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Why has the right judged the Uvalde police so quickly? — 106 Comments

1. The police will almost always ‘look’ bad in mass shootings because they are exceedingly rare and also very complex and dynamic events that are almost impossible to react ‘correctly’ too.

   That also goes for the ‘known wolf’ phenomenon that is often brought up. There is no way for any law enforcement agency to decipher which of these individuals is a true threat and for the right that rails against ‘red flag laws’(correctly) this is another inconsistency.

   Some humility and honesty is needed to admit that sadly these things are going to happen no matter what and the best approach is to just try to prepare responders as best as possible.

2. People want a scape goat and want it fast. That’s my answer. I mean look at say the Exxon Valdez disaster. Joseph Hazelwood got to be the scapegoat in that right at the beginning and at this point if you point out the major players that screwed up were the Coast Guard and Exxon people will think you’re crazy. (BTW if you haven’t looked it up yes the reason it happened was Exxon and the Coast Guard’s fault. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill) I only heard about years later btw.

3. Thank you for this very appropriate analysis of why it is far too early to make judgements about this. I regret that so many comments on right-of-center blogs are assuming the situation is settled.

4. Griffin:

   Humility and honesty would be great. I’d even take humility or honesty. Sadly, we often get neither.

5. Roland Hirsch:

   You’re welcome.

   I’ve been very troubled by the near-universality of the quick police condemnation on the part of the right. People on both sides are often compliant with and respond well to emotional manipulation by the press if the manipulation goes in the direction they want, whereas they are critical of such manipulation when it goes in a direction they don’t like.

6. I would add that in schools specifically making sure all exterior door locks are functioning correctly and having very clear systems in place for entry are things that can be implemented somewhat easily but even then they will not be perfect.

7. Neo,

   I think a portion of it is a knee-jerk reaction to the left’s immediate calls for gun control coupled with they abysmal performance of many governmental institutions of late.

   I am trying to keep an open mind on the issue. But I do admit that some of the actions taken by the Uvalde police to limit the public’s knowledge. Does appear suspicious. As the offender is deceased no released information would hamper a prosecution. So I am left to wonder what is motivating it beyond face saving.

8. Mythx:

   I have addressed that many times. Take a look at my comments in today’s open thread, just to take a recent example.

9. I do think some of the knee jerk criticism from the right is because of the overt politicization of so many law enforcement agencies the last few years. For many they have lost the benefit of the doubt.

   Is that fair? No, not entirely, but when so many non political organizations spend so much time being politically partisan it leads to more criticism when they fail at their actual jobs.

10. Griffin:

    Are you talking about local police departments? Or about entities like the FBI or DOJ or DAs like Boudin? If the latter group, I don’t see why it would carry over to the local Uvalde PD.

11. Neo-

    Thank you. New job plus intermittent power the last week. Has me far behind on my normal reading

12. neo,

    I’m talking about law enforcement as a whole and not just FBI Trump scandals. I can’t speak to the Uvalde police before the shooting but I know plenty of police forces that are all in on a lot of the woke crap (at the managerial level mainly) but that turns people off.

    Also it goes without saying that virtually 100% of the critics (and defenders) of the Uvalde police knew absolutely nothing about them before this event but they had an increasingly negative view of law enforcement in general.

    Not saying it was right in this case but I think it is a factor.

13. This short take on the militarization of the police since 9/11 has something to do with it, background-wise, I think. I remember when my local small town police department picked up a surplus MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle years ago, and thinking, wtf?

    https://hotair.com/headlines/2022/06/17/police-militarization-gave-us-uvalde-n476922

14. Erasmus,

    Yes, I linked to the original Atlantic article Hot Air excerpted on the open thread earlier. The pictures of local police forces in military garb has been a building thing on the right for years. There was a famous shot in Texas, I believe, of a couple of obese cops preparing to enforce some lockdown order that got a lot of attention at the time.

    Also the police behavior in enforcing COVID orders did them no favors either by the way.

    The original Atlantic article.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/police-training-militarization-mass-shootings-uvalde/661295/

15. Griffin,

    Thanks.

    Enforcing COVID orders *and* standing down/taking a knee during our most recent Summer of Love (2020).

16. The right is strongly supportive of the police and rightly so.

    In accepting that support, a moral obligation is placed upon police officers to act in accordance with that standard. When police officers appear to act in violation of that moral obligation, supporters are rightly disturbed.

    When children’s lives are lost through what clearly appears to be a profound violation of the police’s raison de etre, it generates outrage and a fierce desire for justice.

    Justice requires accountability. Accountability escaped elevates the injustice.

    At base, two inescapable factors lead to the harsh judgement visited upon the police present at the scene. The apparent inactivity and the inexplicable time delay.

    Some of that has been explained. Have I missed a satisfactory explanation for why it took so long to get the right key? Why the requested equipment needed to breach the door never appeared?

    If by now that still remains a mystery, then that information is being intentionally withheld and that always confirms guilt.

    So… the outrage remains.

17. I probably haven’t made this clear in previous posts, but my issue isn’t so much with their behavior as the event was unfolding but with the fact that there 6 district police officers employed 40 hours a week for presumably at least a couple years prior to the event with duties that I presume are not unlike the following that I pulled from a Florida job description, which includes functions such as:
    ***Providing police services to the district.***

    ***Partnering with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to ensure school safety.***

    **Managing specialized school security programming.***

    Coordination and oversite of the District Threat Assessment Team (DTAT) and the Schools Threat Assessment Teams (Stat)

    ***Conducting security-related assessments.,***

    ***Coordinating security for school activities, district meetings, and special events.***

    ***Maintains police and public safety communications Center.***

    How did they fail so spectacularly at so many of these? Even the most basic thing like emergency communication slipped through the cracks, despite Parkland showing us all that communication issues cost lives.

    I mean, it’s a school district in a town of 16,000 people. That it even had district police was mind blowing (Fairbanks, AK.. A city of 100k… doesn’t have any.). It’s proba ly safe to say that in a place that small they probably weren’t busy monitoring gang activity and such like they would be in a major city. So if they werent doing security assessments and drills and tabletop exercises, and the town wasn’t big enough to keep the 6 cops busy with keeping gangs and drugs out of schools, what WERE they doing in the months and years leading up to this? TikTok videos?

18. There has been an anti-police vibe from libertarians like Glen Reynolds for some years now. They view all government agencies with suspicion. Police don’t enhance their reputations when they do traffic stops and are cur or angry while writing a ticket. I’ve been stopped for various minor infractions and the policemen were not always courteous. But anyone who’s paying attention knows that a traffic stop can be quite hazardous. And cops have bad days, just like all other humans.

    When I was in training at Pensacola, we had a lecture on how to deal with traffic stops or other encounters with the police. The Pensacola cops did not appreciate whipper-snapper damn-Yankees violating their laws. Too many routine traffic stops were turning into arrests. So, we were told to pull over carefully, turn of the engine, roll down the window, and keep our hands in sight at all times. No matter what the policeman said, we were told to be courteous and comply with all directions. Yes, the cops were abusive. But the y had the power and The Navy wanted to get along with the locals and this was an area where there were problems. Thus, the lecture, which I have found to be good advice over the years.

    I have a neighbor who isa retired policeman. He has a hard time trusting non-cops. He’s seen too much of the underbelly of society. It has made him, cynical and suspicious. I’ve gained his trust and have come to appreciate how difficult the job is. Those of us who don’t come in contact with the dregs of society on a regular basis don’t appreciate what they deal with.

    They’re not perfect. Some of them can be jerks and on a power trip. But we need them, and we need to support them. Otherwise, it becomes vigilante justice or banana republic militias and gangs.

19. just from my perspective, it resembles too many incidents going back to 1999, we have higher expectations about law enforcement in texas, they were trained for just this circumstance, although since 2020, we have been pushing against the lessons learned after parkland,

20. I think the urgency to know why it happened as it did is in part because of the politicization of everything. Democrats and some Republican senators have already put together a legislative package which may or may not pass. This is being done in response to knee-jerk reactions. The sooner we can get facts, the better. Democrats blame guns, as if they shoot by themselves. Republicans, not wanting to blame self-firing guns, need some other understanding of the problem. On the face of it, over an hour to get into the room seems to many of us like too long. Knowing why would help. Waiting six months or a year for “investigations” to finish (how many, who is doing them?) won’t help the political mess one bit.

21. Erasmus, yes I think that is one of the reasons that conservative citizens feel that local police forces are subject to criticism – the militarization of their equipment, often to absurd levels given budgets small towns already stagger under. The upkeep costs of this sophisticated military-grade equipment must be painful.

    I think the other reason that conservative citizens are primed to be mistrustful of police behavior goes back over the past few years, when riots and violence based on the George Floyd death, or BLM protests, or Antifa rallies, seemed to be spreading across the land as weak mayors (mostly leftist Democrats but also some weak Republicans) caved in and started publicly taking knees in support of the mayhem. And with this, came the realization that local police forces are very often aligned with local leadership that they report to, and very often dance to the tune they’ve been instructed to heed. And this might include turning a blind eye to arson, destruction of property, and assault.

    This was particularly evident in Charlottesville, where local police at the direction of the mayor intentionally marched protestors from opposing sides, into each other in order to create conflict. And this, as well as orders to ‘stand down’ and not take action, have been in evidence in other places as well – Milwaukee and Kenosha, WI for example.

    So to me, it’s no wonder that the average conservative citizens considers it wise to assume the worst of local police forces: They’ve seen repeated examples of corrupted practices at the behest of local elected figures to co-opt the principles of law enforcement and replace them arbitrarily with Woke policies that abet mayhem and destruction at the hands of outsiders, and fail to protect the rights and properties and businesses of law-abiding citizens. There’s a reason. It’s too bad, and I hope it improves, but there’s bitter experience providing a good reason to mistrust the police until it’s proven otherwise.

