Looking at Uvalde from another perspective
At first the Uvalde school shooting riveted everyone’s attention because of its horror and tragedy. The murder of innocent and beloved children and their teachers is a nightmare that engenders deep feelings of rage and grief. At first, the stories focused on the victims and the perpetrator, and also some descriptions by survivors.
But after a while people realized that the perpetrator will always remain opaque, as psychopaths so often do. What drove an 18-year-old to end his life through an act of obscene cruelty? We’ll never know. The grandmother he shot in the face and left for dead has surprisingly survived, minus her jaw. His family will live with the mystery and the horror forever, but they have faded into obscurity once more. The children he killed will always be mourned by their families and friends, and the survivors will bear the physical and emotional scars.
But the world has moved on, as the world does. Now we’re confronting what might be done to improve school security, and the hearing in Texas this past Tuesday that featured Texas Department of Public Safety head Steve McCraw had lengthy discussions on that issue. But the focus for most people listening to the hearing was when he finally gave an updated timeline and facts.
In particular, people wanted to know about the police response. Ever since just a few days after the shooting, when it began to emerge that the police got to the school quickly but acted with agonizing slowness and delay, a great deal of rage has been directed in their direction and in particular towards the person who was ostensibly in charge but seemed to not have a clue what should be done, school police chief Arredondo.
I set out to watch McCraw’s entire testimony, which lasted about four and a half hours. I took notes the entire time and listened very carefully, sometimes playing certain sections several times. About a third of the way into it, I was struck with the thought that I was watching something that was teaching me much more than facts about the shooting. That “something” concerned the ways in which people take in information, communicate that information, understand or don’t understand each other, and act on their perceptions in terms of behavior and also in terms of their judgments of the behavior of others.
It’s something we do every day and every time we interact with another person. We’ve done it all our lives. Sometimes, when people make errors in perception or judgment or behavior, it doesn’t matter much. Sometimes it causes small misunderstandings and mistakes; sometimes it causes large ones. Sometimes it even causes fatal ones.
People whose job it is to investigate accidents are well aware of that. Sometimes they discover that an instrument was read wrong. Sometimes a word was misheard. Sometimes a person is tired and loses alertness (I once fell asleep for a split second while driving on three hours of sleep, and almost veered into oncoming traffic when something – I don’t know what – jerked me awake).
Fortunately, though, most of the time our errors have few or no important consequences – although some misunderstandings and miscommunications can end a friendship, or a marriage, or estrange a relative. But that’s part of being human.
Here’s a story. When I was about five years old, my older brother and I used to attend Sunday School classes from 9 AM to noon. My mother would pick us up then and take us home, about a three- or four-mile drive. But one Sunday she didn’t come.
I couldn’t figure out why. I watched all the other kids leave, and I think even a teacher or two asked me if I was all right and I said I was fine (I hated asking for help). But at a certain point I was left alone, standing there.
Fortunately it was a beautiful day, sunny and just a little warm. Although I was only five, I knew the way home – after all, we drove it Sunday after Sunday.
And so I started out for my house on foot. I had a choice of one of two ways to go. The shorter way was through the park and the longer way would take me around it (in those days each route was fairly safe). I chose the longer way because I would be passing the apartment building where my aunt, uncle, and cousin lived, and I decided to stop there and see if they were home, because I figured if they were then they could drive me to my house. I was starting to get a bit tired.
It was a good idea in theory. But they weren’t in their apartment; I rang and rang the bell but no answer. At that point it would have made my trip even longer to have backtracked and gone through the park, so I continued onward. It was a long walk, and as it got hotter I took off my outer sweater and carried it; for some reason I remember that in particular. The last stretch was uphill and I was dragging a bit more. But then I got to my block, and then my house.
The front door was open, and I stepped in. I saw my mother in the living room, sitting on a couch and chatting on the phone. She looked at me, open-mouthed with surprise, and I said something nasty to her and then turned on my heel and went upstairs to my room. I was really, really angry, because the only explanation in my head the entire time had been that she had simply forgotten me.
But then she told me her story. At about ten o’clock, my brother had called her from the school phone and said something like “We’re being let out early and I’m going to Jimmy’s house.” Jimmy was his friend. My mother thought that the “we” was my brother and me, but he actually meant that the other person in the “we” was Jimmy. My brother never for a moment thought my mother would misunderstand and think that he and I were the ones going over to Jimmy’s house. And my mother never thought that he didn’t mean me, so she never thought to ask him what he meant.
They both thought everything they said was clear. But when my brother phoned her to be picked up later on at Jimmy’s house, which happened at about 12:30, and she arrived there, she was stunned to learn I wasn’t at Jimmy’s, too. Stunned and very very upset.
Meanwhile, I was oblivious to all that, and plodding home, with my short cotton socks sinking down at the heels and forcing me to tug them up every block or so.
My mother took my brother in the car and they went to look for me. I wasn’t at the school anymore when they got there, of course; no one was. Again, my mother – and my brother – made an assumption at that point. Their assumption was that I would of course take the route we always took, the short one through the pretty park with the water feature and the birds. It never occurred to them that I wouldn’t do that, because they simply didn’t think that I’d stop at my uncle’s instead. I guess they thought of me as a creature of habit, unable to come up with a more creative solution to my problem; after all, I was only five. But when they drove the park route (several times, I think) I was nowhere to be found.
And so they went back to our house. My mother was extremely upset. My father wasn’t home. Did she call the police at that point? I can’t remember. But when I entered the house she was certainly calling someone (no cell phones back then, of course). She was flabbergasted and delighted to see me trudge in, my sweater dragging too. And I was absolutely enraged at her, till she told me the story of what had really happened. Even then, I couldn’t understand for a long time how my brother and mother had misunderstood each other so badly, and it bugged me that it ended up affecting me. It also seemed strange to me that all this drama had occurred completely outside my awareness. For me, the drama was at the beginning; the rest had just been tedious.
That’s a story with a completely happy ending. No one was hurt. My mother wasn’t guilty of neglect. I was forgiven for being angry. My brother was – my brother. But it planted seeds of knowledge within me about how easily communications can go astray, and it certainly wasn’t the only time that happened in my life.
On Tuesday, when I watched McCraw’s presentation, and then listened to the question-and-answer period as well, I was struck over and over with the ways in which people misunderstand each other despite making enormous efforts at being clear. It was a demonstration of one of my favorite quotes, from Karl Popper:
Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.
And combine that with Donald Rumsfeld’s:
…[A]s we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
It’s usually those last ones that get you.
But police responding to a school shooter call don’t have the luxury of misunderstanding, or of having a lot of unknown unknowns. We demand perfection or near-perfection of them – or at least competence in often-chaotic situations – for a reason, which is that the stakes are extremely high. They are required to understand others clearly and to be understood clearly by others as well, and it is necessary for them not to assume that they know things they don’t know and to ask the right questions of dispatch, and all this must happen very rapidly in tense situations.
We also require courage of police – courage of a degree we don’t all have. I certainly don’t think I have the requisite courage; but then, I’m not a police officer. “It’s what they signed on for,” we say. So it probably is the case that even though we have almost no tolerance in police for error and/or stupidity or misunderstandings that can prove dangerous or fatal, we probably have even less patience for demonstrations of cowardice.
All of those are issues relevant to the perceptions and behavior of the police in Uvalde that day, and to our own perceptions of the meaning of the information we read and hear about that behavior. This was on full display in McCraw’s testimony as well as in the questions of the Texas senators. There were a number of communication breakdowns, as well as unknown-unknowns, even in the interactions between McCraw and the senators there, and I’m virtually certain that a lot of viewers will have trouble agreeing on what was said and in particular what it means.
So here I am again, writing a post with general reflections rather than going into the nitty-gritty of McCraw’s testimony. But for me this is a very big topic with many parts, so I felt the need to write this first. I definitely plan to go into much detail on specifics in subsequent posts – probably exhaustive detail.
I find no basis for disagreement with any of that. We can all relate to the human condition of misunderstanding.
I would add the observation that “its not what you dont know that will bite you on the ass, its what you think is so, that just aint so… that will get you every time.”
The innocent mileau we lived in back then struck me anew. Today, no way will a 5 yr old girl walking alone in a major city not be reported to the police. I’m also struck by the maturity of your thought process at that age. Are you sure you were only five?
The problem is the things we think we know, that just aren’t so.
Edit: Geoffrey beat me to the punch.
Geoffrey Britain:
Around four or five but I think five. My aunt and cousin died when I was six, and that helps me date it as prior to that.
Yes, if that happened now at best CPS would open a case file on your parents and at worst you and your siblings would have been taken into custody.
And don’t forget the massive social media shame that may have been let loose on your mother.
Or your parents would file a massive lawsuit against the Sunday school staff and church.
We have come so far.
What a great column.
I have yet to jump on the police, though have said a squad of Marines there and armed by chance would probably dove right into the building.
What a great story on the walk home from Sunday school!
