I came here to post about the lack of SWAT team response too:
The NY Times coverage says " While the Uvalde Police Department has in the past boasted of its SWAT team, those officers did not appear to be involved in trying to stop the gunman."
I don’t care what they claim, they don’t have their own SWAT. Towns that small usually have a regional SWAT that is made up of police officers from various towns, sheriffs, and state police. They do their regular job all day but carry their SWAT equipment with them. They could well have had some officers 50 miles away, tho not all of them.
As far as I know, SOP is to go to the gunfire immediately as most victims are shot at the beginning. Once confronted by police the shooter often kills himself or is killed by officers, stopping the rampage.
As for calling them cowards? If they really did not immediately enter the building, then yes they are. As someone who has been involved in multiple shooting situations, waiting is a terrible option. Waiting gives the advantage to the shooter. It sound like in this case the shooter was expecting a police response quickly so barricaded himself in the same classrooms he shot everyone in. Lucky for the students he didn’t keep shooting until the police actually showed.
I seem to recall, in one of the last 40 or 50 school shootings, the school resource officer not only didn’t go towards the shooting, he stayed away from the building entirely. At least he had the grace to resign the next day.
Not everyone can be a Starbucks window or a bank door and thus be assured of aggressive police defense. The rest of you are on your own.
It is not cowardly to want to remain safe. It is cowardly to allow others to die to save yourself. It is cowardly to turn your back on your duty and the live you are pledged to protect.
I am rather surprised to have to explain it.
Lots of speculation here considering how information is still being collected. One report has already come out that a kid said his classmate was shot and killed when an officer said to yell out “help” if you needed help and one kid yelled it out and was shot by the killer. Accurate? Only time till tell. But the so called expert opinions on here are anything but. I’ll be glad to pile on as well when the time is right but we are not there yet.
By the time “the time is right” there’ll have been another three or four mass shootings and everyone will have forgotten about this one. It’s the same insidious nihilism betrayed in the words of the pro-gun people who insist in the wake of every tragedy that “now is not the time to make this political”.
Warning for Smapti, this isn’t borderline ignoring Mod instructions, this is pouring gas on them and lighting it up.
Bringing up pro-gun and politics. You have several other threads to discuss the political side of this.
This topic was automatically opened after 22 minutes.
The school isn’t his private property; the police don’t have to give him notice that they’re coming in. Even if it was, I’m pretty sure that under “exigent circumstances” doctrine - applicable when officers reasonably believe that people are at imminent risk of physical harm - they could break in without giving notice.
They also don’t simply open the door and walk in. The perp may notice the noise as they break the door open, and that’s great - because now he’s not shooting at the kids, he’s busy watching the door. The longer the cops can distract him, the fewer kids he kills.
Likewise. I’m not willing to be a cop, but I’m willing to pay other people to be cops; they just need to be willing to do the job for which they are paid.
Here’s the training course manual that was linked to from the Twitter thread @Smapti linked to (this is an MS Word doc hosted on a texas.gov website):
From page 8:
First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm’s way and display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent. First responders must understand and accept the role of “Protector” and be prepared to meet violence with controlled aggression. The Priority of Life Scale is used to guide first responders during the critical decision making process that is required to effectively neutralize any threats. As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended. A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.
This scale does not suggest that any first responder approach the mission with reckless abandon for safety. The first responder using effective tactics coupled with situational awareness can isolate, distract, and neutralize the actor(s), while mitigating the loss of innocent life.
TL,DR: First responders aren’t expected to sprint across 20 yards of open terrain to tackle an armed suspect. But they are expected to do more than just establish a perimeter. As the document suggests, they are expected to prioritize the lives of the innocent above their own, and if they can’t find it in themselves to do that, then they should find a job that doesn’t inherently require risks to life and limb.
From page 9:
Officers have three primary goals in responding to an active attack on their school. These goals are:
ISOLATE – Drive or segregate the attacker in an area where their capacity to harm students, staff or visitors is minimized until more first responders arrive.
DISTRACT – Engage the attacker so that they have a diminished capacity to hurt students, staff or visitors. If they are engaged with the officer(s) they will be less capable of hurting innocents. It also buys time for students, staff and visitors to implement their Avoid-Deny-Defend (ADD) strategies.
NEUTRALIZE – Take away the attacker’s capacity to harm other people. This may include the use of deadly force, disabling an attacker, or disarming an attacker and taking them into custody.
Achieving any of these three goals is an acceptable outcome.
The Uvalde police and SWAT didn’t even attempt to do any of these things. Being barricaded in a room with twenty innocent targets does not count as “isolated”. There was also no effort to distract or neutralize the shooter either.