22. I found that times piece, particularly aggravating, interesting they put it at the back of the paper, but it was ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing told by an idiot’ I didn’t see the byline was it manny fernandez or another one of those anthropologists in deepest texas,

    in the movie ‘interstellar’ the threat is something called the blights, some unspecified phenomenon that is wiping out the crops, and leading the world to ruin, this was also to the actual threat in the manga, that edge of tomorrow was based, not these biomechanical things, this is most of prog media, the times, the daily basilisk, the texas tribune, for them to prosper institutions must wither and die,

23. Just one example. The Burbank police all geared up to…crack down on a restaurant daring to flout lockdown orders. There are so many of these examples and that is just one reason why conservatives have less knee jerk positive responses to the police.

    https://americanconservativemovement.com/2021/04/12/burbank-arrests-owner-puts-fence-around-tinhorn-flats-to-preserve-government-supremacy/

24. yes I remember ‘meal team 6’ ordered by commissar hidalgo, to shut down businesses in san antonio, just like the keystone Capital Cops, about a decade ago, they gunned down miriam carey, to the applause of much of Washington,
    now the most interesting questions have not been asked much less asked how much did the local and federal bodies know about the shooter,

25. I hope to all that’s meaningful that this is not true:

    https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Uvalde-classroom-doors-17251116.php

26. And naturally this course of action, ‘lawyering up’ to prevent the release of public information, is not a good look either.

    https://www.vice.com/en/article/88q95p/uvalde-contracts-private-law-firm-to-argue-it-doesnt-have-to-release-school-shooting-public-records

    Now this is a biased site and rather lurid reporting. I am with Neo when it comes to calls for patience while the investigation plays out. But at the end of the investigation there should be a period of full disclosure of findings, too.

27. I don’t trust the justice department taskforce, in part because it has chief mina on it, the one that precided over the pulse massacre in orlando and yet wasnt materially affected by it,

28. if you’re going to be in the lions den, well you need to have a good lion tamer,

    https://www.rampagelaw.com/attorney/lowell-f-denton/
    https://www.rampagelaw.com/attorney/charles-e-zech/

29. vice just happened to be embedded with parties in charlottesville and most recently with the proud boys, that’s just a coincidence I’m sure,

30. More bad news for Uvalde. Classroom doors may have been unlocked.

    From the San Antonio Express News
    “Surveillance footage shows that police never tried to open a door to two classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in the 77 minutes between the time a gunman entered the rooms and massacred 21 people and officers finally stormed in and killed him, according to a law enforcement source close to the investigation.

    Investigators believe the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on May 24 could not have locked the door to the connected classrooms from the inside, according to the source.

    All classroom doors at Robb Elementary are designed to lock automatically when they are closed so that the only way to enter from the outside is with a key, the source said. Police might have assumed the door was locked, but the latest evidence suggests it may have been open the whole time, possibly due to a malfunction, the source said.

    The surveillance footage indicates gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, was able to open the door to classroom 111 and enter with an assault-style rifle, the source said.

    Police finally opened the door to classroom 111 and killed Ramos at 12:50 p.m. Whether the door was unlocked all along remains under investigation.

    Regardless, officers had access the entire time to a “halligan” — a crowbar-like tool that could have opened the door to the classrooms even if it was locked, the source said.

    Two minutes after Ramos entered the building, three Uvalde police officers chased him inside. Footage shows that Ramos fired rounds inside classrooms 111 and 112, briefly exited into the hallway and then re-entered through the door, the source said.

    Ramos then shot at the officers through the closed door, grazing two of them with shrapnel. The officers retreated to wait for backup and heavy tactical equipment rather than force their way into the classrooms.

    Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief and the on-scene incident commander, has said he spent more than an hour in the hallway of the school. He told the Texas Tribune that he called for tactical gear, a sniper and keys to get inside. He said he held officers back from the door to the classrooms for 40 minutes to avoid gunfire.

    While Arredondo waited for a tactical team to arrive, children and teachers inside the classrooms called 911 at least seven times with desperate pleas for help. One of the two teachers who died, Eva Mireles, called her husband by cellphone after she was wounded and lay dying.

    When a custodian brought a large key ring, Arredondo said he tried dozens of the keys but none worked.

    But Arredondo was not trying those keys in the door to classrooms 111 and 112, where Ramos was holed up, according to the law enforcement source. Rather, he was trying to locate a master key by using the various keys on doors to other classrooms nearby, the source and the Texas Tribune article said.

31. Sorry Erasmus, didn’t realize you already posted the link.

32. So if they werent doing security assessments and drills and tabletop exercises, and the town wasn’t big enough to keep the 6 cops busy with keeping gangs and drugs out of schools, what WERE they doing in the months and years leading up to this? TikTok videos? — Megan

    We’ve read that they did do school lock-down drills. I am bothered that they didn’t have things like classroom keys sorted out in spite of having done drills.

    But the other thing we’ve learned that is relevant to Megan’s question is: they were responding to dozens of alerts caused by human smugglers and their clients and drug cartel people bursting across the border and into Uvalde.

    Was that why such a small town has a SWAT team? And where was the SWAT team on that day? I’ve read a fair amount of this shooting but nothing on that question. (I might have missed it.)

    To answer another of Megan’s questions: I saw an interview with a Uvalde mother who along with some other mothers claimed to be the driving force for the creation of the school police force, as well as having negotiated for its funding. She seemed like she was a professional communicator of some sort, which I’m sure didn’t hurt her chances.

33. I am supportive of the concept of police and police work.
    I appreciate the work they do.
    I have friends and family LEO.
    I even thanked the cop who recently gave me a ticket speeding.
    It can be a rough job.

    I don’t trust cops I don’t know.
    I do trust that told to, they will execute a no-knock if told to on me and mine because of my political views and someone will die, presumably me.

    Given the willingness to break down a door and rush a home, I resent their resistance to knocking down a door to save some kids.
    At some risk to themselves, of course.
    You’d think that’s what we pay them to do.
    You’d be wrong.

34. The final paragraph from Griffin’s Atlantic article:

    Above all, Uvalde is a clear sign that the benefits of police militarization have been profoundly oversold. Any police leader who does not recognize Uvalde as a foundational challenge to police legitimacy is a fool. The rationale for creating thousands of SWAT teams across the United States was that the good guys with guns would stop the bad guys with guns. For that promise, we have accepted a more and more militarized and aggressive police culture, with serious damage to basic constitutional liberties. What we got in return is 19 cops standing outside a classroom while children were slaughtered. We cannot continue to accept this culture.

    I think this guy makes a few good points earlier in the article, but this paragraph would be funny if the subject weren’t so tragic.

    So how did the mass killing actually end? Because three good guys with guns and a ballistic shield stopped the bad guy with a gun. Sheez. This author is retired police and Army?? And the bad guy wasn’t just shot, he was obliterated with a 12 gage at close range. Would the author be happier if the perp was shot with a .38 revolver and the officer killed in the process?

    What does SWAT have to do with Uvalde? SWAT wasn’t there, except possibly at the very end. No, I don’t think we know that Uvalde is a “foundational challenge to police legitimacy.” Not yet anyway.

35. TommyJay:

    The key situation is indeed especially strange and in need of explanation. And whether a SWAT team was ever involved needs clarification as well.

    Some thoughts I’ve had about the keys – the “they” who screwed up on that score may have been the school administrators and/or janitor rather than police, although of course it might have been the police at fault. But we don’t know whether there was some protocol that was supposed to be in place, according to what the police experienced during the drills, and that was screwed up by someone else other than the police when the real thing happened. We have heard literally nothing about the principal or about the janitor except that they existed and that the police ended up getting keys from the janitor. And yet I hear almost no one asking about their roles.

36. They had a halligan to force open the door. Here’s a video on how that’s done:
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KiFq9W_Wf-g
    Maybe they were concerned about the exposure to their officers.
    (Of course check first if door is unlocked)

37. The officer alboredo was with the border patrols tactical unit the counterpart to the swat team but yes his inferences are way off and he teaches criminal justice

38. Eva Marie:

    Obviously, if police didn’t even try to get into the room and the door was unlocked, that’s awful.

    However, I can’t access that article you cut and pasted, due to a paywall. On the other hand, I found an article in the Daily Mail that is based on that article you linked, and in the article I do have access to it never characterizes the source of this information.

    The source is characterized only as “a law enforcement source.” That’s the sort of person and the sort of reports we kept reading over and over in connection with the January 6th “insurrection” and about 95% of the material coming from those sources was wrong. In this case, it’s not even “a law enforcement source connected to the investigation.” I’m really tired of reading incendiary reports like that about any topic, from completely anonymous reports. I have no doubt that sometimes they turn out to be true but they often are false, and yet even the false ones become part of the narrative that people have come to believe.

    That’s what I’m against here. We’ve had too much experience with false reports.

    I repeat, though, that obviously if this one is true it is very very bad in terms of the police’s response to this awful event. I have no need to protect the police. But I do have a need to know who is giving the MSM information, and whether or not to trust that person.

    To discuss just a few points in the Daily Mail article:

    (1) “surveillance footage from inside the school shows that police made no effort….”
    I had previously read that there was indeed surveillance footage from the hall but it is of extremely poor visual quality and was given to the FBI for enhancement because very little could be discerned from it. Was that true? Is there a problem with the footage or not? If so, enhanced footage of that sort is usually very iffy in terms of showing much of anything.

    (2) “Investigators believe the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on May 24 could not have locked the door to the connected classrooms from the inside, according to the source.”
    Everything I’ve previously read is that teachers had to lock the doors internally with keys. One child gave a description of the teacher having trouble finding the key to lock the door internally, and then after she found it and went to lock the door but before she actually locked it, the perp entered and killed her. Again, I don’t know whether that is true, but if so it contradicts this new report from the anonymous source in a number of ways.

    (3) “Embattled Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who led the response on-scene, has previously insisted that the classroom door was locked, and he spent much of the standoff personally searching for a master key to the school.”
    He never said that. I read what he said, and it was not a master key to the school he said they were searching for, it was the keys to the rooms. Nor did he say he personally searched for the key. He said he told people to get it and several key rings were brought to him which he tried in the door and which didn’t work. Again, we don’t know whether this happened that way or not. But Arredondo did not say what this source claims he did, much less “insist” it.

    (4) “However, the progression of events suggests that the automatic door locks on the classroom may have failed, because the gunman Salvador Rolando Ramos was able to gain entry without a key.” Once again, that’s in contradiction to what the child witness said about the doors having to be locked with an inner key. The outer doors to the school locked automatically, not the classroom doors, according to everything I’ve read so far.

    (5) “Regardless, they did have access to prybars that could have opened the door without a key, the source said.”
    That contradicts other sources as well. Who is telling the truth? We don’t know. In addition, standing in front of that door and using a “prybar” would have gotten them killed. It takes time and it makes noise.

