Oh for the love of god.
The restriction on this thread about talking about gun control definitely plays into what I can say here. I’m limited from talking about realistic solutions, limited to talking solely about one possible solution and its utter failure here.
“Works some of the time” is not good enough. Being satisfied with the current plan, despite its lethal failure, is a moral abdication.
The plan did not fail. It worked perfectly fine once it was allowed to happen. Deviating from the plan failed. Hinting about better plans that can’t be discussed here is useless so I’m not even sure why you bring these imaginary plans up.
This is called letting the perfect get in the way of the good, which is a bad strategy no matter what you are talking about. When you quiz your fourth graders and they don’t all score 100%, do you immediately change your teaching methods without finding out what the failure point was? Of course you don’t, because that would be bananas. No plan works 100% of the time.
But that doesn’t even apply here, because when the plan was followed, it worked. When it wasn’t followed, some helpless child was killed while asking the 911 operator to send the police to help.
And we’re done.
You have a very peculiar sense of time. 15 minutes in an acute crisis is a HUGE amount of time. Even one minute is a long time under those conditions. It is a ridiculous statement that someone, anyone, would spend fifteen minutes banging on a door that does not budge, while children are dying on the other side of it.
But hey, your earlier comment on how some people need five minutes to realize they can drive away after filling a tank tells me there’s zero realism in your statements.
Modnote: Part of your post is addressing the content of posts but another part is commenting on the poster themselves. This is not allowed outside of the pit. Please refrain from this.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
I apologize. I only read the mod notes further downthread after posting.
Speak for yourself. I think this has been a valuable thread for piecing together and analyzing the facts. We do have quite a lot of information, and I am seeing most people in this thread forming reasoned opinions based on the facts. If people have a harsh opinion of the performance of law enforcement here, it is because all the evidence says that they did perform poorly, contrary to recent training and clearly documented protocols, and with severe consequences. I find your suggestion that all anyone is doing here is pushing a prior narrative to bash the police patronizing and inappropriate.
In fact, we DO know why they didn’t enter. Here’s a couple of quotes from one of the myriad of articles available:
Police officers did not act sooner to stop the 18-year-old gunman rampaging at Robb Elementary School because the school district’s chief of police wanted to wait for backup and equipment, said Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Meanwhile, students were still trapped inside with the gunman, repeatedly calling 911 for help.
McCraw said the commander on site at that point treated the situation as a “barricaded suspect” case and thought children were no longer at risk, which McCraw also called a mistake. McCraw said at one point there were as many as 19 officers in the hallway outside the classrooms where the gunman had locked himself inside with students and teachers.
Much of this thread has focused on why the commander made that decision, and what should have been done instead. And when little girls are calling 911 in a whisper so that the shooter doesn’t hear, we have every right to criticize and assign blame.
Criticize who and blame who? Of course in this thread we have to pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Because the person who killed those kids is dead we can’t get any satisfaction from criticizing and assigning blame to him so of course it must be the police who deserve all the criticism and blame. It is clear to me that incompetence ran through the Uvalde police and special school police departments. The blame for that has to run up to the top, which in this thread is just the local police chief. You can blame every one of those police officers who didn’t do more, but they don’t bear the responsibility of a fundamentally flawed system that will continue to fail when faced with crises like this.
The topic of this thread is the police response to the Uvalde incident, not the system that allowed this incident to happen.
The specifics of exactly who in law enforcement had authority to do what and who bears what share of responsibility for the mistaken delay is not known yet with any certainty. But that is no reason to shy away from a determination that the overall law enforcement response was deeply flawed. The primary motivation here is obviously not to single out a specific human being for opprobrium, it is to learn from what happened to ensure that the same mistakes do not happen next time.
I can’t talk about all of the system but their response was a product of that system. It is a fundamentally flawed system, Among the flaws apparent here and directly applying to this situation was the belief that 2 days of training would change how police would react in that situation.
My comment was ment to convey that people are not necessarily rational under great pressure.
It was meant as a reply to someone who claimed they’d be through the window 30 seconds after they found out the doors were locked.
I found that a very optimistic claim and I thought it fitting to exaggerate to the same degree.
Your call. The things your posts hint about are really better suited for the Politics thread.
Well said. When the police themselves say they messed up and made the wrong decisions, along with all the proof supplied that they didn’t follow their own protocol, I think we can assume they made the wrong decision. It’s not like everyone is blaming all the cops. The criticism is for the 19 cops who did nothing for over an hour. There seems to be full support for officers, on duty and off, who actively did something to help. Like the three who breached the room or all the ones that helped evacuate all the other classrooms.
Again, it’s not just two days of training. It’s the protocol that they sign off on when they become officers. This is specifically mentioned. Do you think officers are given months of training on every situation they may encounter? They aren’t because they have rules to fall back on, like this one:
Law enforcement officers in Texas are trained to intervene quickly, according to active shooter guidelines in the state’s commission on law enforcement 2020 training manual obtained by CNN. The manual states an “officer’s first priority is to move in and confront the attacker.”
