The New Neo

“Everybody knows” that the cowardly Uvalde cops sat in the hall for over an hour while children were being shot and school police chief Arredondo gave the order to stand down, although of course the officers could have gotten the key or breached the doors or shot through the doors without hurting any children.

Except that we don’t know those things, although there certainly have been reports in the MSM stating them as facts or as obvious conclusions – much or all of the specific information coming from anonymous sources.

I would say that probably the vast majority of people who’ve followed this story believe a lot of things that haven’t been proven and that originate with unnamed sources talking to the MSM, or “experts” or pundits not paying attention to what we actually know and what we don’t. Haven’t we learned from previous experience not to trust those initial reports, especially anonymous ones, and to suspend harsh judgment until a lot more is known? And doesn’t that take time?

I’ve been asking a lot of questions as I try to sort it out. One of the things I’ve been waiting for is to hear from school police chief Arredondo. Well, now wait no more. You are free to think he’s lying through his teeth in his description of the ordeal, of course. But I think he just might be telling the truth.

There should be other witnesses to this and I hope we hear from them. So far I’m not sure of the extent of the video evidence, but I recall reading that there was a hall video that was of very poor quality and investigators are studying it and trying to enhance it.

Here’s the story that emerges based on Arredondo’s interview [emphasis mine]. You shouldn’t be surprised to hear that it differs from the story we “know” in many key details, as well as expanding on some parts of that story (such as getting the key):

[The classroom door] was sturdily built with a steel jamb, impossible to kick in.

He wanted a key. One goddamn key and he could get through that door to the kids and the teachers. The killer was armed with an AR-15. Arredondo thought he could shoot the gunman himself or at least draw fire while another officer shot back. Without body armor, he assumed he might die.

“The only thing that was important to me at this time was to save as many teachers and children as possible,” Arredondo said.

So according to Arredondo he was willing to die, but couldn’t get in. But what about getting body armor, and getting the all-important key? Why did that take so long? I think a lot of people have gotten the impression from the coverage so far that the Uvalde cops weren’t even trying to get the key, and that it was the BorTac officers who overrode that order to stay put, and that it then was a simple matter to get it from the janitor. Arredondo says not so (and you’ll read more about those keys later, in another quote):

He called for tactical gear, a sniper and keys to get inside, holding back from the doors for 40 minutes to avoid provoking sprays of gunfire. When keys arrived, he tried dozens of them, but one by one they failed to work.

“Each time I tried a key I was just praying,” Arredondo said. Finally, 77 minutes after the massacre began, officers were able to unlock the door and fatally shoot the gunman.

I assume that “tactical gear” is body armor and/or ballistic shields. But Arredondo is saying they would have gone in without them had they been able to get the door open.

Also:

He noted that some 500 students from the school were safely evacuated during the crisis…

Whether the inability of police to quickly enter the classroom prevented the 21 victims — 19 students and two educators — from getting life-saving care is not known, and may never be. There’s evidence, including the fact that a teacher died while being transported to the hospital, that suggests taking down the shooter faster might have made a difference. On the other hand, many of the victims likely died instantly. A pediatrician who attended to the victims described small bodies “pulverized” and “decapitated.” Some children were identifiable only by their clothes and shoes.

Devastating and heartbreaking, but not surprising. It doesn’t sound as though many children could have been saved even if the police could have gotten in sooner, but it would be good to know and we don’t know. But – was it possible to have gotten in sooner?

We still need to know so much more. It’s not difficult, though, to imagine the extreme frustration and desperation that was being experienced by the police themselves – some of whom had children in those classrooms. That was one of the reasons the “cowardly and uncaring police sitting on their asses” narrative never made sense to me and still doesn’t.

More:

The Tribune spoke to seven law enforcement experts about Arredondo’s description of the police response. All but one said that serious lapses in judgment occurred.

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

I’m not impressed by these experts. “Running into the school with no key” is what they’re criticizing? Are they assuming he had keys to the classroom and just left them somewhere? I actually have heard that some police departments have keys to schools and other public buildings, but do they ordinarily have keys that open every classroom? And as we will learn later in the article, the Uvalde police did not have such keys.

