have such a small, specialized department in command of this sort of incident for any longer than it takes to get city/county/state police on site. The city police department of Uvalde was probably also pretty small, and probably didn’t have much experience in this type of situation - but still, it was almost certainly better prepared than a six person department that came into existence four years ago.

[Dinsdale]

Good points. In my area, the common practice is to have cops from the applicable municipality provide services to the grade/high schools. Your second point is the one that truly amazes me, tho. Why on earth was Barney Fife still calling the shots after the town cops, sheriff’s dept, and feds appeared? When the fucker didn’t even have a freaking KEY?!

[DavidNRockies]

@mordecaiB

Other officers had no problem reacting to evacuate kids from the other end of the school.

Which looked like this, and gives a better sense of how the windows look and operate:

[Riemann]

@DavidNRockies

Which looked like this

Good work with finding those pics. Whatever the issues with the locked door and why there was no key available, it seems pretty clear that it would have been straightforward in a purely physical sense to break in through the windows. Horribly exposed, but it looks to me that a sledgehammer any heavy implement is going through the aluminum (?) frame crosspieces without much trouble.

[silenus]

Just break the window and shoot. There were 19 cops just standing around. That’s 2 for each of the windows, 4 for each door, and 3 left over to supervise. They have radios, so on the signal they breach all windows and doors at once. Too many targets for the shooter to successfully engage.

[Dewey_Finn]

There were two adjoining classrooms, so couldn’t they have entered through a window of the classroom he wasn’t in?

[Riemann]

@silenus

Just break the window and shoot.

Sure, if that’s all you can do. But to be certain of ending it, it’s better if you can then enter - especially if all the windows are on one side. So that fact that it appears that you could break through these windows quite easily (in a purely physical sense) undermines any suggestion that there was no easy way to continue to push to engage the shooter immediately.

[Railer13]

@Dewey_Finn

There were two adjoining classrooms, so couldn’t they have entered through a window of the classroom he wasn’t in?

My thought exactly. Bust open a window in each room at the same time. The shooter will likely fire at the window in the room that he was in, which would enable entry into the other room.

[carrps]

@Dewey_Finn

There were two adjoining classrooms, so couldn’t they have entered through a window of the classroom he wasn’t in?

That’s what I wanted to ask.

[ASL_v2.0]

@Riemann

@silenus

Just break the window and shoot.

Sure, if that’s all you can do. But to be certain of ending it, it’s better if you can then enter - especially if all the windows are on one side. So that fact that it appears that you could break through these windows quite easily (in a purely physical sense) undermines any suggestion that there was no easy way to continue to push to engage the shooter immediately.

I *think it was in the CNN article I linked to upthread, but I definitely read somewhere that when border patrol entered, the murderer kicked open the door to a closet he’d been hiding in and opened fire on them. So it’s at least conceivable there would have been no clear target from the windows. But then again, lack of a clear target strengthens the case for breaking all the windows at once, scanning the room (even just with a cell phone camera) and then entering in force. The next stage in this tragedy is going to be learning about how many of the victims here bled to death (I also read that there were perhaps three or four shots fired midway through the hour long delay, so… yeah, not super eager to find out what the story was there, either, but I’m sure we will).

*ETA: Yes, it was in an article I linked to up thread:

After waiting about 35 minutes outside the classroom, a US Border Patrol tactical team used a key to open a door. They had been at the school since 12:15 p.m. The teenage gunman kicked open the door of a classroom closet and opened fire, said a source familiar with the situation.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/29/us/uvalde-texas-elementary-school-shooting-week/index.html

[DavidNRockies]

DoJ is going to look into the law enforcement response:

Justice Department to review law enforcement response to school shooting

[and – at this point – I’d say: probably for good reason]

[Odesio]

@Dewey_Finn

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.”)

We had one in Plano, Texas back in the 1990s. Officer Pickle. He was employed by the Plano police department not the school district though, and, honestly, I don’t know what he did really. I never heard of him arresting any students and he wasn’t exactly there for security from what I could tell.

[Yllaria]

Regarding school districts having police departments, of the four districts in our city one has its own department, one has an agreement with the city PD, and I don’t know about the other two. I wouldn’t have known about any school district PD if changing traffic signs and painted curbs near a school didn’t require their approval.

The only time I’ve seen them work, they were working to guide traffic around a newly opened school where the parents were snarling traffic by parking where the street was too narrow to allow parking.

I don’t know what else they do, but herding parents at school dismissal and developing traffic plans are definitely ongoing tasks. And this is in California, so it isn’t just Texas.

[mordecaiB]

@Riemann

We certainly don’t know that it was just him. As far as I’m aware, we don’t know if evacuating kids from the other end of the school was contrary to his orders;

Well, we know he was the officer in charge of the situation. As far as I know, nobody disputes that.

We know that no orders were given to evacuate the other children in the school because it took an off duty Border Patrol officer getting a text from his wife, a teacher, asking for help. We know that him, and possibly his barber, responded with a shotgun and started evacuating kids by the ingenious ploy of opening the windows and helping the kids out.

Maybe the feds are lying. Or maybe it’s just like they said because they have no jurisdiction in a school shooting. Federal officers cover federal crimes. And from some reports, not all the officers were feds. Heck, we don’t even know how many officers actually breached. If it’s true that they only had one ballistic shield, I’d guess max of three.

@DavidNRockies

Which looked like this, and gives a better sense of how the windows look and operate:

Great pictures and hopefully put an end to the unbreachable window theory. ( now I’m wondering if the guy in the fourth picture with the shotgun and pink shirt is the off duty BP agent or his barber.

One other thing. What does a school resource officer actually do? Especially in an elementary school. Search lockers for drugs, break up fights and bust gun running operations?

Where’s Texas Walker Ranger when you really need him?

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@mordecaiB

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.

Yes, I know. That’s not my point. My point is that there’s no way to address this from a systemic situation, as long as our focus is on the training. Sure, we can punish this dude, but so what? How is that going to stop it from happening next time?

If your interest is in assigning blame, nifty. I have no interest in that. I’m interested in stopping shootings. This incident shows that training is not the answer–since, as you correctly notice, people don’t follow the training.

[Riemann]

@mordecaiB

Maybe the feds are lying.

That’s a straw man that you’re engaging there. There is considerable distance between spinning what happened with a gloss that puts you in a favorable light and lying. When we have independent reports that the BORTAC team presented themselves as ready, willing and able to enter through the windows and engage immediately, and that they recommended this course of action, but were overruled by a local officer who had clear authority to overrule them, I will accept that they bear no part of the responsibility for the 30 minute delay after their arrival.

[Magiver]

@silenus

Just break the window and shoot. There were 19 cops just standing around. That’s 2 for each of the windows, 4 for each door, and 3 left over to supervise. They have radios, so on the signal they breach all windows and doors at once. Too many targets for the shooter to successfully engage.

That would probably be a lot easier and more survivable than trying to climb in. These were not ground-level windows so it’s not a simple thing to climb up and into the opening.

[Riemann]

@Magiver

That would probably be a lot easier and more survivable than trying to climb in.

Of course it would. It would be even easier and more survivable to do nothing. I’m really not understanding the thought process by which you’re approaching this. The question is not what would be easy and survivable, it’s what course of action is required to ensure that you engage the shooter as quickly as possible.