“As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended,” it says. “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”
And of course the police chief was responsible for the fuck up. He was not only the officer in charge for the district, he was actually there on site leading the police response. He has a lot of explaining to do. One I haven’t heard mentioned is why any school district police officer does not have a key to access the schools they are in charge of.
I always do. So do we all, don’t we?
I agree.
Of course. But there are still gaps in what we know. I’m frustrated as hell about that. I wasn’t addressing logical conclusions based on facts but those that are not. Has anyone who was in that hallway or who communicated directly with those in that hallway said that law enforcement were too scared to go in? As far as I can tell, most people who have arrived at that conclusion have done so based on the fact that LE stood in that hallway or outside the school for such in incredibly long period of time while kids were dying inside.
I was concerned before I posted that people would think I was defending cops, when in reality I was, I hoped, protesting against the leap from them standing in the hallway/outside the school to speculation–and until we have a clearer picture, it IS speculation–that they were scared or just stupid.
No argument whatsoever there.
Holy smokes. Clearly the police response deserves harsh criticism. One more time: I was not defending police practices. They fucked up, and kids are dead because of it. I love the SDMB and have learned tremendously from this place. You’re someone whose posts I find well-reasoned and informative, and I have a lot of respect for you. It upsets me that you’d think I was patronizing.
My anger, again, is not at the logic or evidence presented in this thread. It’s with suppositions NOT based on evidence. Is there solid evidence that the reason that cops didn’t act was because they were too scared to? Are there no other logical possibilities?
My empathy lies entirely with the children and teachers in that classroom, not the cops. Have you ever been inside a classroom where an emotionally disturbed kid has a gun? I have. Ever been told that if you’re locked in a classroom with a shooter, you’ll be on your own because cops would not be coming in to save your students? I have. Do those experiences make me an authority? Hell, no. Quite the opposite: they make me more prone to emotional responses. If my post came strictly from those emotions, if there are no blanks in the narrative, if nobody has been making suppositions with a lack of evidence, I’ll apologize, abjectly and sincerely.
That’s really something of a strawman.
I was one of the first responders (no pun intended) to the OP. What I offered was the post-Columbine shift in strategies for active shooters: You Go In … Immediately.
I knew that. And I’m not a first responder.
Most of us know that. I suspect – even beyond “two days of training --” most first responders (particularly law enforcement) know that.
And several people well placed to know (ie, TX Department of Public Safety Colonel and the head of the National Tactical Officers Association) know that. Both said that the call made by the incident commander NOT to go in immediately was dead wrong.
Forgive the choice of words.
None of us here is acting as judge and jury. Much like American Exceptionalism has never made, and will never make, anything better in this country, not doing an after action report – formally or informally – will never make the process work better.
The first step in solving any problem is admitting that there is a problem.
FYI what rubbed me the wrong way was the broadness of your suggestion that people here were jumping to conclusions with a motive to push a narrative, when (from most posters) what I’m seeing in this thread is the opposite of that - I’m seeing careful and thorough reporting and analysis of what we do know with reasonable certainty.
And when you raise this specific issue, it honestly appears to me that you have just jumped in here without reading the thread. Much of the recent part of the thread has been devoted precisely to exploring “other logical possibilities”. We have established that they acted contrary to recent active shooter training, contrary to clearly documented active shooter protocols, and for a very extended period. So we have discussed in considerable detail whether there was any plausible justification for this horrible mistake, if perhaps it was physically impossible to push to gain access and press to engage the shooter quickly. The physical layout and the other access points show that there is no such justification. The facts and evidence really do not leave much other than some combination of fear and incompetence. Not that their mental state is really what matters - what matters is establishing that there was a serious mistake, and learning from that.
I’m very curious to hear estimates of when - during the hour - the various victims died.
Were they all shot at the beginning? If so, the delay might not have mattered as much, unless some bled to death who could’ve been saved. Or did he shoot some 30 minutes in, 45 minutes in, during the breach…?
I have a bad feeling that the outcome of the investigation is going to be chilling. In a chaotic situation like that, what is the likelihood that he shot all the fatalities such that they all died within a few minutes with no hope of saving them?
There’s also the question of the state of health of the victims who did not die - the delay in getting them medical attention may mean that some are in significantly worse shape.
So it turns out this business about a teacher propping open a door and then running away and leaving it as an entry point for the gunman may have been, let’s use generous terminology, overstated by the police.
https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Uvalde-teacher-open-door-shooter-17209972.php
This is an attorney’s statement, not independently confirmed, but it’s pretty unequivocal: the teacher had the door blocked while she delivered something to her car, but when she realized the situation, she returned to the door, removed the block, and pulled it closed, whereupon it is supposed to lock itself. The teacher cannot confirm the door lock functioned correctly, but closing it was the right thing to do.
If this is true (the constant caveat), then it’s one more thing the police reported incorrectly, and one more example of a teacher knowing the proper procedures and following them at the risk of her own safety.