    (6) “The shooter entered Robb Elementary at 11.33am on May 24, entering through an exterior door that had been pulled shut by a teacher but that failed to lock automatically as it was supposed to — another hint that something was wrong with the school’s door locks.”
    Not if the classroom locks worked with a different mechanism than the exterior locks, as everything I’ve previously read indicates. In addition, there is no evidence that any other exterior lock was faulty – just that one.

    (7) “It was not until 12.50pm that a team led by Border Patrol agents took the initiative and breached the door to room 111 and killed Ramos.”
    All previous reports I’ve seen said that they had “taken the initiative” earlier to find a key, and that when they finally found one and entered, they entered by means of a key. The teams were variously reported to have not been in coordination with police and also to have been in coordination with police. Which is correct? We don’t know that either. And if they had a breaching tool, why didn’t they use it? Why do all reports say they entered though use of a key they got from the janitor?

    (8) “However, [Arredondo] wasn’t testing the keys on the doors to rooms 111 or 112 themselves, but on doors further down the hallway, searching for a master key that would unlock any door. ”
    I read that article based on Arredondo’s interview (and his lawyer’s statements) and wrote a long post on that. That quote is an incorrect reading of what they had said. Here’s a quote from the article: “Eventually, a janitor provided six keys. Arredondo tried each on a door adjacent to the room where the gunman was, but it didn’t open.” This “source” may not realize that by the time the police were in the hallway, the gunman was only in one of the two classrooms and never returned to the other. The two rooms were adjacent. Therefore Arredondo is saying he was trying the key in the room the gunman had previously been in and had shot kids in, but was adjacent to the other that the gunman was actually in at the moment. This makes sense, because trying the keys would make noise, and it would be good not to draw the gunman’s attention any more than necessary; therefore try the door to the classroom he was no longer in (they knew where he was because he had shot them through the door from one room). If the police could get into the adjacent room they could enter the room the gunman was actually in.

    I could probably go on, but you get the idea.

    This is a terribly written article and the source doesn’t even attempt to show why his (or her?) statements contradict other reports, including child eyewitnesses. Again, it may end up that this report is true and that police didn’t try the door, but it’s a very flawed article and one of the worst things about it (though by no means the only bad thing) is that we haven’t a clue who the source for all this information is.

39. Tommy Jay,
    I’ve read about the drills too. Even so, I can’t help but get the impression that it was all half assed; like someone got the funding for a few cush school district police jobs and everyone was just hanging out, doing the bare physical and intellectual minimum to not be seen as pointless while they collect paychecks and built pensions.
    Granted, that is all my gut feeling… But it is a gut feeling based on the fact that I can’t envision any group with such a distinct and carved out mission being so woefully unprepared to execute it. The excuse that it’s dangerous amd scary doesn’t fly with me. It comes with the territory. And hell, being a cop isn’t the only dangerous gig in town; firefighters run into burning buildings to rescue people even when the build gs are damn near engulfed. Could you imagine 19 firefighters being so unprepared and scared of the risk to themselves that they’d stand around saying “hey, does anyone have anything to open this door? No? I guess we will call someone who does and wait for an hour.”
    Or “Shit, I forgot my command radio and couldn’t call for assistance!”

    Or “I dunno Pete. A plane just hit the building! It’s too dangerous to go inside and they’re all probably dead already anyway”.
    The juxtaposition of 9/11 firefighters and Uvalde brings the Uvalde cop’s behavior into sharp relief and further cements this sense that they expected the job to be a safe and uneventful ride to a state pension.

40. Aggie:

    I already dealt with that Vice article earlier today in the Open Thread.

41. “ They had “taken the initiative” earlier to find a key, and entered with a key. ”
    From the WSJ:
    “Bortac members were eventually able to enter the room after getting a master key from the principal, according to the officials. One Bortac agent took rounds to the shield upon entering, a second was wounded by shrapnel. A third killed the suspect.”
    Local cops could have asked the principal and been in sooner.

42. Eva Marie,
    Not just local cops, but the district cops whose sole existence is to liaison with school officials for a myriad of reasons and yet it took an hour for them to get a hold of someone (yes, who may have had to get a hold of someone else) to get the keys. Speaks to extremely poor preparation.

43. Off the topic of the Uvalde police but a good reminder that police have a very difficult job with an unbelievable amount of variables.

    This is amazingly random.

    https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1538272765022769154

44. Eva Marie:

    Read my response to you at 10:54.

    I’ve written many posts about these issues for over three weeks now. There are conflicting reports, as you no doubt know if you’ve read this blog and if you’ve followed much of the news. For example, did the BorTac agents get the key from the janitor or from the principal? Choose your report to get this answer or to get that answer. Were the BorTac agents ultimately working with the police or were they on their own and opposed by police? Choose your report to get your answer.

    And why have we heard next to nothing about where the janitor and principal were during all of this?

    You make categorical statements like “they had a Halligan” and “local cops could have done it and been in sooner,” based on contradictory reports from anonymous sources. Is that the way you come to decisions?

    The argument I’m making isn’t about what actually happened. If the police were every bit as bad as some have said, then that’s what happened. But we simply don’t know at this point who’s telling the truth and who isn’t, and so we don’t know. What we do know: that children and teachers were killed and wounded by a gunman who was later killed (by BorTac; there is general agreement on that last point) and that there was a lengthy delay while police were in the hallway.

    About many of the still-disputed details: I don’t base my opinions on anonymous sources talking to the MSM, especially when those sources contradict each other. I have no interest in rushing to judgment.

    By the way, I wonder whether the anonymous source for that San Antonio article – the one that says the police didn’t even try the doors – is someone in the FBI or who has talked to someone in the FBI. I base that guess on the fact that I’ve read that the very poor quality surveillance video from the hallway was given to the FBI for enhancement. That source seems to be relaying on information about the video.

45. Assumptions are now fully assed.

    Well passed half-assed.

46. I haven’t been following this story closely. These are the things that stand out for me:
    1. The teacher propping a door open to run to her car. That can’t be accepted procedure. It indicates to me that they were terribly lax about security.
    2. Chief Arredondo had no radio communication by his own choice. That was a bad decision. So I don’t trust his decision making process.
    3. This interview with the mom who ran in to get her own kids. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_q7olC1LteE
    Why the heck weren’t they evacuating the rest of the school? This is what angers folks the most. Why not immediately start evacuating the rest of the kids. The cops had control of the hallways. They knew they had one shooter and that he was in one of 2 rooms. Why not get the rest of the kids out immediately.
    4. The treatment of the parents. So many cops and not one who could have served as an information officer to explain to them what was happening and treat them respectfully?
    5. If the cops were rude but competent, well then all is forgiven. But instead they weren’t competent and yet thought they were deserving of respect

47. My understanding was they were evacuating the rest of the school they just couldnt get to those two rooms

48. Assumptions continue to rule the day for some.

    You would almost assume some making the most self assured and damning assessments were actually there, the fly on the wall.

49. I just want to add – the fact that the mom could run into the school EVEN with such a huge police presence means the school was completely unsecured.

50. Eva Marie:

    You say you haven’t been following this story closely.

    It shows. In fact, you haven’t even been following this blog closely in terms of comments I’ve made and posts I’ve written. Just to take one example, I wrote at length in this recent comment about that mother who supposedly ran in to rescue her own kids. You seem to have missed it, so I’ll recreated it here.

    You are almost certainly referring to Angeli Rose Gomez, who has been telling this story. However, nothing she says has been authenticated by anyone else, as far as I can tell – and I’ve researched it because I’m curious. For example, see this. It was US marshals she argued with, and they say she never was handcuffed, nor are there any photos or videos of that as far as I can see.

    In addition, she says that she drove 40 miles to the school after hearing of the shooting. It had to have taken at least five or ten minutes to hear of the shooting, and how long to drive the 40 miles there? That means she would probably have gotten there after the children were evacuated. Time stamps, etc., from teachers, indicate that the evacuation of the school was complete by a few minutes after noon. Even by the timeframe of her own story, she would have gotten there after the evacuation. Apparently the children were taken to an area where parents could claim them, after the evacuation. I recall this area as being somewhere on the school campus. At that point, that’s probably where her children would have been.

    This woman is the hero of her own story. Although that may indeed be true, I think that the lack of any corroboration, plus the timeline, indicate that she is exaggerating as well perhaps even making up some parts of it, for attention. In addition, she has said they are trying to silence her, and then there’s this:

    After she shared her story with reporters, she got the threatening call, dangling charges that could upend her probation related to charges filed more than a decade ago.

    But Gomez said the judge overseeing her probation told her she did not face new legal problems and that her bravery would be rewarded with a shortened probation.

    It sounds very fishy to me, and the lack of anyone but Gomez herself corroborating her story seems odd as well. She is the hero and everyone else is at fault. What is her probation about, ten years later? That doesn’t sound like a minor infraction.

    I have searched and searched to find independent corroboration of her story. I haven’t been able to find any so far. The MSM just says she told them this and she told them this, and loves her story because she casts herself as the hero and everyone else as the villain, and the MSM takes it at face value because it fits the narrative.

    As for some of the rest of your assertions:

    (1) It is a common problem in schools that people inconvenienced by automatically locking doors will do things to temporarily override the locks. It wasn’t just a problem at Robb Elementary. In fact, though, it doesn’t seem to have been the rock-propping that was a problem there, because the teacher closed the door in time and it was supposed to lock automatically. For some unknown reason it didn’t.

    2. Chief Arredondo and the radio – he explained in the interview article why he made that decision. There were several reasons, but one was that radios often don’t work in those schools. In addition, I read an article saying that other police officers had radios in the school that day and they didn’t work. They did have cell phones, however, and there was communication that way, but for unknown reasons they were never informed about the 911 calls. They should have been.

    3. I have already responded to point number 3; see the beginning of this comment.

    4. The treatment of the parents – in a chaotic and highly emotional situation, parents going into the school themselves would have exposed them to grave danger. It is standard to keep parents out in situations such as that. I don’t see how that can be done with kid gloves.

    5. You still don’t know the extent of the cops’ competence or incompetence. Obviously they will have made some mistakes. And it’s certainly possible they made some terrible mistakes for which they are culpable and should be held responsible. But you have no idea which it is at this point, and you’ve said yourself you haven’t really kept up with the story.

51. I have held back. I trained for this. I’d be embarrassed to have the world know I trained for this and I didn’t put my training into action.