Continuing on page 9:
Several officers have been criticized after events such as the shooting in Parkland, FL for a perceived failure to respond. Video footage of an officer “staging” outside the building while the attack in Parkland was going on drew a great deal of public criticism. There has been significant public and legislative debate about sanctioning peace officers who fail to act to stop the carnage during active shooter events at schools. Citizens have a reasonable expectation that police officers are willing to take risks to reduce casualties during active shooter event. Part of the reasoning behind House Bill 2195 was to ensure that Texas school-based law enforcement officers receive training specific to their role in stopping school shootings.
TL,DR: Citizens have a reasonable expectation that police officers are willing to take risks to reduce casualties during an active shooter event.
Continuing on page 10:
Time is the number one enemy during active shooter response. The short duration and high casualty rates produced by these events requires immediate response to reduce the loss of life. In many cases that immediate response means a single (solo) officer response until such times as other forces can arrive. The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone.
TL,DR: Law enforcement officers are expected to act quickly and with whatever lever of force they have available, rather than waiting for a small army of reinforcements to arrive.
Thinking of Denzel Washington’s heroic response to this classroom hostage situation from the 1992 movie The Seige:
Nobody expects the cops to try that kind of insanity. But with the nature of active shooter events well understood ever since Columbine, I can’t see any way that the Uvalde PD response to this week’s active shooter event is defensible.
That was at the Parkland school shooting in Florida in 2018. Officer Peterson was fired, not resigned, and was charged with criminal counts relating to his activity that day.
The most recent info I can find is that in August 2021 the trial judge rejected Peterson’s motion to dismiss the charges, but nothing yet about a trial.
As more is coming out, it isn’t looking good for the local PD. It looks like they waited for backup that didn’t show and it took Border Patrol to end it. The timeline is still not clear, but it looks like the PD failed big time.
FWIW, timeline in San Antonio paper this morning. More detail at link (bottom of story).
Uvalde school shooting timeline
Victor Escalon, regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, offered new details about the Uvalde school shooting.
11:28 a.m. – Salvador Ramos, 18, crashes his grandmother’s pickup into a ditch near Robb Elementary. Moments earlier, he had shot his grandmother.
11:30 a.m. – Witnesses call 911 to report the crash and that the driver has a rifle.
11:30-11:40 a.m. – Ramos fires his weapon outside the school.
11:40 a.m. – Ramos enters the school through an unlocked door on the west side and fires multiple shots.
11:44 a.m. – Uvalde police arrive. They try to confront the gunman but come under fire. They retreat and call for backup while trying to help children evacuate.
About an hour later – A Border Patrol tactical team enters the school and kills Ramos.
My wife and I were discussing this this a.m., and I was shocked that she believes a cop ought no the expected to confront a heavily armed offender. Her thinking is that if that is the expectation, the only people who will apply to be cops will be crazies.
I understand cops are not exactly the same as the military, which is trained to run towards fire. But especially with the increased funding of the increased militarization of police forces, I expect them to exhibit considerable courage and place themselves at risk in certain situations.
Will be interesting to hear what comes out, but I’m having a hard time figuring why a 1 hour wait is reasonable.
From that timeline, the police could have ended things quite early. Perhaps even before some or any of the kids died.
Looking at the timeline posted above, my big question is why did they take almost 15 minutes to respond to reports of shots being fired for ten minutes outside a school? This asshole spent ten minutes in the open, with no kids in the immediate area, which was probably the best scenario for engaging him you could hope for, but the cops wasted the opportunity to stop him because they took too damn long to get there. WTF, guys? Was it coffee break or something?
“Crazy” in this context is rather subjective. To a risk-averse person, a risk-tolerant person seems crazy. There are people, including some on this board, who think I’m crazy just for riding a motorcycle, and I can well imagine they would think anyone willing to take on an armed offender is even further down the crazy spectrum (from them) than I am.
I’m not sure, I feel like Police are indeed pretty close to military. If you’re trained to carry a gun and a badge, it seems like you are indeed expected to risk life and limb to save others. Especially kids in such a situation.
I mean, firemen are literally trained to carefully walk into a burning building and to save lives. I think Police are held to the similar standard.
I don’t expect a sole police officer to go Die Hard on an armed asshole, but I’m kind of assuming once you have several officers with vests, helmets and hopefully shields, they should move in.
This is the job they took on. I’m not sure how it isn’t a job requirement.
An interesting standard with no basis in reality. Despite all the name calling here and laws that don’t materialize the state has no authority to make the police give up their lives for others, just as they can’t make you give up your life for others. I’m more surprised than you that I have to keep explaining this to people. Is the life of a policeman worth so much less than yours that they should take a bullet to make you feel safer.
What was he doing during this period? He fired shots, but what else was he doing? Running around looking for an unlocked door?
So many questions left to answer.