As I understand it, he wasn’t fired, but placed under investigation and chose to resign/retire.
I don’t know the protocols in place for that assignment in particular, or the area in general, but I’ve attended 2 active shooter trainings last year, one for our hospital and one for the county, and in both they were emphatic that the responders are going in hard, fast and ready to fire.
These things are generally over in 5-10 min from first shot, and often with the perp killing themselves. LEOs only chance of changing the outcome is to get there now, they’ll drive a car through the door if it’s blocked, they’ll run right past you if you’re alive but obviously wounded, if you’re waving a cell phone around, you might get shot in case you’re trying to trigger an IED (which has been tried).
Again I have no idea if Parklands protocols and training are up to date.
ETA, the ones I worked with were all clear that they knew the risk and were fully committed to throwing themselves into harm way.
I don’t see the problem with him resigning, if I was a cop with a gun who stayed at the back while kids were getting murdered I’d resign too.
I don’t think anybody is saying he should be charged with anything or blaming him for what happened, but I’d consider it a simple fact that he acted like a coward.
Kids were getting shot like animals, he could have helped them, he didn’t. He is a coward.
Is there any definitive timeline of this? I’m not even trying to argue he did the right thing, but I’ve read numerous comments (here and elsewhere) alleging that he stood outside doing nothing as the shots were being fired and that he would have saved lives had he gone in, but the shooting only lasted six minutes, and I can find nothing explicitly laying out where the deputy was during those specific six minutes.
Sure, this can be viewed as an isolated incident. But assuming he was a cop for many years, what is to say he responded differently in every other stressful situation? This is the type of extreme situation he was hired and trained for - and he (appears to have) failed spectacularly. No, of course there is no showing that his going in would have saved any lives, but (not knowing any policies/training to the contrary), he should have at least made the effort.
Now he resigns, collects his pension, and (I predict) applies for disability benefits due to PTSD. :rolleyes:
Well, usually, it’s a good thing when a cop doesn’t charge in looking for someone to shoot. So if this officer has been a little more cautious than expected for the last three decades, maybe that was a good thing on balance until it suddenly wasn’t.
Not every stressful situation a cop faces involves “charging in looking for someone to shoot.”
Maybe he was fine in every situation up until now. But that begs the question of when the cops are most needed. Is it for active shooter situations? Or for high-fiving high schoolers and passing out speeding tickets? (Admittedly, likely a combination of both. But I definitely NEED my catastrophic health insurance more than I need a discount on my regular teeth cleaning.))
“Dangerous scenes” covers a lot of territory. I watch “Cops” pretty regularly too, and on that show, “dangerous scene” is usually a business or residence that’s been broken into and may or may not still have an perp inside, who may or may not be armed; under that circumstance, there’s little to be gained by rushing in and confronting whatever you find in there.
“Active shooter” is a very special subset of the “dangerous scene” category. As you noted upthread, Columbine was the turning point for a change in policy in this situation: when a gunman is actively murdering the occupants of a building, you can’t afford to wait for SWAT to arrive, you need to go in and confront him NOW. In most of the mass shootings since then, the pattern has been that the shooter is not highly trained in combat tactics, and also not terribly bold when faced with real opposition: they tend to kill themselves when the police move in (if not before).
Being first on scene and charging in with no info or backup certainly not zero risk. Maybe today is not your lucky day because the shooter this time just happens to be a recently retired Navy SEAL who’s gone off his meds, instead of just a dumb kid with a rage fantasy, limited resolve, and shitty tactical awareness. But history has shown that it’s almost always the latter, and when we hire someone as a law enforcement officer, that’s one of the risks we’re paying them to take. If they have the misfortune of being first on scene to an active-shooter event, and there’s no backup, their job is to engage the shooter; Israel certainly didn’t mince words about that during the press conference.
When I first saw the headlines on this, I withheld judgment. Even if you’re on the SWAT team, certain officers are assigned to patrol the perimeter rather than go inside the building. But when I read that the sheriff specifically said that this officer was not doing what he was supposed to be doing (Cite), that’s when I, well, I guess when I decided to pass judgment. It struck me as bizarre that a senior officer, ready to retire, would behave this way, but after looking up the demographics of Parkland, it’s making a bit more sense. I imagine (and acknowledge that this could be wrong, as it’s just speculation) that this officer worked in a safe, high-class neighborhood for most of his career and had never faced anything remotely this intense. But any number of things could have been going on, for all I know, he could have been having a cardiac event or some other health issue. I don’t understand his motivations, but I sure am curious about them.
We don’t know what the deputy was facing or what his thought process was. It’s silly to judge him without knowing that.
What we DO know is the sheriff’s office answered 30 calls on Mr. Cruz since 2011 for violent outbursts, and they failed to do a goddamned thing about someone who was clearly a threat to society–autistic or not. That’s not a school resource officer’s fault, that’s um…lessee, there’s got to be some office that evaluates ground-level threats, performs arrests as necessary to mitigate those threats, and issues arrest records and incident reports to the district attorney? I just can’t think of who that might be, and who might have been dropping that particular ball for 6 years, the result being no criminal activity to ping a background check in the course of purchasing a firearm. IF deputy failed, I’m more likely to chalk that up to poor training/supervision, which is the responsibility of…dang, who would be responsible for ensuring the training and job fitness of a deputy? It’ll come to me…
I am not too keen on hard condemnation, however this does give one pause about the premise of how effective is having someone armed around in and of itself. You just can’t predict if that person will make the right decisions.
He was facing an armed nut who was planning to kill as many people as he could. Otherwise known as “the reason that he was there in the first place.” He was there to protect the students, and when the moment of truth came, he proved himself to be an abject coward. There is one and only one way that he can begin to redeem himself, and that is by proving his remorse by feeding himself his gun.
And no, I’m not claiming that I would have been brave and thrown myself into a hail of gunfire to protect somebody else’s children–but I didn’t take a job where that was the job description.
He certainly should have, and it shows that even someone who chose to confront criminals as part of their job, and who has had training in how to do so, could freeze in a stressful situation when faced with the probability of his own death and a guy with an AR-15. Four minutes is not very long to panic and freeze, but its a hell of a long time for a guy with an AR-15 to roam the halls of a school shooting.
There is really no way to know how you are going to react to this until it happens. And it isn’t likely to happen to any individual police officer.
You can’t depend on human beings to always respond in a predictable fashion - even with training.
I saw one very short interview with the couple and the father said basically he has no regrets and wouldn’t have done anything differently with hindsight. what the hell?