52. Ok. I’m well into my seventh decade. I’m not capable of whipping out a can of wh**p @## like I used to be, But still I’d rather die than stand by and let s*** happen.

53. God it it kills me.

54. “It sounds very fishy to me, and the lack of anyone but Gomez herself corroborating her story seems odd as well.”
    “Chief Arredondo and the radio – he explained in the interview article why he made that decision”
    So the mom’s statement sounds fishy but the Chief’s explanation doesn’t sound fishy even though no one has said it was a good decision and it’s only been criticized.

    “ It is a common problem in schools that people inconvenienced by automatically locking doors will do things to temporarily override the locks.”
    Maybe that’s your experience. It’s definitely not mine nor any parent or teacher that I’ve spoken to.

    As to the competence or incompetence of the police this is also from the link you provided:
    “Police are now saying it took more than an hour from the first 911 call to stop the gunman, when most “active shooter” attacks in the U.S. end within five minutes.”
    And by the way here’s a situation that was competently handled:
    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna33291

55. Here’s a story from Buzfeed about Gomez:
    “Gómez was captured on camera holding her sons’ hands while running out of the school.” There’s a photo. It would be nice to have it time stamped.
    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/stefficao/uvalde-mom-saved-sons-school-shooting-police

56. Eva Marie:

    A timestamp for that photo wouldn’t help. Gomez and her children are in the parking lot. What’s more, she doesn’t appear to be running. So the photo is meaningless in terms of the claim that it shows her “running out of the school.”

    I have read that after children were evacuated they were in a staging area near the school where they were claimed by parents. It is certainly possible she is coming from that area in that photo. But we don’t even know if any of that is true, either.

    There has been very little detail written about the evacuation and the timeline involved in the evacuation – except for a fourth-grade teacher named Nicole Ogburn whose report I already discussed in one of my posts, and who says she was evacuated by police along with other teachers and children a few minutes after noon, based on the timestamp of a text message a teacher who was with her sent.

    If you don’t think that the mom’s (Gomez’s) statements are at least somewhat fishy – no corroboration despite a lot of people being present, no photos of the handcuffs etc, some sort of criminal background for Gomez, and a timeline that doesn’t make sense – then I have to say I believe you are being naive. And that has nothing to do with whether her story ends up being true or not – it may be true, but there is nothing but her own word so far for that, and her story has holes in it.

    As far as Arredondo’s story goes – of course I’m not saying that what he says is true. I make it clear in my post on the subject that it may not be true. So his story is somewhat “fishy” also. My point is that we don’t know who is telling the truth and who is lying. I have merely reported his story and tried to decide whether it makes sense and could be true. I have come to no conclusions on whether it is true.

    About door locks at schools – logic and personal experience with human beings, as well as the article on the subject that I already linked, tell me that people often get sloppy when locks are inconvenient. That type of lock is inconvenient, and people sometimes or even often get careless.

    Regarding the last quote in your 2:59 AM comment: many school shootings end with the shooter committing suicide, which did not happen in Ulvade but that has nothing to do with police. Also, there has not been a previous school shooting in this country involving a living shooter behind a locked security door and in the same room as his victims. That would be a very different situation from that which is usually faced in school shootings and most other “active shooter” situations. Most “active shooters” are either outside or in an unlocked room when police arrive, and are therefore quite accessible to police.

    The shooter in that BBC story was unable to get into a classroom. In addition, when he was in a room with children later on, a gym, he was far less aggressive than Ramos and didn’t even try to shoot the children there (before police had arrived), and that fact was instrumental in preventing children there from being killed or even wounded. Also, the room was apparently unlocked (I don’t even think the door was closed, since it was a gym), and so the police would have had no problem entering.

    Of course, if in fact the Uvalde police didn’t even try to enter the classrooms at Robb and one of the classroom doors was actually unlocked – then yes, they were extremely incompetent and egregiously and tragically so. I have already discussed that possibility at some length in this previous comment of mine, so there’s no need to do so again here.

57. “Also, if you think back, the turning point against the police came early on with the release of videos of irate parents outside Robb Elementary that day, screaming that the police were just standing there. That release occurred on May 26, two days after the event, and highly influenced public opinion through emotion. It is another example of videos strongly influencing opinion before other things are known (in this case, that the entire school was being evacuated at the time and that most of the children had already been evacuated by police).”

    In my opinion, that’s what happened to Derek Chauvin.

58. Ira M. Siegel:

    It’s absolutely what happened to Chauvin.

    Although he also got railroaded in his trial, in my opinion.

    Whether or not the Uvalde police are guilty of some egregious incompetence we don’t yet know. But a video of screaming parents says nothing on that subject.

59. I bailed out of this thread last night, but I see Neo dealt with the link that I couldn’t read at the San Antonio Express News. The link at Instapundit said, “sources say.” What sources? If they are not named, it might be true or it might not be.

60. I think the biggest issue for me is that the state generally has a monopoly on use of deadly force. AND with qualified immunity and officer’s bills of rights much less accountability (And rights that don’t apply to non police, like being able to defer speaking to investigators for days in some states, with no consequences) AND with supreme courts decisions, fewer duties (responsibilities) to protect or act. Then throw in the stand downs during to Covid summer of hate, and the ‘sense’ that the police are simply praetorian guards for the state has taken hold on large swathes of the right.

61. Neo: “Also, if you think back, the turning point against the police came early on with the release of videos of irate parents outside Robb Elementary that day, screaming that the police were just standing there.”

    Yes, I remember that video of a man screaming at the police that “You know they are kids, right? They are little kids, they don’t know how to defend themselves” and thinking, wow, that video is going to get repeated a lot because it is so emotional.

    And, yep, it has been play again and again and again by the MSM as if it is the word of God! The attitude each time it was played was sort of like “look one of the parents gets it and the stupid police don’t”

    While I can certainly understand the man’s frustration; I also understand that it is very emotional – too emotional – to be taken at face value that the police are doing “nothing.” But, too many people let their emotions control their behavior and their thinking.

    Many years ago, when I lived in an apartment building the apartment above mine caught fire. I remember standing outside watching the firemen getting ready to tackle the fire and thinking “why are they moving so slow? don’t they realize that is a real fire!” Well, of course they realize it is a real fire and that was their reason for reacting so cautiously. Being emotionally involved (it was the apartment above mine after all; and I was watching the apartment above mine become pitch black with smoke and their blinds were melting!) I interpreted their reacting cautiously as moving too slowly. They last thing they needed was to “rush” in without being prepared and have the whole thing go up when the door was opened letting in oxygen causing a massive backdraft.

    The same should be held true for the police in cases like a shooting – they don’t have all the facts. They do need to react cautiously. But, too many people react emotionally, and expect the police to rush in like Bruce Willis in an action movie.

62. “Why has the right judged the Uvalde police so quickly?”

    I think that it may partially be that we respect cops, give them big pensions at a young age, etc, when they rush to protect us from danger. We, as a nation, greatly respected what the NYFD and NYPD did on 9/11, rushing into the WTC buildings, hauling hoses, etc up endless flights of stairs, just to die when the buildings collapsed. They were heroic, and we honored them for their heroism.

    After 9/11, in order to fight the War on Terror, many departments became militarized, with the best, most prestigious, jobs going to the tactical groups, all dressed in their tactical gear, practicing tactical stuff, etc. But then they used these tactical units to arrest conservatives who caused inconvenience to liberal politicians (think most recently of how the Feds arrested 70 year old Roger Stone), instead of protecting us from danger. Where were all these SWAT teams when Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, etc were burning? More and more, police, and most esp militarized police units, have appeared to become the protectors only of their left wing politician bosses, and not of the rest of us.

    What is respected with the police is for them to run towards the gunfire. What we expect of SWAT units is that they lead the charge. That is what they train for, the time they spend training for that coming out of the time they can spend patrolling. They have the really cool tactical gear for just that – to lead the charge. The police (JCSD deputies) had an excuse at Columbine HS, for setting up a perimeter before entering the building, because they were first. Very much like going along with the plane jackers on the first three planes on 9/11. Before that, plane jackers were assumed to want something political, and personally wanted to survive. But after the first three planes were intentionally crashed as weapons, we knew better. Well, after Columbine, immediate entry in a school shooting situation became SOP across the country. But here, as in Broward County, FL, the cops, the fancy SWAT teams, built their perimeter, delayed their entry, until they had everything perfectly in place, before entering, and meanwhile kids were being executed.

    There is a saying in cop world essentially that any shift where they go home safely at the end of their shift was a good shift. But in cases like this, we are reminded that many cops are in it for the pensions, and in the final analysis, many of them are decently well paid bureaucrats with guns, many of whom put their personal safety before that of the public they are kinda supposed to protect.

    Coming full circle, maybe the reason that conservatives are quicker to condemn the police in these situations, is that we instinctively don’t trust government bureaucracies. And what appears to have happened here with their very possible sitting on the sidelines, building their perimeters, while kids were being killed, just feeds into our negative perceptions about government bureaucracies and bureaucrats.

63. Since someone made a snarky remark about us commenters acting like we were there, allow me to present this from a CNN interview …

    “Zavala County Sheriff Eusevio Salinas told CNN on Friday when he responded to the deadly shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, he didn’t hear anyone at the scene say they were in charge.

    Salinas said when he and Chief Deputy Ricardo Rios arrived at Robb Elementary School on May 24, .he had a portable radio, which was broadcasting traffic by the Texas Department of Safety. He couldn’t hear radio traffic from the Uvalde Police Department nor the Uvalde schools police department.
    He said he helped evacuate children from some classrooms and then helped clear other rooms..
    When asked by CNN whether there was someone in charge of the scene, Salinas said, “I never heard anybody say they were in charge.”. [Side note: Establishing an incident commander is literally in FEMAs 100 level training class because it is sooooo important. Presumably it is an industry standard for emergency response in other agencies and yet no one was obviously in charge here. This is a failure of preparation.]

    Salinas and Rios arrived around noon, about 30 minutes after the first 911 call reported a man shooting outside the school. They found a chaotic scene on the southeast side of the building though authorities had established a perimeter around the school.
    The sheriff said a person he thinks was an off-duty border patrol agent asked him to help rescue children from four or five classrooms so he, Rios and another law enforcement officer pitched in.
    After they got the students out, Salinas said he moved closer to the building where the shooter had locked himself in a room. The windows of the building were broken, and the shades were hanging out, he added. The sheriff would later learn Joe Vasquez, one of his deputies who was off-duty, was in the building and was part of the improvised team that killed the gunman.”