I have mostly (completely, I believe) stayed out of the debate in the many posts neo has written on Uvalde. I respect her dogged determination to get to the facts and I certainly agree with her approach throughout; let’s wait until we have actual facts before making accusations.
The event is a tragedy. It seems inappropriate to use such a simple term to explain such a devastating event, but that is what it is. Investigations should occur. Any useful information should be analyzed and new, better protocols be created and shared with school districts and law enforcement.
I imagine many small towns have a chief of police or sheriff or highest ranking law enforcement officer who is not capable of managing an effective response to something like this. If that was the case here, and it does seem to be the case, it is not a surprise. Also, the force that person would be leading will often hold some individuals incapable of thinking and reacting effectively in such an unusual situation as this. A police force draws from the local pool of applicants, or does a national search of applicants willing to live in that community.
Decisions were made and not made by the people on the scene. Some parents (and at least one officer, the husband of one of the dying teachers) thought the response was wrong and fought to get to the classroom, only to be stopped and detained. One can imagine a situation where parents running into the building could have disrupted an effective police response, even led to more deaths. I believe I would have been one of those parents, and I imagine most people believe the same of themselves.* An awful, awful tragedy.
Those who now know they decided incorrectly, acted ineffectively, failed to save lives that may have been saved… That is a very difficult burden to bear. I pray for all of Uvalde. I cannot fathom the struggle so many there are enduring.
*Most of us have probably been through fire/earthquake drills at work where we are told to shelter in place, exit in a certain manner, etc. Safety officers will direct the response. If everyone acts on their own account Safety officers cannot get an accurate count of office staff and lives could be lost searching for others. I’m a good soldier and listened to all those rules when going through those drills.
Then 9/11 happened and the best thing anyone in those buildings could do was leave their office immediately and get out of the building. The safety protocols were wrong. Waiting for more information could get one killed. People who acted like individuals survived.
Safety protocols/Emergency response protocols (“secure the perimeter,” “keep civilians out of the action…”) are built on statistics. “In n% of office disasters these are the most effective methods.” “In n% of active shooter situations these are the most effective methods.” Sometimes the thing that is happening is not the higher percentage situation the protocols are built around. The Uvalde officers near that door almost certainly had a good idea of what was happening and knew the commands they were receiving from the officer in charge were not the right approach. But they are law enforcement officers and they are also trained to obey commanding orders.
Often the person behaving differently due to an individual perception of circumstances that differs from the real time approach is wrong, and ends up injured, dead, or creating more work for rescuers. But sometimes that person is right. Uvalde is one of the times we needed one or more of the officers who were active observers of that room and the sounds coming from it to disregard protocol and go against orders.
Regarding walking home from events centered on children.
Everything I’ve been involved with for at least two decades (not sure when it started) dictates adults in charge do not leave until all children are picked up by a known family member or designee.
I actually did walk home from kindergarten, as did most all my classmates (and to and from Sunday school). I think it was 4 or 5 city blocks. Teachers just released us when the bell rang.
But now, adults* stay and take care of kids left behind due to some unexpected circumstance like an older brother incorrectly telling his mother that “we” were going to a friend’s house. 😉
*I will add, at functions that I’ve been a leader or caretaker on that also had a Priest as a leader the Priests DO NOT let adults leave until all children are picked up. Priests insist on at least one adult remaining with them when they are responsible for waiting for caretakers to pick up children.
Rufus T.:
This was long ago, in a galaxy far far away.
Neo says, Sometimes [miscommunication] causes small misunderstandings and mistakes; sometimes it causes large ones. Sometimes it even causes fatal ones.
I’m reminded of the fact that the single worst aviation disaster to date (583 dead) occurred when two jumbo jets, one Dutch and one American, collided on a runway in Tenerife in 1977. There were several miscommunications that contributed to the disaster: 1) even though English was then the standard international language of aviation, the Spanish ATCs spoke it with a thick enough accent that the crew of the American plane misunderstood which taxiway they were to take to get off the main runway; 2) the first officer on the Dutch plane used nonstandard terminology when communicating with the ATCs about takeoff; 3) there was a three-second shrill noise called a heterodyne caused by radio interference when the American crew was communicating with the tower. The heterodyne caused the Dutch crew to miss important information, namely that the American plane was still taxiing down the main runway.
One consequence of the Tenerife disaster was the introduction of required standard phrases in civil aviation along with more stringent requirements for English proficiency in pilots and ATCs for whom it is not their first language.
It is a good thing that very few instances of miscommunication lead to a disaster of this magnitude.
neo @5:14pm,
Indeed. The past is a foreign country.
Good story on miscommunication neo.
I thought you might go somewhere else at the beginning of the post. Like, how did a burger flipper kid with a poor background obtain a truck, guns, and body armor?
I don’t expect the same courage in police officers as I would someone in the military. What bugged me about their action that day was stopping the parents that did have courage. For a long time, they had overwhelming numbers, protection, and firepower and used it to hold back parents wanting to save their children. That’s a mindset I don’t expect police to have. Once the shooter is neutralized then hold the perimeter and clear the scene. Don’t do it all backwards.
As for communication, if the Chief didn’t take his radio as Jocko Willink’s noted from some account of events; then that’s a huge factor in the chaos. Why would a leader not take his most important asset?
Thanks Neo. Looking forward to your next Post. I feel that here is the only place I can get good info.
Thanks for a terrific post Neo. What you have said captures why many take a systems-based approach when dealing with Safety Critical issues, and why Emergency Response Plans are created in the first place – to put equipment and procedures in place for dispatch when required, to define roles and responsibilities, to reduce the number of variables that can come into play when people respond to highly-emotionally-charged events. But more importantly, these plans have to be drilled over and over again to identify how people are going to react, to teach the participants how to react and respond better as teams, to reduce communication errors, and to reduce creative thinking that can often move an event into unmanageable territory – and to eliminate the probability of confusion.Training is fundamental, but drills make the training work.
One of the Mars lander spacecraft from many years back was designed by JPL (I think) and used retro rockets built and calibrated by Lockheed or Lockheed Martin. The rockets came with tables of thrust data, with no units identified. (Gasp!)
JPL assumed it must be newtons because everybody uses MKSI units. Lockheed assumed that people must realize that we measure things with commercial sensors and they read out in pounds. Result: a $2B(guessing) splat on the surface on Mars.
_____
One of my favorite old movies is the Coen bros. first feature length film, “Blood Simple.” It was quite gruesome in its day, but it has some very fascinating and even subtle features. Its got a half loaded revolver that literally becomes a wheel of fortune or demise. A female lead that is either a heroine or femme fatale depending on point of view.
But most importantly it has a persistent level of miscommunication between the major characters. The wrong assumptions involved in those miscommunications are revealing of the character flaws. That last point is certainly not always true in real life, but in this case it makes for a good movie plot.
Leland:
Most of that has already been explained, some of it in McCraw’s testimony.
There is no mystery whatsoever about how the perp got the money and the weaponry. He worked for a long time, full time I believe, at Wendy’s, and had no other expenses. He saved the money, several thousand dollars, and he used that money to buy everything, some online and some in person, with debit card to the bank account.
If they hadn’t stopped parents from going in it would have been worse chaos and parents would also have been in danger if they had tried to go into those 2 rooms in particular – we would have had tons more dead people. The entire school was being evacuated, successfully and quickly, by officers, through breaking windows, except for those 2 rooms where the gunman was. So there was no need for parents to enter to evacuate other rooms; it was already happening and was done fairly well. Stopping other parents from going in is something any police department would do and should do. That wasn’t the problem nor was it the solution – the problem and solution lay elsewhere.
The chief’s lack of a radio had NO effect on the outcome, it turns out. There were other officers there with radios, and he also was communicating by cellphone. But more importantly: police radios didn’t work in the school. No police radios of the school police, or the Uvalde police, or the federal agents – none worked except BorTac radios, and those couldn’t be patched together within the school because THAT didn’t work. Arredondo cited knowing that the radios don’t work in most schools as one of many reasons he didn’t take his in initially. At any rate, it would not have mattered one bit had he brought it in.
I totally agree. But have to emphasize that this failure to clear up the basic misunderstanding of who was the incident commander is one of the reasons (one of many reasons) why Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District chief of police Pete Arredondo can be fairly blamed for creating the chaos that lead to 21 students and teachers needlessly shot and killed.
I mentioned the acronym SMEAC that we used in the Navy when I was on a Ship’s Reaction Force (SRF) after successfully completing Shipboard Security Engagement Tactics (SSET). S stands for situation, A stands for administration and logistics, C stands for communications. The first administrative task is establish a clear chain of command. Almost everybody with any training to respond to this typed of incident (mass shooting, hostage situation, terrorists, etc.) immediately noticed severe lapses in Chief Arredondo’s judgement. The first was failure to take command. Arredondo made a series of lethal assumptions and boneheaded decisions.
