Some schools I’ve been at have had a policy that classroom doors must be locked at all times, and closed at all times other than between classes. Which, yes, does mean that when a student comes back from the bathroom, they need to knock and be let in. But it also means that in a lockdown situation, nobody needs to spend any time worrying about the door.
And it is not like Allen keys are mysterious tools only school districts have access to.
Is this solely because of concerns about school shootings? If so, that’s really quite disturbing.
I look forward to school districts trying to find a “security” screw/bolt that doesn’t have its driver available on Amazon.
Man, you guys went to some fancy pants schools! My K-8 schools were all rural and very old. All doors were regular wood, the top half of which was a regular glass pane. I doubt anyone was even able to lock them because they were old skeleton key locks. The keys were probably lost decades before I was born. And no bathrooms in classrooms.
Thanks, that’s almost exactly what I pictured from your description.
When I was a little kid, the common term for them was Allen Wrench. Which, of course, my five year old self heard as L-End wrench. Which made perfect sense since they were L shaped.
Well, for security in general. There are a lot of legitimate security concerns in a school that are much less severe than shootings. For instance, keeping the doors locked also prevents students “on the way to the restroom” stopping in to chat with their friends and disrupting class. And when students are late, it passively reinforces the fact that they are, in fact, late (“I’m not late, the bell only rang a minute ago!”).
As to the mother who got in, and was threatened if she spoke to the media; she was at work, IN A FARM FIELD, 40 miles from the school when one of her kids called her. She sped there at 100mph. She was furious the cops were doing nothing and wouldn’t let her by, the response team immediately cuffed her. But she convinced the Uvalde police to uncuff her. Wherein she instantly vaulted the barrier and got into the school, retrieved one of her kids then headed to get the next. She then out maneuvered the two cops that were inside the school doing nothing, except trying to stop her, with one child in tow! She got her kids and some others out.
She was threatened because she had a record and was only a farm worker, and not white!
I hope there are lawyers lining up to represent her in her lawsuit. This police force is going to get sued out of existence. And they deserve it, in my opinion.
Isn’t keeping civilians out of crime scenes like that the standard police response? Apparently they failed at that also. It does seem to make things worse that the police tried to follow the standard strategy outside while probably not having any idea what it was supposed to be inside the school.
I hope so. Do we know if that is being pursued?
I doubt that the Uvalde police will be successfully sued, given that police have some form of immunity.
It’s very unlikely that the police department will be successfully sued - but I am pretty certain the school district police department will cease to exist
If parents sue the police, they will presumably just be bankrupting their own town, probably for minimal financial benefit. I don’t see any deep pockets here unless they go after the gun manufacturer.
But as @doreen says, they at least need to be sued out of existence.
I don’t think they will be sued out of existence - I think that either A) the school board will realize they have no business running a police department , disband it and go back to however they handled security before this department was formed in 2018 (which would have involved the actual city police handling this sort of incident) or B) the state will revoke the ability of this school district (and hopefully other small districts) to operate their own police departments.
The school board made one big mistake- hiring Arredondo as the chief. And he made one big mistake- not ceding command as soon as someone more qualified was on the scene. All the other mistakes flowed from those two.
Police have immunity for actions taken in the course of their official duties. Do they have immunity for actions taken in the avoidance of their duties?
This New York Times article (gift link) says it would be difficult to sue or punish the police officers.
Generally speaking, said Seth Stoughton, a former officer who now tracks police accountability as a professor of law and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, actions are legally easier to punish than omissions.
“I think it would be difficult, but it’s possible,” he said, adding, “We can only punish someone for failing to do something if they were legally required to do it.” The law usually does not require people to put themselves in harm’s way even if training instructs them to do so, Professor Stoughton said.
What I’m wondering is that the incident commander/school district police chief was apparently treating the situation as a barricaded hostage event and was waiting for additional resources before proceeding. But various articles said that there were upwards of a hundred local, state and federal law enforcement officers present. Isn’t that enough? Just when was he planning to act?
I’m not sure he was planning to act anytime soon if he really was treating it as a hostage situation. Hostage situations can go on for hours or even days - but once the hostage taker starts shooting, it has changed to an active shooter situation and should be treated as one. If he was treating it as a hostage situation after the shots were fired, I’m not sure he would have ever ordered officers to go in - and I think the officers who did finally go in became convinced he wouldn’t and that’s why they finally disregarded his commands. This article says one officer received a command of “Do not breach” even as they were moving toward the classroom.
When 9/11 happened, I had to go straight into the office.
My boss and I were on the phone with a very high-level logistics guy at FedEx (FedEx being, first and foremost, a logistics company).
We remarked that voices came over the public address system in one of the twin towers, essentially telling the occupants to remain in place.
[this was about three minutes before the second plane struck that tower]
“Uh-uh,” said our FedEx buddy. “Not this Southern boy.”
We both shook our heads in dismayed agreement. When the shit hits the fan, you get the fuck out. It’s almost the exact opposite of post-Columbine active shooter protocol: when there are shots fired, you go the fuck in.
It sounds like the BORTAC team said essentially the same thing to the Chief of School Cops and incident commander, Arredondo.
But it still sounds like it took them a lot longer than it should have.
Politics ? Turf issues ? Hopefully, time (and the DoJ investigation) will tell.
Once things go pear shaped they don’t get back into form very easily. The initial decision to treat it as a hostage situation was a mistake, but it was a bigger mistake but the commanding officer did not get the officers in order and establish proper communications with 9/11 and the regular police and other commanders available. I’m sure it was such a shitshow that couldn’t have happened even if the commander on scene and all the rest of regular police officials weren’t incompetent as well. I can’t imagine what kind of catastrophe would have happened had they tried to go right toward the gunman through a door they couldn’t unlock and hadn’t thought about finding the key to it.
Let’s not rule out cowardice. Considering the number of people gunned down by the police because of imagined threats, I’d say it’s the leading candidate.