    These are comments from an experienced on scene sheriff. We can’t dismiss him as someone who wasn’t actually there because he was, we can’t dismiss his account as anonymous, because it isn’t and we can’t dismiss him because he isn’t law enforcement and doesn’t understand police response protocols.

    So NOW can we dispense with Pete’s claim that the radio was too hard to carry when his law enforcement peer (and every cop we’ve ever seen in modern law enforcement history for that mattet) clearly had no problem carrying his into the same building to rescue children? Can we dispense with the claim that radios didn’t work in the affected building if the sheriff was receiving other radio traffic? Can we at least admit that Uvalde had an hour to fix the comm situation and apparently didn’t do so?

    Can we admit that the lack of an apparent incident commander is a failure of training and preparation and that the police chiefs are responsible for exactly this kind of basic emergency preparation and that this falls on both the local and district police chiefs shoulders?

    And can we at least admit that if the Sherriff said tbat HIS deputy was part of the team that took Ramos out, then that means it’s starting to look like no one from Uvalde ever stepped up to be part of the breach team which consisted of what, three Bortac members, right? And now one neighboring deputy. The breach team wasn’t much larger than four or five people IIRC.

64. The perimeter apparently was outside the school which had been evacuated by, among other things, cops going in.

    After that, it was a locked room and there were cops in there doing whatever they did, right or wrong, fast or slow, to get into the locked room.

    The existence of a perimeter held by other cops is irrelevant to what was going on inside the school.

    I am probably oversomethinging this, but the “perimeter” seems to be a hellaciously convenient artifact to justify and aim anger, facts notwithstanding. Which brings up the question of why, when what was actually necessary was being attempted, well or poorly.

    Do we want parents running up and down empty halls? How many of them had kids in the collection area and why weren’t they–the parents–there? The parents of the kids in the locked rooms had every reason to be frantic but that doesn’t mean letting them in while whatever was being done would be a good idea.

    We can sympathize with the parents whose kids were in the locked rooms without thinking letting them in would help things.

65. Another issue: we don’t blame police for doing a requested welfare check, and finding dead children (social workers, estranged parents, yada sure). But having children dying AFTER the police are in “command” of the situation is much less excusable. There is waaay less “benefits of the doubt” to be claimed in then.

66. KRIS Depending on the point when the cops actually had
    command.

67. Megan:

    You still weren’t there. You trust CNN it seems? Anything else, “we knows?”

68. om: were you there?

69. Om,
    Right. I should’ve used today.com like Neo did to disprove Eva Marie. Color me embarrassed.

70. Richard Aubrey
    Surely.

    But Blocking others from entering? That implies control over the scene.

    But Turning off radio so not knowing what was really going on (particularly if the one in charge? Military officers get courts martialed for less)? So, while in charge, didn’t have food info. Bad form. An argument against being in charge, but NOT knowing that.

    But lying to the Governor?

    But Lawyering up to prevent release of information? (I get the process / rights reasons, but the recent justification of ‘not news worthy’ and ‘potentially embarrassing’ is at the same time ludicrously wrong and accurate– taking both reasons as given in good faith)

    Exhausted the benefits of the doubt. And we still don’t really know wtf happened.

71. Megan:

    Some are unable to be embarrassed, so sure of what they “know” and who to blame. Truly awesome, we others are not worthy.

    Eva Marie:

    Of course I was not there. that is why I do not claim to know more than a few things. It seems many like playing the black, grim version of Groundhog Day; the murderer is not the focus it’s the evil cops! We can get them!

72. Om, if your standard is that no one who wasn’t there can have knowledge or an opinion then you have just deprived yourself of the right to criticize anyone’s statements. You can’t logically say you know a few things but that those things don’t include anything I say but do include things you agree with. You weren’t there.

73. Om: who has said that the cops were evil or motivated by evil? (And specifically when have I said it?) Not only weren’t you there, but it seems you weren’t here either.

74. Eva Marie:

    You realize that you have just silenced yourself?

    My point and possibly neo’s is that many are making dubious assumptions and accepting speculations as facts. You have to have the right answer yesterday, impervious to history of what a rush to have the “right” answer often is; wrong,

75. neo on June 19, 2022 at 6:33 am: “ Although he [Chauvin] also got railroaded in his trial, in my opinion.”
    Yes!! In sooooo many ways. It even made me despair to think of it when I made my a comment above.

76. Om that’s YOUR standard not mine.

77. ‘there’s no fighting in the war room’ yes the police department’s actions look sketchy, recall they had been party to 46 previous lockdowns, because of the invasion, reconquista or al hijra take your pick,

    seems sketchy but everyone from the da in san antonio I suspect to the doj will be acting like godzilla toward this small town, vice has been in enough dodgy material, as with buzzfeed, to know that legal defense is quintessential

78. Eva Marie:

    It seems you haven’t been paying attention to “known”character attribues of the Uvalde LEOs either:

    lard assed, unfit, cowardly, interested only in collecting their pensions, spending all that public money on training and then doing nothing (the “we knows” nothing), unwilling to risk their lives for children (if not their own), untruthlfull, showing a callous indifference to the lives of children and teachers who were murdered. No, those aren’t evil cops?

    Carry on Eva, but try to keep up with neo.

79. I KNOW that either pre-identifying an incident commander or figuring out who would be the incident commander in an emergency (usually the first person on scene if it isnt pre-established) and how to delegate this role when someone more qualified arrives is a basic principle that anyone with cursory knowledge of level one of the FEMA NIMS training has (and the police almost as a rule do because it’s meant for responding to ANY emergency, man made or otherwise.)

    Arredondo said he didn’t think he was the incident commander (but I may have read that in a CNN article), which means he didn’t know who was. No one does as far as I can tell so far. I

    Thus, I will not pretend that I don’t have enough information about what the basic response was supposed to look like with regard to shit like comms and incident command vs how it actually played out since what it was supposed to look like it is covered in great detail in free training for anyone who cares enough to look.

    Even if they trained every day, this kind of shit is not something you are supposed to overlook. As far as I can see, only two options can explain that 1). They didn’t train at all (which we know isn’t true.. Probably also from CNN though soooo) or 2) they trained the basics poorly. And someone in that chain of command is responsible that failure.

    Anyway, I’m out. Enjoy the rest of your weekend everyone.

80. I remember standing outside watching the firemen getting ready to tackle the fire and thinking “why are they moving so slow? don’t they realize that is a real fire!” — charles

    My wife and I used to watch the TV show “ER” about an Chicago inner city emergency room. Years later someone made a documentary in an actual Chicago inner city ER. Wow. Everything in the real world was slow and deliberate. Sadly, some of it seemed slow because the docs and nurses seemed exhausted and sleep deprived. Which brings up another point: Just because people sign onto a job with life and death consequences doesn’t mean that everything will run like a Swiss watch, or that near perfection will be achieved.
    _____

    Megan, I agree that whatever school emergency drills were conducted by the Uvalde school police, they probably didn’t take them seriously enough. Also, nobody knows who the incident commander was? That one smells.
    _____

    In hindsight we know just how dangerous it was for firefighters and police inside the WTC towers on 9/11. But on the day of, the building structures had withstood the enormous impact forces of the crashes themselves and it was being reported just how strong the buildings were.

    I’ve been in exactly two harrowing situations in my life. In one, I assessed the risk to myself at about 5% in about one second, and then I saved a person. In the second case of a rogue wave (sort of) in Hawaii, I saved myself and my wife gave me shit about it for a couple years. For her it was a real threat that didn’t really materialize. (Lots of extra details that I’ll skip.)

    That latter situation was very similar to a movie called “Force Majeure.” I hated the ending, but the rest of the film is quite fascinating. Do rewind to double check the scenes if you watch it. It’s a Swedish black comedy, though the comedic dimension escaped me entirely until the end.

    I think there are two things that messed with cop’s heads in Uvalde. One is that the bullets were coming through the walls. I presume the walls are hollow concrete blocks and one might think that it would provide protection, but didn’t. The other thing is that even though the punk shooter was not highly trained in anything, he was willing to counterattack and he was willing to die while doing it.

    One incident that dramatically change thinking in law enforcement was the bank robber shootout in Miami 1986. One robber was an Army Ranger vet and was armed with a Mini-14 which is like a ranch version of an AR-15. He was trained to charge the enemy position in order to create a psychological shock effect, which apparently worked in that shootout.

    No Ramos didn’t charge, but cops were probably hoping he’d commit suicide.

    Courage or lack of it is a very complex thing.

81. KRIS
    Holding the perimeter is one thing, but meaningless. The problem was inside the school, inside the locked room.
    When did the cops arrive at the door? Even then, if they couldn’t get in, “command” is kind of wispy.
    As a former military officer, I can tell you military officers get corrected for cleaning the unit’s rifles when they should be finding more privates to clean the rifles.
    Arredondo should have been calling for more resources. “more resources” meaning something which was available. “should have had” doesn’t mean “did have”, and it doesn’t mean that working without what one “should have had” will go as if one had what “should have” been available.
    You get on the horn and call for….ballistic shields. Somebody has to figure out where they are, contact that location and get them delivered stat. Meantime, you don’t have them. Ditto breaching charges which keyboard explosives experts will tell you will defeat every door including the Big Kahuna at Ft. Knox. In addition, the breaching charges–this time, miraculously–can be counted on not to shoot pieces of door and hinge inward as if shot from guns–this one time because there are kids in there.
    I have no idea what Arredondo thought he was doing. But the situation is not “active shooter” once the guy locks himself in. Once he’s fixed in position, what happens outside is irrelevant and any cop out there should be able to manage it.
    Which is what happened.

    The active shooter issue was over in minutes and then became a fixed-shooter situation whose requirements were entirely different.

    Unlike that moron at the field house, Ramos was not an easy target. How this does not occur to the keyboard brave and strong seems kind of odd.

    In addition, what security protocols were supposed to apply were to be applied by people who, as has been mentioned, had been subject to more than three dozen lockdowns resulting in…nothing. At some expense in time and convenience. In effect, they’d been trained to complacency. Nevertheless, only one classroom door remained unlocked and that, according to reports, was only seconds away from being secured. Not a bad result for non-combat types, with the horrifying bad luck that the door in question was handy to the shooter.