Frist, he failed to assess the situation. He assumed that the situation had changed from active shooter to barricaded suspect possibly with suspects on the basis of no intelligence whatsoever. Frankly, to me it sounds like wishful thinking. He assumed that someone had taken charge of the overall response as incident commander, again on no rational basis whatsoever.
Meanwhile all the law enforcement officers from various local, state, and federal agencies had “no doubt in their minds” that Arredondo had taken charge as incident commander and they had valid reasons for thinking he had.
1) He was one of the first officers to respond.
2) He was the chief of police of the school district. The school shooting was within his jurisdiction.
3) Despite whining to the Texas Tribune that he issued no orders and in his own mind he was in the role of a first responder (a gross dereliction of duty as that’s not the role of a police chief) and had issued no orders, he was in fact issuing orders. From the transcript that McCraw read during his testimony:
“I just need a key; tell them to f–ing wait. No one comes in.”
When you’re telling other responding officers what resources you need to eliminate the threat, and telling those other officers what to do, you have taken command. Even in his own words Arredondo admits to issueing ordres. He requested an “extraction tool” so he could break in, whatever he meant by extraction tool. Did he mean a hand-held Halligan-type forcible entry bar, power tools like a hand-held power cutter [large, heavy duty gasoline circular saw] or the jaws of life? Vague request would have added to the confusion, and then they would have had to figure out what tools this guy knew how to use (no doubt none, since those “extraction tools” are used by firefighters, not law enforcement).
Then of course he made the conscious decision to leave his radios (police and campus) outside. He thought that was “logical” as he wanted both hands free plus in his experience they didn’t work anyway inside some school buildings.
Arredondo thought he was making some sort of valid point. No, he was indicting himself. He had a known deficiency and took no action to correct it when he first identified it in a non-emergency situation, in the normal course of his duties as chief of police, when he had plenty of time to do so. Ensuring that his SCHOOL DISTRICT POLICE FORCE had radios that worked inside the SCHOOL BUILDINGS in his SCHOOL DISTRICT was exactly the responsibility of the SCHOOL DISTRICT POLICE CHIEF.
The whole point of having a comms plan, which is a necessary element when dealing with any sort of emergency, is that it works. This is so basic I can’t believe I have to address this point. And perhaps to everyone reading this it’s glaringly obvious. But this Arredondo fellow thinks the fact that he failed to properly equip his force and failed to have a back-up comms plan excuses his inaction.
So after creating confusion by issuing the types of orders an incident commander would issue, and making the requests for additional the resources an incident commander would issue, Arredondo is at a loss as to how the other responding officers had “no doubt in their minds” that the chief of the UCISD police force hadn’t taken on the responsibility they would have expected any other chief of police would have done within their jurisdiction.
And he deliberately chose, indeed planned ahead, to not to have any communications equipment that would have enabled him to clear up any confusion he created.
I learned early in my Navy career that it was my duty to issue clear, unambiguous orders/instructions. I’d verify my troops knew exactly what I expected of them. Actually that was my Chief’s job (Chief Petty Officer) but I didn’t always have a Cheif. I’d even have them repeat back my instructions. Because, as you observe NEO, it’s easy to miscommunicate. If I issued ambiguous instructions then any failure on the part of my troops was my responsibility. But if I issued clear instructions, verified my instructions were heard and understood, then any failure to follow those instructions became a disciplinary issue.
The classic example of this during my time in San Diego took place on Camp Pendleton. A young Marine private was something of a problem child. For enlisted troops that junior they had to be back in the barracks by curfew. For arguments sake let’s say curfew was midnight. After missing curfew a few times the problem Marine was restricted to base for a few weekends and he had to content himself with using the base rec facilities and the Enlisted Club. Finally he was off restriction and got a pass to go off base for liberty. His platoon leader, a First or Second Lieutenant gave him his pass and said, “Private, if you miss curfew again don’t bother coming back at all.”
Problem child didn’t come back. He was reported up the chain as U/A (Unauthorized Absence, Navy-speak for AWOL). The company commander opened an administrative investigation. After a few days the local PD apprehended him and turned him back over to the Corps. He was brought before the company commander who demanded to know why he had gone U/A. “Sir, my platoon leader ordered me not to come back.”
The platoon leader never thought anyone would take his off-hand, sarcastic statement as a serious order. The private did, and after the liement’s chain of command did a little more digging so did the lieutenant’s command. The private was off the hook, and the lieutenant was the one facing the music.
Steve57:
It was one of the reasons; that’s been known almost from the start. But there were so many other reasons it would make your head spin. I plan to say quite a bit about those reasons in future posts. It was a very complex snafu compared to the one you describe, with many parts to it and many players, as well as bad luck.
One of the many relevant things we don’t know is whether Arredondo had tried to deal with the radio problem and not gotten results because of some other agency. For example, apparently this is a problem in very many schools, not just his district. Something about how schools are constructed and how the radio system works. I doubt he had the power to change a pervasive and wide-ranging problem like that. But as I said, you and I have no idea whether he or anyone else previously tried to fix it and failed. And as I said, it was not just local police radios that didn’t work, it was all radios except BorTac, and even BorTac’s radios couldn’t be patched together to communicate properly in the building even with other BorTac agents. I believe McCraw said that that radio problem of not working at all in the building would include the radios of Texas state police and US marshals. Before you blame Arredondo for that problem, you need to know what was tried and what the hierarchy was.
exactly when did they know the radios would not work, at any of the 46 lockdowns,
in their training regimen,
miguel cervantes:
See my post above yours. It’s relevant to your question.
But the answer is: we do not know. But read the comment for a fuller discussion.
Have you ever read “Talking to Strangers” by Malcolm Gladwell? You’d probably be very interested.
The McCaw said the BP radios worked because their station has a more powerful transmitter.
Chases Eagles:
Yes, and also even those radios didn’t work to patch together the BorTac people in the building with other BorTac people in the building. It’ a big big problem, apparently quite pervasive. Every state in the US and every district needs to look into whether they have the problem, too, and what to do about it.
Another problem, however, is that police radios get very chaotic in crisis situations like this one, with messages coming in from everywhere. They can create even more confusion and less situational awareness rather than more. Also, in each crisis situation there might be a host of officers from a host of different groups. That’s what happened at Robb. I can’t even think of a way that could have been coordinated and I wonder if it wasn’t even foreseen, and how it can be remedied for the future.
Generals are always fighting the last war, and so are police apparently. I think it’s part of the human condition. They need people in there doing planning who have really really good imaginations.
shadow:
No, but it sounds interesting just from the title.
WRT Neo’s childhood adventure: Some people get really irritated when you ask for clarification. Eventually, you learn not to. Not saying this was the case here, but it can be in many relationships.
Again, given the situation at the door, seems to me Arredondo could have done two things; order more equipment and order an assault.
Didn’t seem as if he was short of the first. The timing of the order to assault, whoever gave it, was likely a matter in part of what equipment showed up, from shields to breaching equipment to keys.
Letting a bunch of frantic parents join the group in front of the door could not have had a positive effect and likely a negative one.
I think, once shorn of anger and displacement and previous assertions, this is going to come down to the time the door could have been usefully breached. From what we’ve heard so far, that’s a pretty long period in which various folks can make assertions.
Neo,
I understand what you’re saying but perhaps I wasn’t clear. Demonstrating your point that it’s easy to miscommunicate. So I’ll take the responsibility and opportunity to correct the miscommunication. When I mentioned exploring alternate comms plans I didn’t mean better radios, but rather alternatives to radios. Radios don’t always work inside the hull of ship. That’s why we equipped our SRFs with sound-powered phones. Every passageway was lined with the circuit with jacks placed every few feet. These work even in total power failure because the phone converts the vibrations cause by the speaker’s voice into an electrical signal and then the earpiece converts the electrical signal back into sound on the receiver’s end. There is no external power source required. And there are commercial systems available which would be ideal for this application.
http://soundpoweredtelephone.com/how-sound-powered-works.html
Sound powered telephones are also used for temporary and permanent communications systems in many industrial and commercial applications:
• airports
• fire and police rescue crews
• public utilities
• schools
• vaults
• subways
• refrigeration plants
• civil defense
• bridge installations
• ski slopes
• oil fields
• parks and forest
• railroads
• salvage yards
• sporting arenas
• shipyards
• diving projects, and
• geophysical operations where power is not available.
Commercial systems are readily available. Don’t let the link fool you; this is not just for diving but for a wide range of applications.
https://www.amronintl.com/commercial-diving-equipment/electronics/sound-powered-phones.html
We know that cell phones worked in those school buildings; the children in that slaughterhouse were able to call 911 and beg the dispatcher to send the police. Encrypted cell phones are widely available (on the off chance these officers faced a scenario where the criminals were equipped with cell phone scanners and interceptors). For less than $3k the Uvalde CISD could have equipped their entire force with encrypted cell phones off of Amazon marketplace.