“Failing to take charge of the situation” – exactly how? It certainly seems disorganized, but what orders should have been given that weren’t given? What actions should have been taken that weren’t taken? And yes, the gunman “continued to fire the rifle” – but only sporadically and as far as we know only towards the door at the cops.

More [emphasis mine]:

Hyde, Arredondo’s lawyer, said those criticisms don’t reflect the realities police face when they’re under fire and trying to save lives. Uvalde is a small working-class city of about 15,000 west of San Antonio. Its small band of school police officers doesn’t have the staffing, equipment, training, or experience with mass violence that larger cities might.

His client ran straight toward danger armed with 29 years of law enforcement experience and a Glock 22 handgun. With no body armor and no second thoughts, the chief committed to stop the shooter or die trying.

So again we hear the chief had no body armor, but again we don’t know why.

One thing is cleared up – why he had no radio:

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

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

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

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

The article goes on to say that as he and other officers fist entered the school but before they got to the classrooms they heard the 100 or so rounds that I’ve mentioned before, the rounds that almost certainly killed the teachers and children. Then when the officers got to the locked doors there was gunfire directed at them; we’ve already heard about that, too. Then more gunfire (described previously as having also been by the perp towards the door; some of it apparently went through walls as well).

The officers were unaware of the 911 calls (we already knew that, too). But how would it have changed things if they had been aware of those calls? I’m not at all sure it would have mattered, but perhaps it might have – although if the police had fired through the door at the perp without being able to see him, they might have ended up injuring and/or killing more children rather than saving them.

More [emphasis mine]:

…[E]ven if they’d had radios, his lawyer said, they would have turned them off in the hallway to avoid giving away their location. Instead, they passed information in whispers for fear of drawing another round of gunfire if the shooter heard them.

Finding no way to enter the room, Arredondo called police dispatch from his cellphone and asked for a SWAT team, snipers and extrication tools, like a fire hook, to open the door.

When was that? Somebody must know, but we’re still not being told.

Also [emphasis mine]:

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

Officers in the hallway had few options. At some point, Arredondo tried to talk to the gunman through the walls in an effort to establish a rapport, but the gunman did not respond.

This is interesting and a little confusing:

Lights in the classrooms had also been turned off, another routine lockdown measure that worked against the police. With little visibility into the classroom, they were unable to pinpoint the gunman’s location or to determine whether the children and teachers were alive.

So does that mean there was some sort of window in the door (one child had indicated that, but no one else had), but they were unable to see inside? I’ve previously noted that the outer classroom windows looked relatively small, and even though it was daylight it probably was very hard to see inside the rooms without lights even if the door had a window. Shining some sort of flashlight inside through the door window – if there was such a window – would not necessarily have revealed the location of the perp but would certainly have made police targets, and what’s more until the school was evacuated they didn’t want the bullets to go into other classrooms.

This is why the students were evacuated through the windows and not the hallways, something various people have asked about:

He told officers to start breaking windows from outside other classrooms and evacuating those children and teachers. He wanted to avoid having students coming into the hallway, where he feared too much noise would attract the gunman’s attention.

Here’s something a bit cryptic about body armor:

At one point, a Uvalde police officer noticed Arredondo was not wearing body armor. Worried for the chief’s safety, the Uvalde officer offered to cover for Arredondo while he ran out of the building to get it.

“I’ll be very frank. He said, ‘Fuck you. I’m not leaving this hallway,’” Hyde recounted. “He wasn’t going to leave without those kids.”

So did the chief not have body armor, but others did? I’d certainly like to know more details about that, and also learn what type of body armor the others had on if in fact they wore it.

Here is much more detail about the keys. It sounds like a nightmare or a horror movie [emphasis mine]:

Tools that might have been useful in breaking through the door never materialized, but Arredondo had also asked for keys that could open the door. Unlike some other school district police departments, Uvalde CISD officers don’t carry master keys to the schools they visit. Instead, they request them from an available staff member when they’re needed.

Robb Elementary did not have a modern system of locks and access control. “You’re talking about a key ring that’s got to weigh 10 pounds,” Hyde said.

Eventually, a janitor provided six keys. Arredondo tried each on a door adjacent to the room where the gunman was, but it didn’t open.

Later, another key ring with between 20 and 30 keys was brought to Arredondo.

“I was praying one of them was going to open up the door each time I tried a key,” Arredondo said in an interview.