    Anybody picture the principal and assistant running down the halls at every third lockdown shaking doorknobs and writing up those whose doors were not locked? Not me.

    I keep saying, “displacement”.

82. Megan:

    Have a good rest of your weekend and when you know those essential details please pass them along. Until then, the rest of us may have to wait and find out some of those and other important details that may help us understand all that went wrong and who is culpable. Waiting is a hard thing. Making assumptions is easy.

83. Bruce Hayden, et al:

    It’s no mystery why the right has some generalized antipathy towards police. The left does, too, of course, although for different reasons. But general feelings shouldn’t affect anyone’s evaluation of what is occurring in each particular instance. Surely people on the right – who profess to be interested in truth and liberty and all of that, as well as the individual, in questions of guilt and innocence – already know that. So generalized antipathy towards and criticism of police shouldn’t affect a person’s evaluation of a specific situation.

    When a source is unnamed and isn’t even described as being part of an investigation, but is just “a law enforcement officer” or “someone who knows a relative of a person being discussed,” anything that source says should be taken with an enormous grain of salt. And yet I see people with pre-conceived notions believing sources they ordinarily would discount, because of confirmation bias.

    Are we not supposed to fight against that?

    In addition, people often can’t even get the facts straight that have been officially agreed on, such as or example when the police entered the building. I see error after error after error, in newspaper articles and from bloggers and other pundits and from commenters. They don’t know much, but one thing they DO know is that the police were cowards, etc. etc. etc.

84. KRIS:

    There is extremely divergent information on whether any bona fide officer was blocked from entering the school building. And the reports that the chief stopped people from getting into the rooms are also contradicted by other reports that say he did not. At this point it is literally impossible to know, and that’s why I am withholding judgment for now.

    However, one thing that isn’t in dispute is that police entered the building and got to the classrooms quickly – within two to three minutes of the shooter entering the classrooms. And yet – by audio evidence of the number of shots – the shooter had almost certainly completed all his mayhem already.

    I have read a host of different things about the radios. The one thing that seems to be the case is that the chief didn’t take his, but was in cellphone communication. However, I have read that other officers had radios, and they didn’t work in the school (which was one of the reasons he gave for not taking his in to begin with). Again, we simply don’t know, and I hope the facts will come clearer over time.

    I already responded to the Vice article about the police “lawyering up.” If you haven’t seen what I wrote, take a look here as well as here. That Vice article also mentions that the police are being sued. Clearly, that necessitates “lawyering up” and being careful about what is released. And yet that element is ignored, and the writer (and most readers, apparently) see this completely normal action in the face of a lawsuit as something duplicitous and shifty.

85. Meghan:

    What kind of juvenile snark is that from you at 11:26 AM?

    I corrected Eva Marie’s assumptions many many times, not just that once, using multiple links from a wide variety of sources and sites. One of them happened to have been a single link to today.com, and the reason I cited it was that it featured a relevant and specific quotation from the U.S. Marshals Service about what they did and didn’t do that day. As an actual quote from a named source, that is a more reliable story than 99.99% of what we read about Uvalde these days. If you are actually interested in further authenticating the quote and its source, go here and see.

    So your snark is quite misplaced and doesn’t reflect well on you at all. Please take more care in the future.

86. neo, oh, I agree but you were wondering why the right seems to have come out so strong against the police. I believe it is because whatever good will and charity the right has had towards police has been / is being squandered on a lost of different initiatives. We on the right and the middle class on up, for a long time, lived in a high trust society, particularly with respect to law enforcement, the military and other “conservative ” institutions. The poor and a large swathe of minorities did not.

    Well, after the FBI & intel community from 2016 on, the police in 2020, the way that Flynn was persecuted, J6 prosecutions while connected lawyers who fire bombed a police car plead out, and so on, the pro-abortion bombings with no FBI push back (unlike school board critical parent parents)have pushed a lot us into the low trust camp. That we are reacting to the police the way that the BLM does may, should, be a wake up that the Blue doesn’t have much backing anymore.

87. Neo, I am much more sympathetic to the police having read your reporting (and I mean that in a approving manner: you are cross checking primary sources and keeping things in a timeline in a way that most of the larger media isn’t, e.g, the click bait stories on the daily mail (UK))

    But, I still strongly suspect some people really f’d up, and an even stronger suspicion that, like Parkland, those people won’t be punished more than early retirement or sinner shuffle to a new parish, err, law enforcement office.

88. KRIS:

    Actually no, I never wondered why “the right seems to have come out so strong against the police.” The title of this post is what I actually wondered: “Why has the right judged the Uvalde police so quickly?” So it’s not the general case, it’s the specific, and the speed.

    I understand the general antipathy. I don’t understand applying it in a kneejerk and rapid fashion to the specific case.

    Actually, I understand it in the sense that many people – including those on the right – like to rush to judgment and operate emotionally rather than rationally.

89. “The right” jumped on this because the first explanation is what sticks with people. The right has always hung back and waited for the evidence to come in, even to the point of waiting for a trial to play out years after the fact. Meanwhile, the lefty myth grows and takes on truthiness so even if the facts don’t ultimately support it years after the fact there’s always going to be a lot of people who still believe the myth that was broadcast at the outset. It’s not correct but it’s the way of the world now. The cops usually get to hide behind qualified immunity and are almost never personally liable, even for egregious blunders and outright intentional excessive force and other malpractice, unlike almost every other professional. And they engage in other shenanigans in civil cases, like “lost” bodycamera footage, the dreaded “reaching for a weapon” defense, etc. etc. There have been a couple of travesties of justice lately where cops are concerned but they and their unions went along with artificial suppression of civil liability and the militarization of policing and now they’re reaping the whirlwind in criminal court. I feel awful for any individual who is wrongly accused but I’m not seeing much of anything to date in the Uvalde case that would indicate that there’s some sort of massive con job on the part of the right. From the perspective of many on the right, this has been coming for a long time. Law enforcement is just another institution that’s been hollowed out and used for political purposes. https://hotair.com/headlines/2022/06/17/police-militarization-gave-us-uvalde-n476922

90. Neo. OK. I misinterpreted the overall question. I did overreact at the beginning (and with recency bias detailed in previous comments propelling me towards outrage at the law enforcement performance). But, particularly because of your posts, I have taken a step back re: the performance. My initial conclusions were ill informed.

    As for why (the majority of the) right hasn’t stood down from the initial response, I don’t have a GOOD reason, but I fear the actual reason: we are people like others and don’t easily self correct. It is damn hard to do that. Consider how hard it is to get large portions of the population to condemn Trump or Biden. It is in our nature to stubbornly maintain “I’m not wrong, you are!”

91. Martel
    Not sure about militarization. Since/if the cops were at the classroom door within minutes of Ramos’ doing something actually illegal that anybody noticed–wrecking the truck–it wouldn’t appear that busting the MRAP out of cosmoline slowed anybody down.
    Why militarization would keep the cops from having quasi-military stuff hanging on their LBE and rattling around their squad cars is also a mystery.
    Remember that the door was not breached–current story anyway–due to lack of breaching charges, battering rams, the sainted Halligan tool, and maybe a Claymore.
    Militarized people think waiting for the key is for wimps.
    Militarized cops would have been firing blindly into the classroom through the windows.

    Got to be something but quasi-soldiering ain’t it.

92. KRIS:

    I agree. Those on the right are indeed human. I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise 🙂 .

    It is disconcerting, though, to see the same people who condemn the left for rushing to judgment on police about certain things then turn around and rush to judgment on the police themselves. And of course Uvalde is a situation that arouses such strong feelings of horror and revulsion that it’s hard not to jump on the bandwagon and assume that the worst that is being said about the police in Uvalde was true, without waiting for the sort of information that would help us know whether that really was the case or not.

93. It’s no mystery why the right has some generalized antipathy towards police. The left does, too, of course, although for different reasons.

    I think the “right” has been pro-police for many years. We are the people who support law and order. Some of us have police in the family although that goes both ways as we hear of scandals. This story is an example.

    What is happening lately is a result of antipathy on the left to the very concept of police. As a result the police are retiring or looking for jobs in communities that are friendlier and safer. The ubiquity of video cameras is another factor. The Rodney King cops saved his life by arriving in time to take him down without serious injury before the female CHP officer could shoot him as she planned. As a result of the video of that encounter, all four cops went to prison and Melanie Singer, the CHP cop who was about to shoot King, testified against them in both trials, then retired on stress disability. Since then, video has been used again and again, as it was used on Chauvin, to deceive the public. The “us vs them” theme among police has increased by orders of magnitude. I can’t blame them.

94. AMartel:

    You write:

    “The cops usually get to hide behind qualified immunity and are almost never personally liable, even for egregious blunders and outright intentional excessive force and other malpractice, unlike almost every other professional.” I believe you’re referring to civil liability? Please try to imagine the situation that would result if they didn’t have qualified immunity. They would have to fend off thousands of lawsuits a week. There is a reason they have qualified immunity, and it’s not because they are considered beyond reproach. Here is the reason for the doctrine, if you’re interested.

    You also write:

    I feel awful for any individual who is wrongly accused but I’m not seeing much of anything to date in the Uvalde case that would indicate that there’s some sort of massive con job on the part of the right. From the perspective of many on the right, this has been coming for a long time. Law enforcement is just another institution that’s been hollowed out and used for political purposes.

    The “con job” is not “on the part of the right,” except insofar as person after person after person on the right (and left, by the way) gets the facts wrong, always to the detriment of police. And the press – the very same press the right usually distrusts, especially when it quotes anonymous sources who don’t even seem to be part of the investigation – is somehow suddenly believed by that same right who were criticizing the very same press for the same techniques when they didn’t like what the articles were saying? We don’t know if the press is guilty of a “con job” and whether the right is the patsy this time, but we need to be a lot more aware, wary, and consistent in our approach.

    Do you really think that the cops who were in the Robb Elementary hallway that day were acting on cold-blooded political considerations? I certainly don’t. Whatever they failed to do that they might have and should have done (and we still don’t know the details of that, although I think that ultimately we will get more reliable and well-sourced information and evidence on it), I don’t think politics entered into it. I think confusion and chaos and tension had more to do with any failings than anything else. But I still don’t know, and I’m willing to wait to find out. One thing I will not do is rely on shaky sources as quoted in the MSM. Those sources may turn out to be correct in the end, but I certainly don’t know that yet and I have no reason to trust them.

