I understand the arguments about how he was out-gunned, etc., but *everyone else *was “out-gunned” even more so, save for the gunman, and the whole point of having an officer on duty at school is for precisely situations like this. If he wasn’t going to intervene, then you might as well not have an officer at all.
This is analogous to an EMT not performing first aid on a severely bleeding patient because “he’s not a paramedic and doesn’t have the gear that an ambulance crew would.” Sure, but an EMT is better than nothing at all, and the patient’s bleeding to death.
That being said, considering the walls of a school, is it possible for someone to stand outside of a school building and not hear gunfire or shouts inside? If it’s brick walls or anything thick, maybe.
The FBI failed at their job pretty spectacularly too; I just posted this in the Pit:
Transcript of call to FBI; this is gonna break people’s hearts (and prolly cause a bunch of people to lose their jobs and possibly for law enforcement to re-think their shit.
The FBI were also alerted to a video on YouTube; pay attention to the details here:
One reason the FBI didn’t investigate the YouTube video further? They didn’t actually, ya know, try:
:rolleyes:
As Loach pointed out, tho, this isn’t why we have school resource officers.
I agree he should have gone in and confronted the shooter, but that is not the main reason that the position of school resource officer was created nor their general job description.
I’d like to think I am the kind of person who would rush in to help. I mean, I think I am…
But who really knows how they are going to react when the situation presents itself. When that fight or flight surge of adrenaline kicks in, some people freeze up. Doesn’t make them bad people. I don’t know if that’s what happened with this guy. I know what he should have done, but I can’t help feel a bit sorry for him.
Here’s a bit more on what information existed in the wild before the shooting:
The Jan 5 call to the FBI was quite damning.
At this point we don’t know what happened. He was on the outside of a building where he presumably hears shots fired and people are streaming out of every possible exit. He doesn’t know where the shooter is or how many there are. He needs to report what’s going on so the police response is as coordinated as it can be. He then has to enter the building with some expectation of surviving long enough to locate the shooter(s) and be able to return fire. It’s not like he’s going to be able to interview students fleeing the building.
It’s a different scenario if he’s inside the area in question and can see what’s going on and react to it.
Its not totally clear to me yet if all of them arrived while there was still shooting going on. The SRO was on scene from the beginning of course.
From what I’m reading on cop pages this information is coming out because there is a pissing match between Coral Springs Police and the county. Coral Springs Officers felt they took on the brunt of the initial danger and the horror of dealing with the dead and injured but it was the sheriff who bravely jumped in front of the television cameras.
That’s going into another direction. That’s not an active shooter situation, that’s a barricaded suspect. Even more dangerous and hard to deal with. That’s a small space with armed suspects and you’re basically walking into a death trap. In that situation the only option is often to set up a perimeter and wait for tactical teams that have breaching capabilities. There is no good answer.
Yup, the officer is now a coward and all sorts of other names - and it might even be true.
However, this is an excuse to cover for the real problem - sure various agencies also failed, still a band aid over the real issue.
As for that terrible Conneticut incident, well lets see, what made the perps so dangerous, what was it that acted as the force multiplier?
Remember the old hippy saying, fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity - pouring bucketloads of guns into society in order to protect people seems to me to be a similar analogy.
The elephant in the room is still there folks, its just that NRA and Trump are now covering it with an ill-fitting duvet.
No guns, no school shootings - simple as - its your choice and its not for me to tell you what to do - that’s for y’all.
Perps will always find ways to offer lethal force, so it make sense to reduce the amount available.
You choose your way, its your democracy, equally its for you to carry the burden and accept the results if its a price you are willing to pay and it seems to me that further massacres are an acceptable price to you - fine, your choice.
In the UK we have our own problems and we deal with them in various levels of effectiveness - good or bad. No system is perfect but I have not yet seen a NRA supporting person come up with realistic alternative other than more guns.
Not quite, the argument shouldn’t be put like that because it is never that simple but I’d defintely argue that…
less guns and well regulated guns means less shootings overall
Is it possible that he really did choose on his own to resign, and that that isn’t just a polite fiction for “fired”? Being put on administrative leave after something like this, while the department figures out what went wrong and if anyone should be blamed, is fairly standard, but it often ends with the conclusion “nobody did anything wrong; come back to work”. At the same time, I can easily imagine that the cop in question is having a really tough time of all of this, and asking himself all sorts of uncomfortable questions, and maybe he just decided that he, personally, couldn’t continue to be a cop after what happened.
And for the rest of his life, he will seconds guess this and live with the consequences.
An otherwise good cop in a situation he handled like a rookie. What a terrible way to end a career.
The elephant in the room is violence in society. The gun is irrelevant. If we could magically make them all go away the actual problem would still exist.
If the shooter didn’t have a gun he would killed the students some other way.
So until such point as a “magical” thing happens we should continue to allow people access to weapons that make the expression of that violence far easier?
name me an easier way for him to kill as many as quickly
You could be right of course, after all our schools in the UK have double-digit murders all the time without guns. They use bombs, swords, cars, harsh language…oh wait, no they don’t.
This is a childish argument, IMO, and a repeated one. Guns aren’t the only issue, but they are part of it. Guns are more lethal than knives (and some kinds of guns are more lethal than other kinds of guns); knives are more lethal than bare hands; etc. Adults can recognize this while also recognizing that this is a complex issue that isn’t nearly as simple as “let’s ban guns”. If he had had access to a rocket launcher, C4, or nukes/chemical/biological weapons, he could have killed even more people – thankfully, government regulation has successfully made such weapons very difficult to acquire. If he’d had a fully automatic weapon, he might have killed more people – thankfully, government regulation has made full auto weapons difficult to acquire. It’s just silly and beneath reasonable adults to pretend that the fact that he could easily acquire very lethal firearms has nothing to do with the body count of this event.
It’s impossible for me to answer specifically about this department. Among other cops Southern Departments have a bad reputation for having weak to no unions and having very little job protection (along with low pay). Basically if the boss doesn’t like you you’re gone regardless of if you haven’t violated the law, policy or proceedures. The statements by the sheriff made it clear he was done and he has enough time on to retire. It was his best option.
There is an element of politics in every police department. At some point there is an elected official involved. It’s usually worse in Sheriff’s departments since the top uniformed law enforcement official is also an elected official. Even if Peterson could show he followed policy and procedures the politics would have doomed him.
yes. because the magical world doesn’t exist.
car, truck, bus. pick one. Or you can make your own bomb if you’re bored. But we’re hi-jacking the nature of this thread. If you want to discuss it further take it over to one of the gun threads. I’m not going to respond to this line anymore in this thread.
Magiver, I started a new thread about the lethality and availability of guns:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=20809550#post20809550
There was a better response to the Pulse night club shooting. Sure, there were some communication issues and the officers weren’t well equipped, but there was no one standing outside with their thumb up their ass.