Not worth less but once they’re are several officers available, it is their job to save lives. Again, forget the military, compare to firemen. Are their lives worth less, no, but they took on this brave and awesome job to protect the public.
I did this training, several times. It is nerve wracking even when you know it is training. Officers on the entry team HAVE to tell the injured victims to hang on as help is coming and you cannot stop to render aid during the sweep. You have to ignore the dead bodies if there are any. The chances of officers getting shot here are high and you know this when you arrive. But we had a case where the young teen entered with a rifle and started walking the halls. The first 3 arriving set up the perimeter and the next 5 were automatically the entry team. No matter your assignment and/or rank. You went in. Fortunately the kid surrendered and no shots were fired but the officers were still a nervous wreck when it was over. Anyone saying they would not be are flat out lying.
Or has some serious mental issues.
I couldn’t do it, I could fight fires and trained for such, but I couldn’t do the gun thing. I would be useless.
Intended seriously - in TX, I’m surprised none of the bystanders was armed and engaged him. Not intended as a gun-rights issue, merely reflecting what little I know (based in part on a son having lived in S TX) as to the prevalence of guns there.
I think she meant hyper-aggressive thrill seekers. Would be challenging to find candidates who BOTH the personality traits that serve well under quasi-military situations such as this, as well as the “softer” attributes which allow them to respond appropriately to distraught/disturbed people who MAY NOT pose an immediate threat.
As others have said–doctrine on active shooters is not similar to other shooting incidents, the old tactics of establishing a perimeter and clearing a facility room by room is not the standard for dealing with an active shooter situation. Police and other security forces have been training more along the lines of an active engagement model since at least the early 2000s–heavy emphasis is put on getting into contact with the gunman as early as possible. This is due to investigations of previous active shooter scenarios showing that the shootings often stop most quickly when the shooter is engaged, with many shooters choosing to commit suicide shortly after police engage with them, other shooters have been killed once police arrived.
Even with the timeline released Thursday, I think our level of information is still “poor” on this, so I think pontificating too much on the quality of the response is still a bit premature. Bluntly though–if police engaged with the gunman early in the shooting, then retreated and established a perimeter, they were going against training and tactics for such a situation as has been developed at a Federal level and across the country, and that has been promulgated down to local law enforcement.
One big “wrinkle” though, is that many tactical guidelines (like you can find in this: Columbine & Active Shooter Tactics (publicintelligence.net)), mention that immediate deployment tactics are not a substitute for a barricaded suspect, so at least some of the concepts of rapid deployment are not intended for barricaded suspect situations. However, if the suspect was engaged in the open and they allowed him to barricade himself without any serious pursuit, that would still be a fairly big breach of training / expectations.
Without knowing exactly when the parents were there and which agency was holding them at a perimeter, it is also hard to know if anything was being done untoward there. The first responding agency generally had the most obligation to pursue rapid deployment tactics, some supporting agency that arrived 25 minutes later and was helping establish a perimeter, would largely be acting appropriately. We need a lot more details across the board–but in short if there was a window for rapid deployment in which police failed to adequately respond, that is a failure.
Firemen have finally figured out that dead firemen don’t protect the public. Let’s see how the new ‘shoot first and ask questions’ later approach to school shootings holds up when the bodies of children who sustained ‘friendly fire’ are added to the victims.
Based on facts that we know I have no criticism of the Uvalde police officers on the scene, perhaps I will have plenty when all the facts come out, but that hasn’t happened yet. And the talk of an active shooter situation here doesn’t seem to recognize that the police were not confronting an active shooter, it was a hostage situation when they arrived and they tried to handle it to the best of their ability. And that ability is highly limited as I pointed out in earlier in this thread. Rescuing students from psychos armed with assault weapons who can lock themselves in classroom full of children is not a specialty I am aware of and so far I haven’t seen that anyone has achieved success in that field. But let’s just blame the next police dept. that finds itself in this mess. Do you believe those children would be alive if not for some failure on the part of the Uvalde police dept. who arrived to deal with this?
I read someplace, perhaps another topic, that the delay was partly because the police were waiting for the principal to provide a key for the locked classroom door. That seems ridiculous. Wouldn’t there be a master key in the Knox box outside the main entrance?