95. Mike K:

    The right has been pro-police in certain circumstances – mostly those same circumstances in which the left is anti-police. But the right has had a large strain that is anti-police for a long time as well. You only have to see how often police “militarization” is criticized, or “qualified immunity” is criticized, or the actions of the police when they act as thugs for the left (dawn raids to arrest Trump’s aides and friends) are criticized, as well as quite a few other things of that nature. I don’t think it is unreasonable to criticize the police, either. I think it’s unreasonable to criticize them in a particular situation in the absence of reliable evidence.

96. KRIS:

    Yes, police may indeed have effed up in Uvalde. At the risk of being very very redundant, I’ll add that we just don’t know yet. But I’ve often wondered about whether, in situations so chaotic and stressful, it’s fair to expect people to function at the absolute highest level at all times. To me it’s amazing that police don’t eff up far far more than they do.

    Is “effing up” making a single mistake? Two mistakes? Three? Do the mistakes have to make a difference in that, but for the mistakes, the children would have been rescued? If, to take a hypothetical, all the children and teachers were already dead or would have inevitably died no matter what of wounds that were inflicted even before police arrived, does it even matter what police did wrong because it wouldn’t have made any difference in the outcome? Or, if people could have been saved that were not saved because of the delay, how do we determine that? There are tons of questions like that which make the decision about whether the police “effed up” more difficult than one might think.

97. Something that hasn’t been discussed as far as I can tell, is the potential rivalry between the different law enforcement agencies.
    Was the School Police Department, headed by Arredondo a regularly trained force, requiring graduation from an academy or were they more of SRO’s handling truancy, bullying, drugs and the like. Don’t get me wrong, with gangs prevalent in many schools (including the high school in my town) that would not be an easy job.
    But were they equipped and trained to handle a school shooter?
    Should they have been a part of the Uvalde Police Department, assigned to the schools?
    Did that create friction between the city police and county deputies?

    I mention that because one of the stories on this thread indicated a county deputy from another county didn’t know who was in charge.

    Reading these various accounts reminds me of the parlor game telephone, where people whisper a story around the room, often to much amusement as the end story bears little resemblance to the original.

    Given so much to choose from, a couple of details seem to stand out. I think it unlikely that a school room door would automatically lock on closing. Yes, exterior doors should, but not interior classroom doors. That would lead to too much mischief by students– closing the door and locking out the teacher or other students, for example.
    Another is the claim that border agents got the key to the classroom door from the principal. That would seem how the system should work.

    If this school police force was not a regularly equipped agency, that might answer why it took so long to get ballistic shields. Most police routinely wear vests, but not level III that would stop a .223 round.
    Even if they didn’t, you would think the Uvalde city police would have that type of equipment or at minimum the county sheriff. That’s another odd part of this story as we know it now.

    At this point, it is speculation.

98. neo. Indeed, far more difficult. If I may, I’d add that in this case, there is an additional issue you mentioned which may be true–time line of shots–which is that the victims were already dead or dying and no amount of door-breaching genius (presuming there is such a thing in the absence of keyboards) would have saved a single life.
    Would the cops catch a break. Nope. I repeat; displacement.

99. Whether this would be observed or not, it might make sense: Once the kids are in the room, the door is closed and locked. It can be opened from the inside by using whatever appliance opens the door, since that will also unlock it.
    But to prevent mischief, it must be locked on the inside with the teacher’s key, not by just punching a button or turning dead bolt.
    Only Authority can open it from the outside–couple of admins and maybe custodian.

    Now, that’s just speculation on my part taking into account various issues and it also seems to fit some reports.

100. Most of those “thugs” arresting Trump aides are FBI. I have a daughter who is an FBI agent for 20 years. She is quite left wing so we do not talk about politics. Most of the stuff she is involved with is “white collar crime” as in health care corruption. We have no arguments about that.

     The FBI, at least the upper echelons, have become an arm of the DNC.

101. Additional speculation: If Ramos’ atrocity were not preventable given the ordinary run of things, and given some extraordinary precautions and protocols still not preventable, then it’s not preventable. And if it’s not preventable…that’s scary as hell.
     Therefore it must be preventable.
     But it was not prevented.
     Since it is–has to be–preventable and was not, somebody screwed up. It’s easier to accept that than it is to accept somethings cannot be prevented.
     Therefore the cops screwed up.

102. Neo, I expect better! I understand your point. It’s a fair point. Keep pounding that table but it is not reasonable to conclude from my general assessment of how law enforcement is viewed by the right that I think they were all out in the hall making political calculations. (Though maybe some of them were; one of them had been elected to the city council-the same city council that this week shut citizens out of its meeting about this incident.) Rather, my point clearly was that policing has been infested by the left, and this has affected the actual quality of policing itself as well as individual perspectives on policing, leading to strong suspicions, increasingly well supported, on the right that this incident was mishandled. The left bought the police departments, and the unions, during the 1990s, using our tax dollars. This changed things. Individual police officers may not be of the left (though they often are) but their representation most definitely is. The FBI is fully politicized; they are Joe Biden’s personal eff-up cover-up detail and apply a completely different set of standards when dealing with Dems versus Republicans. This template is applied in other law enforcement bureaucrazies. This is not your father and mother’s policeman. Regular people are easier to police so that’s where the energy is deployed. Picking up unregistered weapons and animals, unsmogged vehicles, litterbugs, and school board and other protestors of left wing outrages, is easier than policing actual criminals, people who rob, rape, and murder, who are set loose on those rare occasions when they’re even netted in the first place. I don’t know how your local cops deploy their resources but I would bet that a lot of it, a depressingly large amount of it, goes to lefty programs, and not to actual policing.

     Also, I know quite a bit about qualified immunity, thank you very much! I disagree that it’s removal would lead to a flood of litigation, but that’s for another thread.

103. this is why vice makes me itchy,

     https://www.theinformation.com/articles/vice-media-makes-cost-cutting-push-as-it-eyes-sale-options

104. Yeah those individual LEOs in Uvalde, and their brass were so far left that they didn’t care that their own little comrades were being murdered (not, but I’m not a “we know.”) Further those leftist LEOs and their brass just viewed those little comrades as so many broken eggs for the omelette (not).

     Sorry about the gross exaggeration. So many little bloody shirts being waved for political purposes.

     Get the point?

105. Perhaps my comments will be considered “rabid” but I when I was in the Navy I was on a Ship’s Reaction Force. In other words, we trained to deal with exactly the kind of situation that confronted the Uvalde Consolidated Integrated School District PD and the Uvalde PD and the other agencies that responded. I still remember the acronym on my patrol leader’s card; SMEAC. It stands for Situation (gather intelligence on what you’re dealing with), Mission (what are you going to do about it), Execution (how are you going to do it), Administration and logistics (establish a clear chain of command, a command post, and determine what weapons and other equipment you’ll need to accomplish the mission), and establish a communications plan.

     As I was watching the live coverage it was apparent to me that something had gone wrong. Over the next two days information filtered out that confirmed my suspicions. The police response was an absolute disaster and there is one man who created this fiasco. UCISD police chief Pete Arredando.

     Let’s examine the ways. Here’s a link to a very self-serving, softball interview he gave to the Texas Tribune (left leaning) on June 9th.

     https://www.kiiitv.com/article/news/special-reports/uvalde-school-shooting/uvalde-school-police-chief-pete-arredondo-defends-actions-during-shooting/287-622d5ade-328e-485c-b1fa-dbfd5e4edb29

     I found this comment interesting; it is an admission against Arredondo’s own interests.

     Arredondo’s explanations don’t fully address all the questions that have been raised. The Tribune spoke to seven law enforcement experts about Arredondo’s description of the police response. All but one said that serious lapses in judgment occurred.

     Most strikingly, they said, by running into the school with no key and no radios and failing to take charge of the situation, the chief appears to have contributed to a chaotic approach in which officers deployed inappropriate tactics, adopted a defensive posture, failed to coordinate their actions, and wasted precious time as students and teachers remained trapped in two classrooms with a gunman who continued to fire his rifle.

     …One of Arredondo’s most consequential decisions was immediate. Within seconds of arriving at the northeast entrance of Robb Elementary around 11:35 a.m., he left his police and campus radios outside the school.

     To Arredondo, the choice was logical. An armed killer was loose on the campus of the elementary school. Every second mattered. He wanted both hands free to hold his gun, ready to aim and fire quickly and accurately if he encountered the gunman.

     …Thinking he was the first officer to arrive and wanting to waste no time, Arredondo believed that carrying the radios would slow him down. One had a whiplike antenna that would hit him as he ran. The other had a clip that Arredondo knew would cause it to fall off his tactical belt during a long run.

     Arredondo said he knew from experience that the radios did not work in some school buildings.

     …Arredondo believed the situation had changed from that of an active shooter, to a gunman who had barricaded himself in a classroom with potential other victims.

     …Arredondo said he was not aware of the 911 calls because he did not have his radio and no one in the hallway relayed that information to him. Arredondo and the other officers in the hallway took great pains to remain quiet. Arredondo said they had no radio communications — and even if they’d had radios, his lawyer said, they would have turned them off in the hallway to avoid giving away their location.

     …Arredondo assumed that some other officer or official had taken control of the larger response. He took on the role of a front-line responder.

     He said he never considered himself the scene’s incident commander and did not give any instruction that police should not attempt to breach the building. DPS officials have described Arredondo as the incident commander and said Arredondo made the call to stand down and treat the incident as a “barricaded suspect,” which halted the attempt to enter the room and take down the shooter. “I didn’t issue any orders,” Arredondo said. “I called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door.”…

     https://nypost.com/2022/06/21/texas-dps-slams-uvalde-school-police-chief-pete-arrendondo/

     The Texas Department of Public Safety director Col. Steve McCraw testified before a Texas Senate Committed and really cut Arredondo off at his knees yesterday. First, McCraw confirmed the reports that the room was unlocked. Arredondo never checked. I doubt McCraw would testify to this fact under oath if he didn’t have evidence. Second, Arredondo claims he didn’t issue any orders. But reading from a transcript McCraw quoted Arredondo directly.

     “I just need a key; tell them to f–ing wait. No one comes in,” Arredondo said, according to the video transcript McCraw was reading from.