I honestly don’t know why anyone would rely on radios alone.
So who was the incident commander if it wasnt arredondo, i have a lot of regard for law enforcement, but they have drained my reservoir in this case,
Than you neo for the research. I understand what you say about parents as I acknowledged that some previously, but if I was arrested and my daughter died while the police waited an hour to respond to an active shooter; I’d want to destroy the career of those officers. In short, my empathy is more with the parents at that point. I think of Glenn Reynold’s frequent comment that the police are there to protect criminals from the people. He means it slightly differently, but in this case the mob was there and ready.
On the communication, radios not working goes a long way to explaining confusion and inability to plan. While I’ve made hay about the perimeter officers, they are outside, on perimeter, and like the parents, assuming the one’s inside are taking action. I won’t call them cowards because maybe they wanted to go in and got perimeter duty. We may be left to wonder if better communication may have resulted in faster action.
Again thank you for keeping me informed and your moderation on this story.
Different times.
My late grandfather, born in 1918 , was hunting rabbits with a dog, alone, around 7 years of age and selling the meat. Not sure how he killed them . At 8 years old he was hunting possums, at night, alone with his dog. Ever read the book , “ Where the Red Ferns Grow”? In That book the kid was hunting raccoons. Apparently he would climb the tree to get them out. Then he would sell the furs.
Not sure when he bought his first gun, a 22 caliber , single shot bolt action, but I inherited it. Still shoots. My dad shot it as a kid, and so did I.
Steve57, you nailed what I’ve been trying to say for the last two weeks. Emergency management is very prescribed and it builds off lessons learned from previous emergencies to mitigate future incidents. I’ve said it before, but incident command is SOOO important that FEMA details that there MUST be a policy in place to determine not only who the commander is but when and how to hand it off if if someone more senior arrives or the current commander needs a break.
In Neos example, had her walk home been equivalent in terms of the training and preparation required, her mother would’ve had formal trainings to sit through and tests to pass regarding how to manage picking kids up from school.
After that, she would have had to drill it in mock scenarios where her son went to a friend’s house and they would drill it multiple times a year in different ways to flush out as many weaknesses as possible. Had that been the case, neo would’ve been much more entitled to her anger when she saw that her mom still failed to follow the very neatly prescribed GUIDELINES even after having been trained in them for years. Yes, FEMA can’t cover every scenario, but ICS is foundational.
To use a different example, a surgeon (presumably) has a protocol for making sure he doesn’t leave instruments in the patient. If a patient comes in with a scalpel left in him, it is, in itself, evidence of malpractice because the surgeon with all his training regarding standard “operating” procedure (nyuk, nyuk), is expected to have the basics down to a science. It doesn’t matter that he was rushed or tired or whatever, once the patient is stabilized, you have time to doublecheck that you are leaving the room with the tools you brought into it. Similarly, active shooter drills are for doublechecking that any unknown or unexpected issues specific to your school (like old buildings and crap radios) are brought to the fore in a stable environment in order to be dealt with, not sidelined.
Again, and I can’t stress this enough, incident command structure is damn near, if not outright, the bottom-most level of training for emergency personnel (Google FEMA ICS training, take the free course and then, if you can, come back here and tell me that you still think what happened with incident command is remotely excusable.) Any police department more than a year old should have that freshmen level shit figured out. They clearly did not. The scalpel was left in the patient and previous kids died for nothing. That is why I am angry and largely unforgiving.
Leland:
First of all, most of the parents there had kids in other classrooms that were already being evacuated.
Another problem was how to know if everyone in the mob is a parent? Anyone could have been in that crowd for any reason. And if they all rush in – can you imagine if there were bad actors in that crowd who were allowed into the school to grab kids? And there might indeed have been. They don’t have “parent of Robb Elementary student” ID cards. Pandemonium and chaos – I don’t think there’s any police department in the US that would have let those parents in. It’s not about sympathy or empathy with the parents. We all probably have plenty of that. It’s about consequences of letting a mob into that school. The incident was already on the news when in progress and anyone could have been in that crowd. Anyone.
In addition, for a while the perp was shooting every now and then, sporadically, into the hallway. Parents could have been hit. That’s why the other classrooms were evacuated through the windows and not through the halls, even though officers were doing the evacuation. It was safer to go through windows, but it had to be organized, and it was carried out fairly well from the reports I’ve read.
Those inflammatory videos of parents screaming “DO SOMETHING” to cops who were there to guard the perimeter drum up all sorts of feelings in the viewer. But feelings are not logic, and they don’t take into account the actual situation and all its possible consequences. If any of those parents had been killed, people would be screaming even worse at the police.
There’s one other very sad element. We still don’t know how many, if any, of the children (or teachers, for that matter) who didn’t survive had survivable wounds if they’d been rescued earlier. That question was asked of McCraw and he said they had a medical team evaluating that but it hadn’t issued a report yet. I have read articles in the MSM with doctors from that emergency room who said the wounds of the vast majority (perhaps all, perhaps not) were absolutely horrendous and the description was very very graphic and the wounds did not sound survivable, at least for many.
None of that means the police were right to wait as long as they did. I have long said they were very disorganized and the situation chaotic, and it might have cost the lives of some of the victims. We just don’t know yet. And of course the grieving parents have every right to be outraged. That does not mean that letting that crowd inside would have been a good move on the part of the police.
Megan:
You write: “…come back here and tell me that you still think what happened with incident command is remotely excusable.”
Whom are you addressing? No one here has said it’s excusable in the sense you mean. Do you know the difference between explanations or descriptions and excuses? Excuses are different things.
From almost the start I’ve written over and over that the response was chaotic and confused, and that there were very serious chain of command problems. I also don’t think there’s a single commenter here who hasn’t acknowledged that.
So which strawman are you addressing?
Missed the edit window, but incident command and comms guidelines were bought and paid for with the blood of every single person who died due to any clusterfucked emergency response, not just those from Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland. If waiting for evidence is the least you think we should do before condemning him, then reading these guidelines is the least everyone else should do before giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Megan:
You missed a lot more than the edit window. You apparently missed my reply.
Good observation about communication process. In nursing the acronym “TORB” means … telephone order, read back. The nurse calls the doctor, receives new orders, and reads them back to the doctor. The nurse making the phone call puts the order in writing, or in the computer. Calls between midnight and 6 am requires a second nurse listening in on the call. Oh, and those are “doctor’s orders”. Not suggestions, hints, or ideas, but orders. My CPR classes have included the process for deciding who is in charge, and there is no arguing while doing basic life rescue. Have the discussion in the post event debriefing and assessment, not during the emergency.
Calling the doctor, there is SBAR… Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation. The information is given, and expected, in a particular format, which makes receiving the information, easier. Communication process is very important.
Occasionally an aide would need assistance pulling a patient up in the bed. As the nurse, I would hold one hand where the patient could see it, and fold my fingers, explaining “We’ll go on three, two, one, and go.” If my hand is off the draw sheet the aide and patient would know this is the talk through. Not doing that I’ve had aides pull the patient while I was explaining.
Medical error accounts for the third leading cause of death. Once another nurse took blood sugars for me. The blood sugar was 106, but she had written 166, and then wrote over, writing 106. I thought it was 166, and prepared insulin. In the room I said ” I was told blood sugar of 166.” The family assured me that was wrong, blood sugar was 106, and no insulin was required. I double checked with the other nurse, it should have been 106. Nurses are taught, but she erred. Written errors need to be struck through, not overwritten. Process is important. Good thing I asked.
How many couples have the man driving and he says “Turn left up here.”
And she says “Right.”
And he turns right. Argument ensues.
Or she sends him to the store for a gallon of milk. She says “Oh, if eggs are on sale, buy a dozen.”
So he comes home with a dozen gallons of milk. Seems eggs were on sale.
I had the unfortunate experience to be forced to attend an 8 hour emergency response tram training session back in 2001. Wi/th a proctored exam. Eight hours of acronmys, layers of management, command structures, lines of communication, responsibilities, chains of command …… Did I mention acronyms, acronyms, differing by one word but with confusing and complex roles.
It was awful. On steroids awful. Not as bad as 19 dead children, but no cure all.
Milwaukee:
Oh, yes.
GPS technology helps with those arguments – somewhat.
Prior to that, I used to try to remember to say “correct” for “right.” Or to point and say “this way.” Of course, pointing often got me “I can’t see what you’re doing!!!”
I love GPSs.
Milwaukee:
At least with CPR there aren’t hundreds of people and many agencies involved each time.
Neo, you’ve repeatedly made a distinction between those of us, such as myself, who harshly condemn the response vs those of us, like yourself, who (still) rightfully criticize it. To wit,
“I have no problem condemning police if and when I do have more – and more reliable – information, and *it points to their guilt*. As it is, though, there’s plenty to already criticize, such as the chaos and confusion of the command structure”
The difference between condemnation and criticism is simply a matter of how much someone is willing to excuse/explain/justify, right? The fact that you and I differ means we have different thresholds, likely due to different experiences. It isn’t a strawman to suggest we are operating from different premises. My comment to check out the training was a frustrated challenge to try to see where the depth of my ire is coming from because I’ve felt relegating to the “no evidence” camp, when to my mind, these guidelines are themselves evidence that deserve equal examination in determining Arredondos level of culpability.
