It doesn’t surprise me that the DPS head, Steven McCraw, shot down this plan. I think he’s about the only official I’ve seen that has pushed the idea that this was a monumental fuck up from the first press conference he held. I think he had some wrong info at the start, but has been pretty straight forward otherwise.
Yesterday, the Texas House of Representatives released its report on the Robb Elementary shooting.
Does this count as a “falsified police report” filed with the DPS?
Is there such a thing as “police fanfic”?
The report says that there were 376 law enforcement officers at the school, including 149 from the Border Patrol. And yet Pete Arrendondo never thought he was the incident commander. So almost 400 people there (possibly more than the number of students and staff in the school at the time) and no one was in charge.
And, BTW, apparently the classroom was the same one in which the shooter attended fourth grade, where apparently he was bullied. So this was a very personal response and not at all random.
The biggest problem Chief Pete can’t explain is why he wasn’t in command when his very own departmental policy said he was in command and he was one of the original officers on the scene. There is no explaining that away.
While I think he deserves the lion’s share of responsibility, this was truly a systemic failure on everyone’s part. I’ve not read the whole report yet, but a few highlights:
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School officials knew not only that some door locks did not work, but also that teachers routinely came up with ways to prop open doors, and shared these with other teachers because there was a shortage of keys.
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The wi-fi in the schools was so bad that not all classrooms received the shooter alert, nor did anyone try to use the office to classroom intercom system.
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Teachers were lax about the warnings they did receive because they had already had over 40 lockdown warnings (I believe in this year) and most were simply because Border Patrol chased illegal immigrants, who then bailed out of their vehicles and ran. Records show none of these people ever attempted to do anything other than flee.
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We now know that at least some police, including the now suspended Uvalde police chief, had direct contact with dispatchers/911 that relayed calls from children inside the classrooms asking for help and saying a lot of people were shot. Bodycam footage shows the Uvalde chief getting the messages, but he never commented on them or apparently relayed them to anyone inside the school. This is why I feel releasing bodycam footage is important. Obviously the chief didn’t volunteer this info to investigators, they had to get it from bodycam footage.
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Shortly after the first officers retreated from the gunfire thru the door, an officer started to do the right thing, advance toward the shooter. Halfway down the hallway he looked behind him and not a single officer there followed him, so he retreated back down the hallway.
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Almost 400 police there and only the one tried to confront the shooter. This is despite the fact that regulations allow any officer of any rank to advance on and confront an active shooter without permission from a superior.
I’ll probably be back with more tonite after I get a chance to read the whole report. I think the majority of what I gleaned so far, we already knew, or at least read rumors about.
And the fact that he was giving orders to other officers, including officers who weren’t members of his force, and not asking anyone else for orders.
If one assumes competence, then it would make sense for the school district police to be the ones in command. They’re the ones who would be most familiar with the layout of the school, and who would know facts like that it wasn’t possible to lock the classroom doors from the inside. And if keys were needed, they’d be the ones who know which ones, and would have them available.
Again, if one assumes competence. Which the other officers at the scene probably did, at the time. At least at first.
Is that the one who decided he couldn’t hit a human sized target at 100 yards despite having an optical sight on his rifle?
Nope, the lone officer that advanced down the hallway after the original officers retreated. Nobody would back him up, so he backtracked.
Just a little comment on the guy you mentioned. I’ve heard so many versions of this, I’m not sure what’s true. Hopefully, this is in the full report. The part I wonder about is that one story said that behind the shooter were classroom windows and he was leery about firing with that behind the target. I hadn’t seen that he had any kind of optics on his rifle.
The public always jumps all over officers who don’t pay attention to what’s behind their target, as they should. You always need to know what’s behind your target. Include that with the shitty firearm training that police seem to have in the US and maybe he was right not to fire. Remember that it was probably assumed that the shooter couldn’t enter the school at this point. Maybe he knew his limitations. I think we need more info.
There was a case a few months ago where an officer shot at a suspect in a clothing store and the bullet went thru the wall into a dressing room and killed a 14 year old girl. Or all the times police fire 50 times at someone and only hit him 20 times.
Every photo I saw of police that day, they had either optics or red dots. He could go prone or brace on the hood of a car or other support.
For fear of possibly hitting one, 22 died.
I actually don’t think it makes sense under these circumstances for the school district police to be in command - it makes sense for them to be in command initially as the agency with jurisdiction over the school, but Arredondo should have turned command over to someone more qualified. But it seems he was too incompetent to even do that.
Yep. Although the thought of a police officer only firing once is a bit of a laugh. This just highlights the systemic failure even more. The officers on the scene didn’t even know their own rules of engagement. According to the report, any officer is allowed to confront an active shooter. Why he thought he needed permission, if he indeed thought that, I have no idea. We know from experience that police are more than eager to fire dozens of times at unarmed people without the slighted pause.
Like I said, I need to see the actual report to find out what they determined. Too many versions of this story have been reported to know anything for sure.
You mean the report I linked to in Post 782?
Too late to edit, but two of the first responders have iron sights on their weapons, so certainly some didn’t have optics.
Agree. But the other problem is nobody else volunteered to step into the role. The Uvalde police chief did not even enter the building even tho he was on site and at one point knew children were calling 911 for help from the classroom. If that didn’t move him, he just wasn’t going to go in there no matter what. Once they stalled in the hallway and lost momentum, it was a total mess and I’m sure any officers of rank wanted anything to do with it. Police chiefs are often political, and think of the ramifications to their job first.
In the end, it was 3 lone officers that breached the room without orders from any superior.
Yes, I haven’t read it yet. I downloaded it so I can read tonight. Thanks for that, BTW, I was going to look for it so you saved me some time. 
Have you had a chance to read it? If so, what do you think?
Dick Wolf built a career out of it.
I skimmed it. It’s quite detailed and goes into the background of the shooter for one thing.
I thought I read somewhere that it wasn’t the shooter, it was a coach. Probably a good thing he didn’t shoot.
I read some of that in the NY Times. If this guy’s background didn’t send up red flags, we need to change that system. Maybe the FBI should be concentrating a bit more on this stuff than paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to buy info from app companies that track where you are on your cellphone.
I think that was a different officer who saw a teacher/coach in the parking lot.
I’m posting in this thread and the parade shooting and sometimes I have to pause and think about what thread I’m in. Sad commentary about the US when you can’t even keep mass shooting clear in your mind.
Every time they talk about the mass shootings from just this year, I realize how many of them I’d already forgotten about.
It’s absolutely unbelievable.
It’s on page 42-43 of the report:
According to the officer who made the request, there was no opportunity for Sgt. Coronado
to respond before they heard on the radio that the attacker was running toward the school.
The officers testified to the Committee that it turned out that the person they had seen dressed
in black was not the attacker, but instead it was Robb Elementary Coach Abraham Gonzales.