     Arredondo most certainly did issue orders if the transcript is accurate. At least two orders; (1) he told them to wait and (2) he told them no one was to come in. And his requests for assistance and equipment would have been interpreted as orders given the situation.

     So, let’s examine Arredondo’s failures. First, he’s the damn chief of police for the UCISD. He didn’t consider himself the incident commander but a “front line responder?” We don’t pay police chiefs to be front line responders. I recall a scene some of my USMC friends found on the outskirts of Baghdad. A full Iraqi Colonel dead in the fire director’s seat of an anti-aircraft gun. Colonels are supposed to plan the fight and direct the fight. Not man an anti-aircraft gun where they can’t possibly take command of the troops who are supposed to be fighting the fight. Same with police chiefs; we pay them to take command. Although he clearly was incompetent to command. That simply shows that the senior officer present is not always the best qualified to take command. But the police chief had better place a qualified officer in command of the incident. Still, it’s dereliction of duty for a police chief to be completely incompetent to assume the role of incident commander.

     None of his excuses hold water. He thought it “logical” to leave his radios in his car outside? No one trained to respond to this kind of situation would think that was logical. That meant he couldn’t possibly assess the situation. Then he makes the excuse that his radios often didn’t work inside of school buildings. What was his job again? Oh, that’s right; he was the chief of the Uvalde school district police. If there’s a place where he needs his radios to work it’s inside the building of his school district buildings. Where else does he think he’ll be responding to a mass shooter? Six Flags over Texas? A competent administrator let alone a competent commander would have corrected this and any other known deficiencies. If there’s one thing that falls square into the middle of a police chief’s job description it’s to make sure that his officers have equipment that will work in the environment they’re most likely to use it in. Then he says he needed his hands free so he could shoot. Police officers don’t carry their radios in their hands anymore. In fact, I’ve seen pictures of his own officers on security cameras inside the elementary school. They don’t carry their radios in their hands; they wear them on their belts with the mikes clipped to their vests. You know, body armor. look at the picture at the link. 4 officers wearing body armor are outside the classroom and they have ARs and ballistic shields. He had more than enough armed men equipped to defend themselves from the threat the shooter posed and solve the situation and yet he hesitated. Even when he got everything he asked for he still held back and wanted to wait for SWAT. This goes completely against how police have trained to deal with active shooters since Columbine. It used to be wait for two other officers then go in and neutralize the threat. Then it became wait for one other officer. Now doctrine is that the first officer on the scene goes after the active shooter on his/her own. But waiting for SWAT is completely out of the question.

     So, back to the acronymn SMEAC. He had no clue what he was dealing with and made no effort to find out. He thought he was no longer dealing with an active shooter scenario but a barricaded subject and he even thought the murderer was taking hostages. None of that was true. Then in his own words he assumed another officer had taken over as incident commander. Nobody had any reason to doubt Arredondo had taken command. He was one of the first officers on the scene and he was issuing commands. He was telling the other officers to wait outside and not to come in.

     So he completely nuked the koala when it came to the “S” in SMEAC. Having utterly failed to assess the situation and making no effort to find out if his many assumptions were valid there was no way for him to determine his Mission and the how to Execute. Moreover by giving orders to other police officers outside the building he then further confused the situation.

     Then he failed to establish a clear chain of command, either by explicitly taking command himself or installing a competent officer in the role in the Navy we called OTC; Officer in Tactical Command. So he failed at Administration as well as determining his Situation, Administration, and developing a plan of Execution. Logistics. He had everything he needed on hand inside the elementary school. He kept asking for more. Yet he kept asking for more personnel and equipment, and when he got what he wanted then he’d ask for more.

     It’s a sign of a failed commander who keeps blaming not having enough troops and equipment for his/her failures. But that’s what Arredondo keeps doing.

     Finally, the final letter in the acronym. C for communications. It goes without saying that this police chief literally planned to fail in this regard. He left his radios in the car outside and in any case he claims they wouldn’t work inside the school building. There is no excuse for the chief of police of an Integrated School District to have radios that don’t work on school district property.

     I’ve read other experienced commenters (the Texas Tribune that filed the report on their interview with Arredondo interviewed seven experts; all but one noted “said that serious lapses in judgment occurred” based on Arredondo’s own description of his police response in this interview) discuss what happened in Uvalde. Every one I’ve read has observed that the underlying problem with the Uvalde PD’s response was that they were poorly lead. They looked to him for leadership and he choked. The other agencies that responded say that there was no doubt in their minds (as there was none in the minds of his own officers) that he had assumed command of the incident. It doesn’t matter that that Arredondo himself didn’t consider himself the incident commander. None of the people around him were mind readers. In that kind of life and death situation it was up to Arredondo to clearly communicate to everyone inside and outside the building that he had assumed the role of incident commander or clearly communicate that he had not and another officer, official, or agent had to assume the role.

     By issuing orders, by demanding equipment and more officers, then making the decision to wait some more he had effectively taken on the role of incident commander whether he wants to take responsibility for that or not.

     “There was always some reason why we didn’t go in, and of course, as a result, it was 1 hour, 14 minutes and 8 seconds. In an active shooter environment, that’s intolerable,” said the DPS director.

     I may have referenced articles from June, but most of this information had come out shortly after the shooting spree. That the door was unlocked and nobody tested it is new. But still it’s appalling that this guy had to try key after key on a janitor’s or administrator’s key ring. The police chief of a school district police department should have had a master key of his own. Just like he should have made sure he and his small force had radios that worked, and were able to work with those of surrounding agencies such as the Uvalde PD. But that would have required competence and he has demonstrated none.

106. I don’t believe my comments can be called “rabid” as I’m actually sticking up for rank-and-file police officers. Police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and to a certain extent captains, lieutenants and even sergeants are really politicians first. Law enforcement officers a distant second. Police chiefs and assistant chiefs have to be selected by city councils or in some cases simply the city manager. The primary consideration is going to be that the candidate’s politics agree with whoever is going to select the police officials. The captains, lieutenants, and perhaps sergeants are going to be selected ultimately by the chiefs (including assistant chiefs) and their concerns are going to be primarily who is going to help them keep their jobs with the city, which is political. Secondary considerations are going to be who you know, with a great deal of nepotism involved, and now your “intersectionality” score.

     I’ve been listening to these complaints all my life. My uncle was a battalion chief in a major west coast fire department. Firemen and police officers have many of the same concerns regarding employment contracts, etc., so the unions tend to work together. I practically grew up around my uncle’s kitchen table with firemen and police officers griping about their leadership and how they never had their backs and how they certainly weren’t selected for their “lofty” ranks based on competence.

     When I was in the Navy as an intelligence officer I worked with law enforcement. There are certain types of support the armed forces can provide law enforcement without violating posse comitatus. I’m including the USCG in this as they are NOT under DoD and are primarily a federal law enforcement agency except when the President orders them to become part of the Navy in times of national emergency. As a late eighties graduate of SSET (Shipboard Security Engagement Tactics, a prerequisite to become a member of a ship’s reaction force) I’m familiar with the training these officers would have had to undertake to deal with an active shooter. And I’m also familiar with the evolution of doctrine and the training to support doctrine as it evolved particularly after Columbine.

     The priorities for law enforcement in such situations are (1) hostages (2) safety of other innocent civilian lives (3) officer safety and at the bottom of the list (4) the life and safety of the perpetrator.

     Consequently these are two headlines I would never want to have associated with my name.

     https://ca.news.yahoo.com/uvalde-school-police-chief-defends-155336871.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAI2WQ2laB-2L7IJUSoff2dQYgyGAsmzOm5fekf_WVxNpSVkAVQSpEFoBKHUrgoriYgo8sukmkPhwrTtZ4ItMED80PLJSJ6uAKtO3AhaGdGh5nZGfi6Y1F_Xf3NO3ZOAPJvx3aRnkfcWqv3YYW-aIhNhSJQaxVnnIWrRrMubjqIoc

     Uvalde school police chief defends shooting response, says he didn’t know he was in charge

     Active shooter policy state that the first officer on the scene is in charge and has considerable authority and leeway to make decisions even if that’s a regular patrol officer, even if off duty. And the police chief (according to Arredando’s bio before becoming the UCISD police chief he was at least the interim Uvalde city PD chief and was also the Webb County Sheriff’s Office assistant commander) responding to an active shooter in his own jurisdiction who also thought he was the first officer on the scene didn’t know he was in charge? That’s gross incompetence. Any rank-and-file officer first on the scene would have (if he had gone through active shooter training) would have known to take charge. I don’t see how we can overlook this police chief’s total abdication of responsibility.

     There are many reasons why officers from other agencies responding to the ongoing atrocity at that elementary school had “no doubt in their minds” that Arredondo was the incident commander. This is one of them. A patrol officer would have known he was in charge, and a police chief at the scene didn’t?

     https://nz.finance.yahoo.com/news/uvalde-police-delayed-entering-classroom-222029797.html

     Uvalde Police Delayed Entering Classroom Out Of Fear For Officers’ Safety

     Where does officer safety rank in order of priority? After innocent civilian lives, and only above concern for the life of the perpetrator. This is why the DPS director is ripping Arredando a new one in his testimony to the Texas Senate select committee investigation this shooting. Putting officer safety above the innocent civilian lives is indefensible. Ironically, even a patrol officer who had arrived before Arredando knew this. He’s caught on another officer’s body cam mike saying, “If there are children in there, we have to go in.” Clearly that officer had undergone the active shooter response training and remembered it. Either Arredando hadn’t bothered with the training (again, he’s primarily a politician, not a law enforcement officer, so competence in law enforcement operations is not how he gets and keeps his job) or it’s been so long ago he doesn’t remember it.

     Not only did Arredando have no business being the de facto incident commander, he had no business being in that building at all. He should have let the patrol officer who knew what he was doing take charge and established a command post outside so he could coordinate with other agencies.

     I still can’t get over the fact that he deliberately left his radios outside. From the article:

     In the meantime, children and teachers inside the room were in dire need of medical care, according to pleading, heart-rending phone calls from the students to 911. It’s unclear if Arredondo was aware of the calls..

     In his interview with the Texas Tribune Arredando makes it clear that he was not aware as he didn’t have his radios (whose fault is that again?). He also states that in his own experience his department’s radios didn’t work in some UCISD buildings (again, who has the “man, train, and equip” duty on a school district police force if not the chief of that force?).

     He makes these claims as if he thinks these are valid excuses. They’re not. They’re indictments.

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