I don’t think that is an unfair request.
Lets leave the legal aspects out of this, arredondo has to stop blame shifting and not give a self serving gloss but come clean to those parents in uvalde
I also think it’s interesting that it seems like all of our professions are feeding into this. If memory serves, you studied psychology and law and obviously have a passion for dance. To varying degrees, these all have some foundations in the subjective. Eyewitnesses are not infallible and have subjective experiences and memories of events; we rely on a defendents emotional interpretations of events to determine whether he acted reasonably, etc.
The nurse who commented follows strict procedures to reduce and hopefully eliminate the possibility of erroneous subjective interpretations, which is also the whole point of the NIMS training, particularly with regard to incident command. While I get that he was scared and that there were thjngs he couldn’t have foreseen, I also hold him harshly liable for not getting the basics right when he’d been in the role for as long as he has. You seem to be more gracious into taking his subjective experience into account (“he didn’t know he was in charge” , etc) and limit your reaction to criticism as a result. which is fine, but I tend to lean toward his training having been meant to nix any confusion there, so I have less pity about his feeling in the moment.
Anyway, it’s no wonder we are arguing in circles.
Often the correct answer is the simplest: It happened as planned.
Megan:
Law uses evidence, which is one of the least subjective things connected with human beings. Particularly physical evidence.
Of course, people can differ about just about anything. But that’s just human beings.
Law also uses logic. And law teaches you the extreme importance of not rushing to judgment, and the danger of doing so.
Megan:
When you write, “It isn’t a strawman to suggest we are operating from different premises”, that indicates to me that you don’t seem to know what I was referring to when I wrote what I wrote about your creating a strawman. I will try again to explain. Here’s what I wrote in my previous reply to you:
In other words: you, Megan, had written a suggestion to some unknown “you.” Perhaps you were addressing me or perhaps addressing some other commenter here. You, Megan, suggested that this person – this “you” – has been previously claiming that “what happened with incident command is remotely excusable.” I am pointing out that neither I nor anyone else here as far as I know has made the claim that “what happened with incident command is remotely excusable.” In fact – as I point out in my comment to you – I and others have acknowledged that it was very bad. Trying to understand why it was so bad, how it went bad, and the details of the evidence related to that, is not excusing it.
Therefore, when I asked you at the end of that comment, which strawman you (Megan) are addressing when you say “you” (unknown “you”) ought to be taking a free FEMA ICS course before telling you, Megan, that this “you” person still thinks what happened with incident command is remotely excusable – it’s a strawman because, as I’ve already pointed out, no one here has said the command structure problems should be excused. That’s what a strawman is – it’s attacking a position that you say someone held but that they didn’t really hold.
I hope that makes it clear that the strawman to which I referred is not your “suggesting we are operating from different premises.” Of course we’re operating from different premises. I believe that you are operating from premises that make you feel comfortable condemning – not criticizing, but condemning – the people involved before you know what I believe are enough details of what happened there. I think that is dangerous and I’ve observed that sort of thing leading to terrible injustices many many times. I am willing to criticize, but I am willing to wait in order to utterly condemn. I am especially unwilling (and this has been my focus in the Uvalde case) to condemn as cowards who don’t care if children die an entire police force (I don’t think you said they were cowards, but others certainly have said that and in very strong terms). I have had no reluctance to heavily and strongly criticize the command and control structure, however.
In nursing the acronym “TORB” means … telephone order, read back. The nurse calls the doctor, receives new orders, and reads them back to the doctor. — Milwaukee
Boy, I experienced something like the failure of that situation.
A doctor writes out a prescription on paper that goes outside of the doctor’s or hospital environment where the nurse there types it into a computer. The prescription was just slightly outside the norm, and the nurse misinterprets it when typing it in.
A couple days later we discover the error and I ask to see the doctor’s hand written sheet. I explain to the nurse, “See what’s written? You got it wrong.” Oh no, she won’t admit to an error and won’t correct it until she speaks to the doctor. Except the doctor is not available. Another day slips by.
This stuff happens – all – the – time. Sadly.
These things are basic on the one hand, and yet people tend not to understand the following: Errors happen, and things like feedback, error detection, error correction, and redundancies are really important. More so in critical situations.
I’m with Steve57 and Megan. Some facts we still don’t know, but we know enough for some broad and devastating conclusions. On the communications issues, for instance, there may be many reasons why the radios didn’t work and Arredondo couldn’t fix the problem. My volunteer fire department had that problem for a long time. When that happens, the team perfectly well knows it’s happening and has got to react somehow. There are systems–wasteful and tiring, of course, but available for centuries–for getting information where it needs to go even if electronics don’t work. If nothing else, send couriers, especially if dozens of people are on standby for more than an hour. Anyway, phones were working.
The fact that no one seemed able to come to grips with well-known circumstances is a strong indication that they completely lacked an executive function, being instead overwhelmed by the horror and terror of the situation. A human response, and worthy of pity, but still a 100% clear dereliction of duty, and at a minimum grounds for immediate resignation. It’s as if a surgeon discovered that he became incapacitated by the sight of blood. Even if I don’t blame him and I suspect the sight of blood would freak me out as well, I would expect him to own up to a complete inability to do his job, and to resign and find another line of work. As a bystander, and even more as someone in a position to discipline him, I’m not entitled simply to exhibit empathy and give him a pass.
I’ve taken ICS training, too. Much of it was purely awful, but the basic idea that someone has to acknowledge being in charge is hard to miss. It’s not surprising that people with military experience grasp this so clearly. Its absence is quite deadly in an emergency, and these were people in the emergency business.
TommyJay:
Thing is, that is a relatively simple error that is fairly amenable to error detection and correction. It is not a multifaceted, many-person systems error in a highly chaotic situation.
Medically, a better analogy is to decisions made in the emergency room when someone is coding and a team is working on the person. Even then, the situation if far more simple – with far fewer people and agencies involved – than a situation such as Uvalde. I believe that McCraw said that during the event in Uvalde there were a total – at one point or other and not necessarily at the same moment – of several hundred (I think in the 300s?) of police officers, school and town and state and federal and border – there, as well as firefighters from neighboring towns. The supposed command guy was in the hallway and couldn’t communicate with most of them, even if he had had a working radio (which he didn’t, and most of them didn’t if they were in the building). It was a communication nightmare. I don’t think anyone ever envisioned or prepared for a response on a scale like that. Whether they should have anticipated it, and how it should have been handled, is another question.
There were similar command and control problems in NY during 9/11, and that’s a big and sophisticated city.
I think I will post an excerpt from McCraw’s presentation where he discussed some of these issues.
Wendy Laubach:
Please read this comment of mine.
Also, McCraw described the rules in Texas about who takes command. I don’t think Arredondo followed them, but they’re more ambiguous than one might think, and I get the impression they differ in different states so what one person may know in one state as the rules might be different than in Texas. The response here involved not just the Uvalde police, but as I wrote in the comment of mine I just linked, a huge number of agencies, both local and state and federal, that needed coordination and communication with each other.
It didn’t happen. The question is why. It needed to have happened and it didn’t happen.
A separate question involves all the things – command and control and otherwise – that went wrong in the hallway of that building. There were many.
I also don’t know what you mean by “well-known circumstances.” This particular school shooting had some unusual characteristics that I think flummoxed the officers. If you just mean “a dangerous crisis in which someone needs to take control and be clear about that” then I agree that these are “well-known circumstances” and there was definitely failure there.
As more and more facts become known, or as more and more assertions prove to be incorrect, it seems as if things went as well as could be expected up until the guys got to the classroom door.
Much as we would like things to have been better arranged in advance, they weren’t. Mushing this in with what happened in real life is not helpful.
So the guys were, pretty quickly, in front of the classroom door (The Door from here on).
The verb “wait” has been used. Is this correct? “wait” implies a deliberate decision on the part of the individual or group in question to delay whatever it is.
Is it more correct that the guys in front of The Door were blocked–a verb not involving decision by the parties in question–by various issues with locks and knobs?
“wait” implies they could have done something but chose not to.
“blocked” implies they couldn’t have done something due to circumstances, despite wanting to.
Sorry to be so pedantic, but there are enough feels floating around that being specific seems like a good idea at this hour of the morning.
Somebody explain the Magic Thingy Arredondo could have ordered, were the radios working, which would have allowed for an instant breaching of The Door with no casualties among the assault team and which would have arrived within ten or fifteen seconds if only those stupid radios had worked.
What was not available which would have been useful much earlier that didn’t show up on account of comms? Was it a radio problem which kept the guy with the keys from figuring out somebody might need the keys? And so forth.
