I think it is unrealistic to expect police to behave heroically. Because they are not heroes. Hence, if we wish to avoid this sort of thing in the future, we must re-order our society to account for that.
One of the reasons why it’s really tough to discuss inadequate police response in isolation: police response is inherently inadequate to deal with certain societal ills.
No one asked they act “heroically.” We ask them to act how they were trained and how they practiced for this situation. God knows we’ve had enough mass shootings in the US that all LEOs agree that you go after an active shooter. And we’ve seen it work many times. Either LEO kills the shooter or they kill themselves. What we don’t do is gather 400 heavily armed officers to sit around a school for over an hour.
Looking through this list of deadliest school shootings,
I can only find one police officer fatality, and that was during the UT tower shooting, which was pretty different from more recent shootings. (Sniper in a tower.) The officer was at the scene, hiding behind imperfect cover, and the perpetrator shot him through a gap in the cover.
None of the officers and others who went up the tower to confront the shooter were killed (or even wounded, I think.)
In one other shooting on that page, a security guard was killed. Other than those two, I think officers had only minor injuries, if any.
The police response does tend to stop the carnage quickly. Perpetrators often kill themselves once confronted, and even when they fight back, they are subdued without killing officers who are confronting them.
the report from doj has dropped today. it is 610 pages Critical Incident Review: Active Shooter at Robb Elementary School (documentcloud.org) .
Uvalde report: Robb Elementary School massacre could have been stopped sooner, DOJ finds | CNN
merrick garland and vanita gupta are giving a press conference (11:32 ulvalde time) that give an over view to the numerous cascade of failures that they have found.
From reading over the summary, the key tactical error that precipitated the rest of the poor response was mistakenly characterizing the situation as a “barricaded shooter” (i.e., hostage) incident rather than an “active shooter” incident, in spite of evidence on-site that the shooter was, in fact, active from the outset.
The failure that made that dumb decision set like concrete was the complete lack of leadership in the on-scene law enforcement deployments.
There was also the inexplicable insistence by Arrendondo that the other classrooms be evacuated before rooms 111 and 112 were breached, even well AFTER he knew that this was an active shooter situation and not a barricaded shooter. He also insisted Rooms 111 and 112 shouldn’t be breached until he gave permission. And he deliberately did not carry a radio.
At 12:09 (page 78 of the DOJ report), Arrendondo tells an Uvalde PD detective Room 109 needs to be cleared and evacuated before breaching 111 and 112:
“Time is on our side right now. I know we got kids in there, but we gotta save the lives of the other ones.”
At 12:16, A BORTAC (Border Control Tactical Unit) commander says they’re ready to breach, but Arrendondo repeats that Room 109 must be evacuated first.
And he repeats this at least twice after this point.