None did.

I believe the “door adjacent to the room where the gunman was” refers to one of the two classrooms with the dead and wounded children and teachers, either 111 or 112. The gunman is thought to have stayed in one room during the time police were in the building.

Regarding those keys, my hands would have been shaking so badly I couldn’t have put a key in a lock. But that’s one of many reasons I’m not a police officer.

Eventually, the officers on the north side of the hallway called Arredondo’s cellphone and told him they had gotten a key that could open the door.

The officers on the north side of the hallway formed a group of mixed law enforcement agencies, including U.S. Border Patrol, to enter the classroom and take down the shooter, Arredondo said.

So it seems to have been a cooperative effort.

The rest of the article features some experts criticizing and some defending. For example, from a retired FBI agent:

“The training that police officers have received for more than a decade mandates that when shots are fired in an active-shooter situation, officers or an officer needs to continue through whatever obstacles they face to get to the shooter, period,” said Katherine Schweit, a retired FBI agent who co-wrote the bureau’s foundational research on mass shootings. “If that means they go through walls, or go around the back through windows, or through an adjoining classroom, they do that.”

Oh, really? Let’s see [emphasis mine]:

Bruce Ure, a former Victoria police chief, said…he believes Arredondo acted reasonably given the circumstances he faced.

Ure disagreed that Arredondo should have retreated into a command role once other officers arrived, since most active-shooter events last mere minutes. He argued that no amount of ad-hoc planning outside would have changed the outcome of the massacre once the shooter got inside the classrooms.

He said attempting to breach windows or open classroom doors by force were unrealistic options that would have exposed police and children to potentially fatal gunfire with little chance of success. Officers’ only choice, he said, was to wait to find a key, which he agreed should not have taken so long.

Hyde said attempting to enter through windows would have “guaranteed all the children in the rooms would be killed” along with several officers. He said this “reckless and ineffective” action, when police could not see where the shooter was, would have made officers easy targets to be picked off at will.

That conforms with what I’ve said in several posts and comments, and it’s interesting to me to see a former police chief agreeing.

Arredondo’s jettisoning of the radio seems to me to be the worst thing he did, but if it really would have hampered his movements and he thought speed was of the essence, and if he also knew that the radio probably wouldn’t have worked in the school anyway, and if they would have had to turn a working radio off to keep their location secret from the perp, I don’t think the absence of the radio actually mattered all very much.

Still another obvious flaw in the entire operation was the fractured and confusing command structure, or lack thereof. But it’s not at all clear whose fault that was, because the situation was chaotic and had many special features; I can’t think of another school shooter situation like it, with a still-alive perp behind a locked door of that type and the children already shot when police arrived on the scene. So it’s not at all clear to me what difference it would have made if the command structure had been more clear, although I certainly feel it should have been more clear.

Ure also said this:

“There’s no manual for this type of scenario,” Ure said. “If people need to be held appropriately accountable, then so be it. But I think the lynch-mob mentality right now isn’t serving any purpose, and it’s borderline reckless.”

Agreed.

I suggest you read the entire article – there’s a lot more. One of the many things you’ll learn if you read the whole thing is that one of the teachers who was murdered, Irma Garcia, was married to Arredondo’s second cousin Joe Garcia (who died two days later of what appears to have been a heart attack), a man with whom he’d grown up. That’s typical of the sort of intertwining of police and victims that you had in Uvalde, and still another reason why the “callous cowardly police” narrative didn’t seem likely to me and doesn’t seem likely to me.

I am so very very tired of all the premature blame and finger-pointing. I think anyone who reads this blog can tell that, because I’ve written about it before. This interview with Arredondo is the sort of thing I’ve been waiting for, and it’s just the tip of a very large iceberg of facts we need to know before understanding the terrible events that occurred that day in Uvalde.

But you know what? I think it’s already much too late. I think that, for the vast majority of people, no matter what exonerating information might later come out, their minds are set and they know that the police that day were cowards who stood by in order to protect themselves while little children and their teachers were murdered.

The police response was imperfect, to be sure. This is not a team of Navy SEALs who have practiced over and over a mission to get Bin-Laden. We see that on TV, and it’s like an action movie. But life is not an action movie, and small-town cops are not Navy SEALs.