It’s funny that in this situation the cops needed time to assess the situation and develop a plan of action but when it’s an unarmed civilian there isn’t enough time to do anything but empty your mag in their general direction isn’t it?
I can’t figure out if this is meant to be satirical.
Realize you need something to breach the doors: 5 seconds, the time it takes to try the knob and determine that it’s locked.
Deciding to use the tools you keep in the squad car designed specifically for breaching doors, in order to breach the door: 10 seconds.
Getting those tools and coming back: 3 minutes.
Preparing to go in: About six months, but that’s time that you spent when you were hired. It’s done now. Zero seconds now.
Actually going in: Maybe 15 seconds.
That adds up to a LOT less than 40 minutes.
I’m not going to argue with you about things should work, but they don’t. And it is average, perhaps you aren’t considering how much worse it is some places.
You could just wait until he runs out of child shields and then the ointment is flyless!
This stands or falls at the
part: did they have those? → then they were slow.
Otherwise, I stand by my timetable.
Even if they didn’t, Uvalde police station is four minutes away.
But as we’ve discussed extensively in the recent part of the thread, any difficulties with the door were irrelevant when it was clearly possible to engage immediately through the windows.
The inaccuracies aren’t solely the fault of the media. This article lists the multiple times the story told by the police changed, such as their initial and inaccurate Facebook post that the shooter was in custody.
SNAFU is assumed. If they had taken action they would be criticized with lots of second guessing. But, they would have taken action and there would be some redeeming benefit. As it stands there is none.
Having recently completed their active shooter training, I submit that this would be yet another failure rather than an exculpatory factor.
ETA: see post #348
You get called to an “active shooter situation”.
You do exactly as you were trained to do: rush in towards the sound of gunfire.
You find yourself at a locked door, finding out it was locked gets you(r colleague) shot.
And now you don’t get a few minutes to figure out what to do?
I find this overly harsh.
I am not saying that they did the best job possible, I just find this thread overly judgmental.
Everybody keeps claiming that the situation in the room was easily to oversee from the windows. Are you sure there were no curtains? Some pieces of furniture blocking the view? A whole contingent of Texas cops didn’t see anything to shoot at, maybe there was nothing to see?
Shouldn’t they at least get the benefit of a little doubt?
See post #319.
You still seem to be looking at this from the perspective of a situation where a hostage taker has not yet harmed anyone. The objective is not to gain intel and evaluate the perpetrator’s intentions and take some nuanced approach. We know his intentions, because he has already implemented them by shooting children. Training and documented protocols are completely unambiguous in an active shooter situation, and in accord with common sense. Engage as quickly as possible. Ideally kill him, and shooters often commit suicide upon first engagement with law enforcement. At the very least you are distracting him from killing more children until more backup arrives.
The significance of the windows is that they provided the obvious route to immediate engagement, regardless of how clearly you might see what was happening inside.
Sorry, but when students in the room with the shooter call 911 multiple times and the cops fail to react, I think we all have a right to judge.
I expect the story to change several times along the way, perhaps the media should have waited to report unverified stories. We’ve seen time and again that police departments first try to protect themselves in major crime incidents. Some of it is justified from the way people and the media blame the police for the crime itself instead of the perpetrator, and of course plenty of it is not at all justified because it’s usually about covering up police incompetence and outright crimes. So the media screaming about how the story has changed after a chaotic incident involving the police is extremely self serving. Very few people saw the incorrect police reports, mostly they were spread by the media which failed to hold itself at all responsible for spreading that false information.
Then note how the governor of that 3rd world state immediately began to cover his own ass for failing to oversee those incompetent boobs by say the police lied to him about what happened. As if that was the cause of the children’s deaths and somehow could have prevented them. Incorrect police reports are a great target for criticism. It’s a problem that can be fixed but won’t be.
Even when the police lie to us, it’s our fault for believing them?
I guess in the n-dimensional game of defend the police, there are unlimited number of white knights.
I cannot help to think that the officers didn’t train much breaching (doors OR windows) during their “active shooter drills” and are now thrown under the bus by the officials who came up with those drills.
Those guys are uncharacteristically fast in condemning their colleagues.
So when a fast breaking story is occurring, and the police post an update on Facebook, or announce something in a press conference, or state something in an interview with a national news network, the press shouldn’t report that, because it’s not verified? Just how long should the press wait before reporting what the police themselves are telling them?
Which, if true, would be yet another inexcusable failure, and not an exculpatory element.
See post #348.
Just a couple of months ago, the Uvalde CISD police department held active shooter training, with the training led by three members of that force. I assume they had some input into the training they offered their colleagues.