I am reminded of “rivet counting” in military discussions: “The MK VI had 189 cm of rolled steel at a 67.3 degree slope on the glacis plate which the T34/85 could not penetrate from beyond 200 meters, therefore the Germans won the Second World War”.
Was there a delay in the arrival of ballistic shields due to comms, or because, lacking an infinite number of ballistic shields, none were immediately available in that part of Uvalde?
I keep mentioning displacement. There’s another issue whose name I don’t have. Find something that wasn’t done and insist that, had it been done, it could not have failed to save the day, with drums and trumpets.
The cops were on scene a whole lot faster than in other situations. The problem is that Ramos was not wandering empty halls waving a sign that said SHOOT HERE. It’s an active shooter situation until the guy is barricaded. It’s looking more and more like it was an active shooter situation for a couple of minutes, at most, and before the cops got around the relevant corner or something, it was barricaded.
Did the cops hold back during the moments Ramos could have been engaged? If not, then the do-nothing cops thing takes a hit.
Then, did the cops “wait” as in deliberately delay entry at The Door when they could have breached it? As in, they had the equipment right there. Not talking about what they should have had.
This was a massive tragedy. That does not preclude the relevant questions being small in scope.
It would be a great world where all law officers were highly trained, conditioned and motivated to make the decision within seconds to make the change from let’s see what’s going on here to fully engaged mortal combat. It would also be nice if a chief of a six man school police force was trained and ready to send officers into combat within a few minutes on a nice spring morning in a small town a few days before the end of school. In hind sight we can see that most everything that could go wrong did go wrong and while there were more than ample numbers of law officers and leadership showing up every minute none of those in leadership positions stepped up and took over. As stated above, you don’t need radios if you are the leader to point at three or four officers and say, “You, you and you, follow me.” and then move on in and finding out the door was not locked or if it had been tearing it down to gain access. There is plenty of blame to go around in this tragic event including outside doors with striker plates that did not line up, the doors could not lock. The state wide oversight of safety self-audits on schools was lacking . Ours is a big state with the second largest population in the US at 28.6 million, probably over 30 million and Texas failed those people in Uvalde.
Regarding marital navigation struggles,
I have a terrible “sense” of direction. My wife’s is good, but she cannot distinguish left from right, especially in a hurry. I think it may relate to German being her first language and confusion over the words?
I tend to do most of the driving, my vision is much better than hers, especially at night, and I am more coordinated, but I often don’t know where I’m going and she’ll blurt out “left!” or “right!” as we are entering an intersection in the center lane and I have to quickly decide if she has the words “right” or “wrong” this time.
Those inflammatory videos of parents screaming “DO SOMETHING” to cops who were there to guard the perimeter drum up all sorts of feelings in the viewer. But feelings are not logic, and they don’t take into account the actual situation and all its possible consequences.
Well this is where you make assumptions and I have to disagree. First, I’ve never seen a video to be inflamed or emotional about it. That’s an assumption on your part, which then expands to a notion of feeling that is illogical.
What I see is bureaucratic incompetence that both led to a disaster and allowed it to continue for far too long. What is too long? That’s debatable, but I put the line at when a mom is able to drive 40 miles, access the building after being stopped by police, saves her 2 children without harm to herself or others, and then is arrested while the shooter is still active (note the link is not a video). At that point, I want not just an accounting of how things went horribly wrong and solutions to solve them. I want the bureaucrats involved punished. Punished doesn’t need to be jail time or “frontier justice” (as I heard on an AoS podcast), but certainly not a promotion to city council for the police chief. Punished as given the opportunity to find a job in which their incompetence won’t result in exacerbating catastrophic events.
As for the poor communication in the school. Yeah, it is an universal problem, but there are solutions. This solution I worked with 20 years ago for a city covering 65 sq miles. It is barely different than your cellphones ability to use cellular or wi-fi to communicate, with the wi-fi in this case having enhanced routing capability. Of course, there is older technology solutions for FM systems. This is technology under $10,000 to deploy, so we are not talking about a major infrastructure improvement project. $10,000 a school is much cheaper and effective than trying to disarm the whole of society. There is also Wendy’s volunteer fire department solution of using your people resource as courier to get information distributed or Steve57’s sound powered phones, which may seem absurd for a school except this school had a PA systems that also was not utilized until nearly an hour into the event.
You may be reluctant to blame police on the scene. I’ve applauded that notion. However, I think the incompetence that occurred that day became reprehensible and rather than just saying “it just was”, I opted to select a point in which I would as a third party juror draw the line. Megan seems to have selected some point as well that may differ from mine. Your line may not be where we draw it or exist at all. Once the line is crossed in my mind, then as you review what went wrong (which you seem to be doing), you also hold people accountable. Maybe that is emotional to you, but it seems logical to me. The comments made by other seem quite reasonable.
I’ll add one more thing. The problems at the school that day didn’t just happen that day. How the doors worked, how the radios didn’t work, how to respond to an active shooter; these are all things that should have been known by the police force hired by the district to resolve these problems. Ask Wendy if her volunteer fire department never drills to work through solutions to these problems before they become reality. I know the answer, because she has a solution. Why didn’t the paid police chief?
Interesting, Mr. Firefly. We are the reverse. I have no sense of direction and freely acknowledge it. My Eagle Scout husband, with an innate sense of direction, is trained to tell me, BEFORE I get to the turn, that I am going to be turning right or left, and also to help me navigate out of parking lots in spite of the fact that I just drove IN. He has learned to do this without yelling, since that makes me worse.
This system failed on a recent trip. We were supposed to turn east, through the NC mountains, and he misread the map, resulting in a scenic tour of rural eastern Tennessee. It was lovely, and I avoided hitting the wild turkey in the road. This has somewhat damaged my trust in his sense of direction.
One of the insights that Daniel Kahneman thought particularly interesting about his work was that we are not capable of accounting for the distortions of our bias in our perceptions EVEN WHEN WE ARE ACUTELY AWARE THAT WE ARE BIASED.
Bias in perception affects communication for both speaker and listener.
The lesson is to seek to be humble and realize how flawed we can be and how often we are wrong.
Neo,
Sure, my tiny medical situation was no comparison to the Uvalde one. It was similar to Milwaukee’s point. I did learn the hard way that the medical system I experienced was NOT set up to operate with a very low error rate.
The environment you describe suggests that maybe too many people were involved. Though I suppose if the wannbe helpers stay on the periphery of the scene it’s OK. It also obviously suggests that command and control is important and valuable which then connects to communication.
Setting communication aside, command always has its problems which are often severe. It is always slower. I’ll skip other points partly because I’d be conjecturing.
My final point about command is, what level of police casualties is the commander willing to envision? I suspect, but don’t know, that much of the police training these days is highly focused on near zero casualties. (Oops, conjecture.) But what about the personal aspect? Is the commander prepared to order a breach where fatalities are likely? In some sense, it is much better to have two or four guys volunteer and ask the commander for permission to go.
I’ve known an Army vet for decades and he’s never talked about combat until recently in his advanced years. He’s ordered men to their death and it’s something from which he will never fully recover.
PS: I don’t have the desire to wade through many hours of McCraw testimony, so kudos to Neo for doing so.
Leland. The story about the rescuing mother is problematic. She could not have gotten her kid out of the rooms in which Ramos was barricaded and the kids in the other rooms had been evacuated pretty early in the proceedings.
There was so much that went wrong and was wrong in Uvalde, where to begin.
I was talking to a friend who owns a company that provides radios to police and fire departments in our area and he said there is an international fire code that requires a minimum level of signal in all public buildings– so there should have been a signal in the school, assuming the code was being enforced.
It is quite expensive to raise the signal level inside a building though– 10’s of thousands of dollars per building. As an example of how expensive, when confirming a signal, the building must be divided into 20 foot squares and there has to be a minimum signal in every square. If any one of those 20 foot squares fails, the signal must be amplified for that area.
But that failure isn’t the only reason the response was so dismal.
The failures in Uvalde should remind us that there is no legal requirement that police protect us.
“…we simply have no affirmative right to police aid, even when a person, including a helpless child, faces imminent danger. We are all responsible for our own personal safety, whether we like it or not.”
https://www.barneslawllp.com/blog/police-not-required-protect
Ohio took a step by allowing trained teachers to be armed in schools. But that solution does have problems, but is a step in the right direction.
We are going to have to look for other solutions than depending on law enforcement. They serve a purpose, but they have sometimes failed when confronted with this type of situation.
Richard Aubrey boiled it down. Lack of working radios, confused chain of command none of that matters. There were police with rifles outside the door. I am sure there was at least one of them ready to go into the classroom, shield or not. Getting the door open was the most important thing. The big question for me is why couldn’t they breech the door? Waiting for keys? Waiting for an hour knowing that kids were shot on the other side of that door?