What I CAN imagine is being the teacher in the classroom, not knowing where the shooter is located, and trying to determine how to protect the 20 children in front of me until the police come in, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
I imagine that scenario a lot. Every teacher–every school cafeteria worker, every instructional assistant, every principal and custodian and school secretary–imagines that scenario a lot.
I don’t see how the police in this case could reasonably have been better prepared for the scenario, or how they could have more fully failed. This is overwhelming evidence that police are not the answer to mass murderers.
At some point, though, when the gunman starts executing hostages, hasn’t the whole situation materially changed ?
From what I can read, the statute applies only to school resource officers. I doubt more than one or two of the cops on the scene were school resource officers, so, if my reading of the law is correct, most of the local PD officers waiting around wouldn’t be covered by the law. The law basically requires the school resource officers to receive training about how to respond to active shooters. The training might tell them what is good practice to do in an active shooting but it remains to be seen under Texas law whether having received the training obligates one to comply with it and whether there will be repercussions for any trained school resource officers who may not have complied with it.
The police response looks pretty cowardly to me too based on what I’m reading now. The best possible interpretation based on the timeline seems to be that the shooter got into the school, killed a bunch of kids really quickly, then stopped (for whatever reason) giving the police adequate time to secure the perimeter, concoct a plan and marshal resources that minimized risk to officers, and ultimately executed that plan. I would like to learn a lot more about what happened to see if this is what happened. I tend to doubt the facts will paint so rosy a picture.
Being a police officer is a tough and sometimes scary job. In this case, based on the certainly flawed early reporting, it seems that police officers spent a lot of time safeguarding themselves while an active shooter was killing children. They traded the safety of children for their own. That is cowardly by my definition. Police have weapons with which to respond to threats. The risk to a police officer confronting an active shooter is a lot less than an elementary school kid. Every kid in that classroom had the potential to be a police officer or something else. They should have had a future that was longer than any of the first responders’. Maybe, as a society, we should be able to expect the police, with their training and their equipment, to take some level of risk to save kids. After all, there are 20 kinds in that classroom who bore even more risk for perhaps up to an hour and paid the price.
No: it was a situation where the gunman had already fired multiple shots, and the police didn’t know how many were dead, and how many were bleeding out. There’s a very good chance that if the police had gone in immediately instead of waiting an hour, some of the fourth graders who died from blood loss would be alive today.
Rushing towards danger is part of their job that they’ve trained for. It’s one of the reasons the public has forgiven them so many times for shooting people who shouldn’t have been shot. Like others, I don’t expect a police officer to be sucidally brave, but at the same time they can’t do their job if they shy away from danger. Right now I’m seeing headlines that read “Police slow to engage gunman because ‘they could get shot.’” And that is not acceptable. Paul in Saudi is right, that’s cowardly.
And securing the perimeter should be a very low priority. Straight up if the killer leaves the school, they’re going to a place with fewer children to murder, not more. Focus should be on removing their ability to shoot children, and driving them out of the school is one way to do that.
There’s time to catch them later, when there aren’t hundreds of terrified kids within a thirty second jog.
Of course it has changed, but not necessarily away from a hostage situation. If the story of a child asking for help was then shot should the police take an action that might result in 10 more dead children? How on earth do you expect the town cops of Uvalde Texas to know how to handle a hostage situation like that?
Since headlines are irrefutable evidence let’s go hang those cops now.
Presuming, arguendo, that I accept the premise that this ever was a ‘hostage situation*’ in any meaningful sense, then … I guess my answer to your question would be … training.
*A hostage situation is one in which a person(s) takes control over another person(s), is demanding some type of action and not allowing the person(s) being held to leave. The hostage taker is not actively killing or injuring people. The hostage taker is holding people against their will. Police will respond and attempt to communicate with the hostage taker(s).
Minor hijack; how many kids were in the classroom? In other words, aside from the nineteen deceased, how many were wounded and how many were not?
I think there’s also a good chance of more dead policemen and children. I don’t expect the officers on the scene were capable of making a proper assessment of that situation.
Right. And is it the fault of the officers on the scene that they were not trained to that standard, presuming it is the correct standard?
See my later responses based on newer information coming out. I’m seeing more fault with the police.
Even the bestest and bluest good guys with guns cannot seem to stop them a lot of the time.