I’m just going to say that we don’t know the whole situation, and may never. Perhaps the delay was because they wanted to make sure the shooter didn’t have, for instance, accomplices, or for that matter bombs?
No I wouldn’t be ok with it. I’m not ok with the police not protecting people. And I’m not ok with anybody being treated like a 2nd class citizen who has no right to self preservation. And I also feel that people who don’t show the kind of moral responsibility any decent citizen would to protect the lives of children should face nearly universal condemnation.
Good thing that “cop” isn’t a status one is inherently born into and cannot change, then.
Don’t want to put your life on the line? Don’t be a cop. Simple as that.
Fair enough. I think we’re pretty close to agreement.
If you haven’t read the post by the Doper with SWAT team and police training experience, please do so now. There are a lot of misconceptions going around that are being discussed as facts. MikeF’s excellent, informative post clarifies a great deal.
Seriously, read it. It’s important.
deleted, too pissed off to answer.
The thin yellow line has always been the reality, these cops just made it really clear.
Where did I say they signed a contract? It is implicit in taking the job. An enlisted military contract doesn’t specifically say anything being put in harm’s way either but, “Nah, I’m not gonna help you assault that pillbox, sergeant. It looks too dangerous,” would not be received well.
So they lied, then. Take away their guns and their police powers, give them a Segway, and let them be the safe, mall cops they want to be, then. Drop by your local cop shop and try that line on them, and listen to what they have to say.
Read Grossman’s essay. He puts it far more elegantly than I can.
Yet the BORTAC team, who has as part of their job breaching stash houses, sat around for 30 minutes before trying to gain entry. Why did they need to wait for a key?
We already know there were victims still alive, both from the 911 call timeline and the reporting that there were survivors rescued.
Well, you reached quite a few conclusions in your post. C’mon, the police already said they ignored doctrine and training by not breaching the room. We were told every officer in the district was trained for this exact situation. Still, 19 of them sat around doing nothing. There is no reason for you to think up possibilities of why they didn’t breach, because they admit it was a mistake and they should have breached.
Let the guys whose job includes breaching rooms go ahead and breach the room rather than have them also sit in the hall for 30 minutes?
She shouldn’t get death threats, but she sure as hell deserves a big chunk of the blame. All the security in the world doesn’t help if she props open a door, and leaves it open even after she saw the shooter approaching. I hope she gets shit canned and charged with some kind of criminal negligence. Absent her need to get her phone from her car and being unwilling to be bothered to get buzzed back into the building, maybe no one at that school gets shot that day.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that in this town that spends 40% of its budget on the cops and has its own SWAT team, that not one of these squad cars had a battering ram or a breaching shotgun in the trunk.
Yep, I think the SWAT team thing is a joke. There were 8 or 10 officers in that picture. For a town of 16000, that’s probably half or a third of the police force. Something tells me there was a certain lack of training there. Plus, if they were actually a local SWAT, where the hell were they for that hour? Group vacation?
I don’t agree with some of the assumptions of the OP. I don’t think it follows that if police had not been outside stopping parents then they would have entered the scene. They tried to enter the scene because no one was going in to help.
Think of it like a fire. If I know a loved one is inside, and no one going to help, then I would want to go in (and hopefully I’d have the bravery to do so). But if I know several firefighters are doing all they can to get people out, then I’d probably not interfere, on the assumption that they will be more effective than me.
I can see the advert:
I’m more interested in the systemic failures. Why on earth wouldn’t the school district’s dedicated police force have a master key to all rooms? Even if they don’t, why not ask the principal or custodian for the master key?
It’s not just people here posting about the failures of cops. It’s the cops themselves. While your post is really informative, given your expertise, it sounds like the people who are closer to the situation than you are seeing some dreadful failures.
This. The MentourPilot approach.
While dealing with the propped open door is a slight deviation from the thread topic, I hope it may be forgiven as related to the “systemic failures” issue. Propped open doors happen all the time. One approach is to keep scolding, or even penalizing, staff who prop open doors. That does not seem effective. Instead, figure out why staff are doing this, and fix it.
It may be something as simple as giving staff keys to the doors. It may mean installing keypads on doors. It may mean ID badges with a chip that open doors.
Figure out what system leads to fewer propped-open doors, rather than cursing the name of the teacher than ran out to get her cellphone and propped the door open.
(As an aside, I’m confused about the timeline on that. Wasn’t there shooting going on for 10 minutes outside before he entered? Did the teacher just not hear the gunfire?)
Thanks for the informative insight. Based on what little remains of my military training, here is what I believe should have been done:
The officers in the initial pursuit should have maintained contact by firing through the door. The officers who joined them should have been directed to go to the outside and fire through the windows. This needn’t be directed fire, just a lot of noise and harassment to distract the shooter and make him believe he was in a cross fire. Create an opportunity to breach the door or wall. Find a means to breach the door - shot gun, axe, crow bar, key. As officers arrived have them breach the door and windows of the adjoining room.
The problem is, the shooter had total control of the incident from beginning to end. The situation did not conveniently fit the bureaucratic definitions of active shooter or barricade or hostage. It was not a debate over status.
The children making 911 calls were taking action at enormous personal risk while 19 policemen, less than 20 feet away, were cowering in the hall.
I know either virtually nothing or literally nothing about this stuff, but ISTM that – unless they truly had reliably accurate eyes on the interiors (I think it was @Magiver who, elsewhere, talked about getting cameras in place immediately), they wouldn’t have had control over their field of fire or the damage that ricochets might do.
Too much risk of law enforcement killing little kids.
My uneducated sense was that getting eyes on the room might allow them to triangulate the murderer, and then breach from multiple points simultaneously. It’s also why I asked, above, if there were other ingress/egress points and/or windows.
I mean … IF a sniper could get a clear shot through a window with minimal risk of collateral damage …
Or even use stun grenades – if appropriate in the presence of little kids – to distract him while entry is made.
But how much of the required gear did the available LEOs actually have (with them) ? We’re told that one reason for the distressing delay is that they had called for, and were waiting for, things like body armor and ‘tactical gear.’
The ‘blue line flag’ is now officially disgraced.
These colors don’t run (into a building into a building where children are are being shot)
The blue line flag is a violation of the U.S. Flag code -
§1. Flag; stripes and stars on
The flag of the United States shall be thirteen horizontal stripes, alternate red and white; and the union of the flag shall be forty-eight stars, white in a blue field.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title4/chapter1&edition=prelim
The ‘blue line’ is an insult to all who have served defending freedom, the flag and what it stands for.
And to some extent that was true for the responding officers. They did not know their enemy or the environment, but that’s the job. At the moment of contact they have to decide whether they are playing at COPS or actually being COPS.
Exactly! It happens all the time. Workmen come and go through a propped open door. Bus drivers prop it open to come in and use the bathroom before dismissal. The delivery drivers prop it open to go to and fro with their stuff.
I read somewhere the teacher that propped it open because it was an awards day and it was for parents to come and go to see the achievement awards.