Leland:
I think you fail to understand what I wrote, even though you quote it. I wrote:
You responded:
Well, then, since I was only referring to people who viewed those videos, I couldn’t be talking about you, could I?
In addition, I think it’s pretty obvious that I don’t mean they drum “all sorts of feelings” in every single viewer (a set of which you are not a member, as you say). But yes, those are very emotional videos that drum up “all sorts” of feelings in viewers. If you are not aware of that sort of phenomenon, then I really don’t know how to explain it to you. And “all sorts” can be everything from mild to strong, from sorrow to rage to fear and I suppose many others. But feelings are not logic, as I said.
As for the rest, as I said, I plan to write a lot that may clear some things up at least somewhat. But as I’ve said many times before, there were plenty of errors, major and serious errors.
}}} Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.
In Mathematics, there is a thing called “Gödel’s incompleteness theorems”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
Essentially, Gödel proved that a fully self-contained mathematical system is impossible.
Bear with me:
Perhaps from 10th grade Geometry, you recall the “Parallel Postulate”, that for any given line and point, there is exactly ONE line parallel to the given line.
Now, this ties into the “curvature of the plane” — the standard Euclidean “plane” has “zero curvature”. But a sphere is (nominally) a plane, too (it fits most of the criteria for defining a plane). It just doesn’t have a zero curvature, but a positive curvature. There is also a shape referred to as a “hyperbolic plane” which has negative curvature.
Another way to break this down is “0, 1, many”. In spherical geometry, there is no such thing as a parallel line, so there is no “Parallel Postulate” at all: “0”. There are NO lines parallel to a given line through a point not on that line. In Euclidean Geometry, there is one: “1” Hyperbolic geometry fits the “many”, as there are any number of lines parallel to the given parallel through the given point.
And this is the point of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems — no matter WHAT system you find/invent/detail — there will ALWAYS, necessarily, be things such as the Parallel Postulate for which there are multiple options… so your system is incomplete, and you need to define a rule for resolving the ambiguity you have identified… then, having done that, you look at it some more, and you find another case for which there is an uncovered exception… and another rule is needed… and again and again and again as you spiral down forever.
Ambiguity is an inherent part of the universe as we can grasp it.
Now, the reason I mention all of this and argue it for being On Topic:
=====================================================
Once you realize that a markedly careful system such as mathematics cannot provide a closed, fixed, and fully defined system with no ambiguity… what are the chances you can ever hope to do this with something as chaotically defined as English???
=====================================================
“Zero”.
And so we need lawyers.
}}} But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
Ah, but it’s not just the known or the unknown that we all have to worry about.
Your mother knew you and your brother were going over to Jimmy’s.
Jimmy knew your mother knew she’d have to pick you up.
It’s not just what we know.
It’s what we “know” that just ain’t so… 😀
😉
Part of this problem seems to be a lack of planning and foresight. This is especially bad for this situation, because, face it, the idea of someone doing such a rueful thing is anathema to our own view of life.
Which makes us resistant to plan for it, as it seems to make it inevitable, even accepted.
Except it’s not the planning which makes it inevitable, it’s that, sooner or later, someone is going to do this, that we should prepare for its inevitability.
I really am surprised that more police departments don’t have some kind of standard plan in place for how to deal with such things, that they don’t practice on a saturday during the summer, so they have a feel for how things should proceed.
And I’m equally surprised that more school districts don’t have “pen testing” done to protect them from such events, as well as processes for dealing with them which are more comprehensive than “lock everything up!”
Obloody:
Ah, but those are unknown unknowns. Rumsfeld’s definition was this: “the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” So that includes those things we think we know but that we actually don’t know but don’t know we don’t know them.
Obloody:
I think they do have plans. I think Uvalde had a plan and they practiced it. Clearly, it was utterly inadequate to the situation, or it was executed exceedingly poorly, or probably both.
Tommy Jay. When I was headed off to Benning, my father said that he’d known what having a commission meant he wouldn’t have taken his.
Bloody.
No plan works if the prep Isn’t perfect. That means quarterly checks with some kind of penalty for those whose responsibilities aren’t perfect.
Outside of the military, such organization and personality types are rare.
Neo:
For some reason, I’ve always thought you were Jewish.
Cornhead:
And you still don’t know, do you? 🙂
Brian E,
It appears the IFC section 510 relating to first responder communications first appeared in 2009.
The International Fire Code (IFC) is a model that must actuated by legislation usually with additions and exceptions. Here is WA:
“RCW 19.27.031
(3) The International Fire Code, published by the International Code Council, Inc., including those standards of the National Fire Protection Association specifically referenced in the International Fire Code: PROVIDED, That, notwithstanding any wording in this code, participants in religious ceremonies shall not be precluded from carrying handheld candles;”
Then entities that issue building permits (counties and cities) may have their own additions and exceptions.
Here is the City of Bellevue (WA) latest on the subject:
https://bellevuewa.gov/sites/default/files/media/pdf_document/F-57%20Emergency%20Responder%20Radio.pdf#:~:text=Acceptance%20testing%20and%20certification%20requirements%20are%20enumerated%20in,IFC%20as%20amended%20by%20the%20City%20of%20Bellevue.
Sounds familiar, Richard Aubrey: “When I was headed off to Benning, my father said that he’d known what having a commission meant he wouldn’t have taken his.” When I flunked out after three years of college I joined the Army Security Agency, Intelligence stuff (a misnomer for sure) and the last thing my dad who was a Major in WWII said was don’t take a commission and most all of us ASA guys were qualified for OCS and they ragged on us to sign up for OCS. I did my time as an enlisted man, four years instead of two to beat the draft.
“McCraw described the rules in Texas about who takes command. I don’t think Arredondo followed them, but they’re more ambiguous than one might think…” I don’t really understand that comment. They’re pretty straightforward, kind of like the discipline on a ship’s deck with officers relieving each other: “I have the conn.”
“It didn’t happen. The question is why.” The guy who appeared to have taken command wasn’t up to the challenge. He vapor-locked.
“I also don’t know what you mean by ‘well-known circumstances.’” I was referring simply to the problem of the radios not working inside the school, which must have been painfully obvious every time they did a drill. It’s a very common problem with small-town radio systems, not mysterious in any way. But the same comment might be made about something like the locks, unless several locks suddenly and inexplicably malfunctioned that day after having worked during drills. At least, we’d like to hope someone thought to check the locks during drills.
The “why” question obviously is intensely interesting, but in some ways beside the point. To go back to my surgeon analogy, of course I’d be curious how a surgeon suddenly found himself unable to carry on in the presence of blood, but it wouldn’t change the important issue: how to be sure we know how to notice when a surgeon vapor-locks, so we can insist on replacing him with someone who can function under the totally predictable stresses of his critical job. We know that some people can continue to function in the presence of blood during surgery, just as we know that some people can take effective action in an active-shooter or hostage crisis. We may be uneasily aware that we personally might fall apart under similar stress, and we may be wildly empathetic, but that doesn’t change how we need to react to abysmal failure.
Wendy Laubach, The Red Badge of Courage.
Wendy Laubach:
I have an idea: why don’t you listen to McCraw himself and see what I might be referring to?
In addition – the situation in Uvalde with Arredondo was far more complicated than noticing whether he vapor-locked. He was not even remotely the only player in this who contributed to what you might call “vapor-lock” (which was caused, among other things, by a series of misperceptions and miscommunications involving both him and others).
In addition, to be able to notice in the future the warning signs of a problem, fix it at the time it’s happening, or head it off beforehand, analysis of why it happened in a past instance can be very helpful. If a misperception and/or miscommunication is involved, you have to understand it before you can fix it for next time. That involves, among other things, what was going on in the mind of the person involved to have caused or contributed to the misperception or miscommunication or other error. At this point, Uvalde is a past instance. But it needs to be studied.
This isn’t about empathy. Empathy is optional.
Wendy Laubach:
IIRC surgeons go through medical school and residency. It was my understanding that residency is intended to identify surgeons and doctors who aren’t up to the stress that comes with their profession. Blood, gore, chaos, fatigue, stress, and the rest of it. Just my limited understanding. Mike K, Avi, or Cicero can flesh this out if they care to.
I know for a fact that Green Beret medics do rotations in urban emergency rooms as part of their training before deployment. Gunshot, stab wounds, hand to hand combat (non lethal if possible) pacification of violent individuals.
Then again everyone has their breaking point.
@ Rufus > “I have to quickly decide if she has the words “right” or “wrong” this time.”
One of my friends in high school could never remember which hand was right and which was left.
However, she was a very accomplished pianist.
When she was driving, we learned to tell her to turn “treble” or “bass.”
Of course a shocking failure of systems should be studied; we may learn a great deal about how to prevent a recurrence. We may have object lessons to present to the next group who’s supposed to be training for an emergency: “This is how wrong things go when people are muddled.” A cop in Florida talked about how school defense training included making trainees step over the bodies of their fallen comrades to reach the shooter, so they could learn to push past that “this can’t be happening” reaction and keep their eye on the goal: stop the threat NOW at any personal cost.
Uvalde seems rich in lessons about what can go horribly wrong, with one error compounding another. People who write about complicated systems failures, such as aircraft crashes, tell us that the people who miraculously stave off disaster had a combination of disciplined routines combined with an unusual ability to keep thinking logically in a situation where many of us would panic and perseverate in a useless loop.
You can’t really teach that latter quality, but you can make it more likely to come out in an emergency by drilling people in good procedures that they can fall back on in a crisis. Procedures have got to be good in themselves, but also surprisingly clear and simple, because experience tells us most people will lose their higher cognitive functions in the face of shock and panic.
One of the worst things that can happen in a cockpit is confusion over who’s in charge. A close runner-up is clarity about who’s in charge, when the person in charge is in freeze-shock mode. It happens. Remember the Air France crash in the Pacific?
My point is only that we already know much of this; the failure is not inherently mysterious. The collapse of decision-making of the sort we saw in Uvalde happens with some regularity when people who theoretically knew they could find themselves in an emergency nevertheless haven’t really come to grips with what all the security measures mean, and what awful choices may have to be faced. (What do you do if the pilot has a heart attack? What if a bomb goes off in the ER during surgery?) The need to believe it could never really happen leads to laxity in all the details–like door locks and communications and assumption of command–and systems collapse when it does. The details of the collapse are always different and always instructive, but the broad outline is distressingly familiar, if only because the military has been dealing with exactly this problem forever. The folks in Uvalde weren’t making brand-new mistakes, only a brand-new combination of an assortment of the usual ones.
Yes studies should be done and lessons learned. They should include the mass shootings that happened at military facilities Wendy, such as Ft. Hood (“workplace violence, Islamophobia”), Washington (DC) Naval Yard offices (“racism”), Pensacola Naval Air Station (“Islamophobia”).
The military has procedures, training, heirarchies, and security. And yet these atrocities happened.
Sometimes lessons aren’t learned?
Very often they aren’t learned. Our only hope is to find ways of ensuring that they are learned more often. We continue to hold fire drills even though we know they will never be 100% effective, because we get better results than if we didn’t bother with them at all.
Without being a huge fan of ICS training, I do admire one of its basic points: someone is in charge. If that’s not you, then one of your highest priorities is to figure out who it is. There may be complicated problems in resolving a fight between two guys who think they’re supposed to be in charge, but none of that will change the essential need of everyone involved in the emergency to figure it out right now. At a minimum, someone should be saying, “I acknowledge there’s a dispute, and I’m either grabbing the reins for now or I’m letting you grab the reins for now while our bosses figure it out.” No one should ever be getting debriefed afterwards and saying, “But I had no idea anyone thought I was in charge,” unless he can also say, “I believed So-and-So was in charge, and here’s why, and I was bending all my effort to finding out what So-and-So’s instructions to me were, and then trying to carry them out.” The cavalry’s not coming. You are the cavalry.
That command-designation process won’t answer all questions, like the supremely difficult challenge of what to do if the guy in charge has collapsed mentally or physically, but it’s a minimum requirement. The fact that it’s so easy to forget this priority in the face of shock and panic is why it’s drilled into us as an essential duty. For an officer to neglect that task in the heat of crisis, and then to describe the situation after the fact in such a way as to demonstrate that he STILL doesn’t understand what was missing, says volumes. Again, the details change, but the principal is crystal clear. Only by supreme good luck–a fantastically well-oiled team on autopilot with superb individual initiative and resourcefulness–will things go well if this step is neglected for more than a few minutes.
As regards command designation, a couple of notes:
Decades ago, there was an experiment on a college campus. After a classroom had been filled and settled, a continuous but small stream of smoke was introduced under the door. The time it took for somebody to say something was positively correlated with the size of the class. IOW, the more people in the room, the longer it took the folks who saw the smoke to say something.
Robert Ardrey in his musings on The Hunting Band, African Genesis, or The Social Contract, thinks about the proper size of a group to get things done and figures the top is about a dozen. See the football team, the rifle squad, the hunting band. He suggests that there were one too many Apostles.
In small classes of couple of dozen, someone spoke up immediately.
There have been other experiments but the results aren’t particularly woke, so I’ll let those go except to say this is an issue which has been studied.
In my experience, if you have some guys standing around an issue, urgent or otherwise, there’s no waiting for somebody to take command. Somebody might say something in an assertive construction directed at someone else. But, unless there’s a substantial difference in position–physically; I can’t reach whatever it is but you can–usually not.
It’s “Let’s try…”, “I’m going to….” “Hold the other side…” “Fetch me a tourniquet…”
And this is just a selection of guys who happened to be there for some reason other than the issue at hand. Stopped to help at an accident, say, is not selecting for MEN OF ACTION. It’s selecting for guys who know where the brake pedal is and have at least a modest confidence in their ability to handle contingencies if only holding the other end of whatever.
So. Those ten guys at the door, in my estimation, should have generated action, even in the face of possibly lethal danger (see war) just because that’s what a dozen guys do. It’s nature. So I am figuring some positive obstacle. Recent reports that the door was unlocked…. for sure? Anybody know? Command to stay out? Waiting for command? Wrt the latter, in a hierarchy of command and obey, possibly what might be spontaneous when off the clock simply doesn’t happen absent a positive order.
And then there’s command and there’s leadership. The latter usually involves a component of “Follow Me”.
Not sure we’ll find out but, IMO, there was some positive obstacle to thwart human nature.
Richard Aubrey:
I plan to attempt to answer those questions of what happened to thwart the response in that hallway – at least to the best of my ability – in my series on McCraw’s testimony. Still in the works, though. I thought I’d get the first piece out today, but it may not be till Monday. I was busy earlier today and got a very late start, and it’s one of the more complex issues I’ve tried to tackle.
Neo. Your energy and determination are beyond …any compliment I can think of.
Richard Aubrey:
Thanks!
But a little OCD goes a long way. 🙂
They used to teach us in emergency medical training class that an early priority, after reaching the victim, was to make unambiguous eye contact with a single member of the loitering crowd and say, “You there, I need you to call 911 this instant,” and get an acknowledgement. It’s no use saying “Somebody call 911.” Half an hour later you’re likely to find everyone thought someone else would.
Once or twice I’ve had the good luck to work under a team leader who was proficient at dividing up the work and assigning the separate pieces clearly to each member of the team. It’s surprising how rare this is. You’d think it would be basic, but I have to admit it doesn’t come at all easily to me when I’m in charge, and I haven’t often encountered it in someone I worked for. I used to love the standard scene early in episodes of “The Closer,” when our heroine would rapid-fire a series of tasks to her trusted team. If only!
Wendy. In taking CPR/AED training, the instructor said we should ask the name of the person with whom we made eye contact. Then, using the name, tell to call…whichever.
I stopped, years ago, and asked if anybody’d called. No cell phones at the time. Yes, said somebody, up at that house. Fresh snow, no tracks. I instructed one individual to go. He did.
A personal observation in re the very informative discussion about how “someone has to take command” in an emergency.
I first discovered that I was not the typical media consumer back in 1981, while watching the news after President Reagan had been shot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Ronald_Reagan
My initial response hearing General Haig speak was one of great relief, as I knew that leaving the country leaderless for any amount of time was an invitation to trouble, and that someone in the upper level of government needed to be the focal point for control until the situation stabilized, as VP Bush was in Texas at the time (these were the days before cell phones and computers).
I was completely dumb-founded when the reaction of the media and politicians was to criticize him for — trying to reassure the public that the government was not going to founder in a crisis?
Later, I learned some of the back-story, which involved political in-fighting of course, but I still think — as a member of the citizenry, not the elite — that they were wrong in their public reaction, even if their private concerns were legitimate.
It was clear that somebody had to be functionally in charge until Bush got back to Washington, as it was a particularly tense time for all of us still “fighting” the Cold War.
(He sent a teletype soon after with the same urgent request.)
I think Allen’s position was ambiguous at the time, since he was supposed to report to VP Bush, and was in no line of succession whatsoever. Certainly the public (me) was not aware of those nuances of internal staff hierarchy charts, but did know that the Secretary of State was the highest ranking cabinet officer*.
He justified the claim he made at the notorious (per the media) press briefing by pointing out that he was talking about executive branch control, not transition of presidential authority.
Technically, maybe Haig was “constitutionally” wrong (I thought his distinction had merit), but given the line of succession at the time, I was a LOT more comfortable with him being in charge than either of the two people Constitutionally between him and Bush, or NS Advisor Allen (whose resume did not include any type of international crisis management).
From Haig’s Wiki entry:
Long story short: confusion about who is in charge in a crisis reaches up to the highest levels of government.
*Trivia from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_the_United_States
I was thinking of Haig’s “I’m in control here at the White House” announcement throughout this discussion. I remember the brouhaha very well.