Texas School Slaughter...

[rogue06]

THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX

That's how many officers were on scene at Uvalde
https://apnews.com/article/shootings...6d893ea77cf8ea


Can't emphasize that last statement enough.

The shooter, not even taking into account the fact that he already used some to kill the kids and teachers (IIRC he fired around half of the rounds he had), had 316 rounds inside with him when he entered the classroom.

He couldn't have even killed every officer on scene if he'd tried, even if he made perfect one-shot kills somehow.

Don't know who it was but they were demanding to know why none of the senior officers, when they saw the confusion and inaction, didn't step in to take charge.

Everyone just stood around like they were waiting for a store to open.

[Gondwanaland]

I think this is an overgeneralization, Gondy.

It really isn't.

I have no doubt that there are MANY police departments like that, but the ones with which I have been acquainted have very rigid standards, and are actually accredited by Texas Law Enforcement Best Practices Recognition Program.

I'm betting quite a few of the officers that responded to Uvalde attended training schools accredited by the Texas Law Enforcement Best Practices Recognition Program. So that doesn't mean a whole lot to me.

I won't argue even a little that most "school police departments" are like that, and it's clear that Uvalde has shown what a (I started to use "joke", but there's nothing funny about their incredibly horrendous performance).

There were over 300 (almost 400) officers that responded that day. A very small proportion of them were part of the 'school police department', my dude. It was a failure at every level by basically all of the cops there.

I'm no longer "active duty cop", and I'm STILL going to school, with over 80 hours already this year, and a certification in Mental Health for Police in two weeks.

Sorry but our required training hours are embarrassingly low. The cops in those countries have to do ongoing yearly training and certifications as well.

[Cow Poke]

Yeah no, the main problem is the poor quality of training, along with the absurdly low requirements of training before becoming a cop. In many places in the US you need more hours of training to be a barber or a plumber or a cosmetologist or an interior designer, than you need to become a cop.

I think this is an overgeneralization, Gondy. I have no doubt that there are MANY police departments like that, but the ones with which I have been acquainted have very rigid standards, and are actually accredited by Texas Law Enforcement Best Practices Recognition Program.

And when you compare us to many other countries, it becomes even more clear what a joke our training is in the US.
_118375922_d1b376fd-11a8-43c8-9de5-1fb4293df829.jpg
In addition in many of those countries you have to have an academic degree, preferably in a relevant field. In the US most places just require a high school diploma.

I won't argue even a little that most "school police departments" are like that, and it's clear that Uvalde has shown what a (I started to use "joke", but there's nothing funny about their incredibly horrendous performance).

I'm no longer "active duty cop", and I'm STILL going to school, with over 80 hours already this year, and a certification in Mental Health for Police in two weeks.

[Gondwanaland]

Absolutely agreed.



Sorry, when, exactly, did you graduate basic police school? Part of the problem is the sissification of men in general, both in the military and police forces.

Yeah no, the main problem is the poor quality of training, along with the absurdly low requirements of training before becoming a cop. In many places in the US you need more hours of training to be a barber or a plumber or a cosmetologist or an interior designer, than you need to become a cop.

And when you compare us to many other countries, it becomes even more clear what a joke our training is in the US.
_118375922_d1b376fd-11a8-43c8-9de5-1fb4293df829.jpg
In addition in many of those countries you have to have an academic degree, preferably in a relevant field. In the US most places just require a high school diploma.

[Cow Poke]

Yeah there definitely needs to be a root-and-stem overhaul of our police forces and replacement with new ones, and complete changes to training for said new ones.

And this will be the classic example of everything NOT to do in future training operations. I just finished another CISM training on Thursday, and this led the discussion.

[Cow Poke]

If in a similar situation, I bet you'd pee all over yourself.

[Starlight]

Part of the problem is the sissification of men in general, both in the military and police forces.

[Cow Poke]

The sheer cowardice from top to bottom that was on display here among police officers of all stripes, from state to local to federal, is really quite incredible.

Absolutely agreed.

But it fits a clear pattern we've been seeing among US police forces, with their training lying to them about how dangerous their job is and how they should be always afraid of everything and everyone.

Sorry, when, exactly, did you graduate basic police school? Part of the problem is the sissification of men in general, both in the military and police forces.

[Gondwanaland]

The sheer cowardice from top to bottom that was on display here among police officers of all stripes, from state to local to federal, is really quite incredible.

But it fits a clear pattern we've been seeing among US police forces, with their training lying to them about how dangerous their job is and how they should be always afraid of everything and everyone.

Yeah there definitely needs to be a root-and-stem overhaul of our police forces and replacement with new ones, and complete changes to training for said new ones.

[Starlight]

Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to a mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school, but “egregiously poor decision-making” resulted in more than an hour of chaos before the gunman who took 21 lives was finally confronted and killed, according to a damning investigative report released Sunday.

The nearly 80-page report was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the South Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside two fourth-grade classrooms at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers...

“It’s disgusting. Disgusting,” he said. “They’re cowards.”

The sheer cowardice from top to bottom that was on display here among police officers of all stripes, from state to local to federal, is really quite incredible.

But it fits a clear pattern we've been seeing among US police forces, with their training lying to them about how dangerous their job is and how they should be always afraid of everything and everyone.

[Gondwanaland]

THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX

That's how many officers were on scene at Uvalde
https://apnews.com/article/shootings...6d893ea77cf8ea

Uvalde report: 376 officers but ‘egregiously poor’ decisions


Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to a mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school, but “egregiously poor decision-making” resulted in more than an hour of chaos before the gunman who took 21 lives was finally confronted and killed, according to a damning investigative report released Sunday.

The nearly 80-page report was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the South Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside two fourth-grade classrooms at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers.

Altogether, the report amounted to the fullest account to date of the one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history. But it did not satisfy all parents and relatives of the victims, some of whom blasted the police as cowards and called for them to resign.

“At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety,” the report said.

The gunman fired approximately 142 rounds inside the building — and it is “almost certain” that at least 100 shots came before any officer entered, according to the report, which laid out in detail numerous failures. Among them:

— No one assumed command despite scores of officers being on the scene.

— The commander of a Border Patrol tactical team waited for a bullet-proof shield and working master key for the classroom, which may have not even been needed, before entering the classroom.

— A Uvalde Police Department officer said he heard about 911 calls that had come from inside the classroom, and that his understanding was the officers on one side of the building knew there were victims trapped inside. Still, no one tried to breach the classroom.

The report — the most complete account yet of the hesitant and haphazard response to the May 24 massacre — was written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives. Swiftly, the findings set in motion at least one fallout: Lt. Mariano Pargas, a Uvalde Police Department officer who was the city’s acting police chief during the massacre, was placed on administrative leave.

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said an investigation would be launched to determine whether Pargas should have taken command of the scene. McLaughlin also said the city would now release all body camera footage from Uvalde police that was taken during the shooting.

McLaughlin said “a couple, maybe three” officers have left the force since the shooting, and that suicides are “a big concern.”

Family members of the victims in Uvalde received copies of the report Sunday before it was released to the public.

“It’s a joke. They’re a joke. They’ve got no business wearing a badge. None of them do,” Vincent Salazar, grandfather of 11-year-old Layla Salazar, who was among those killed, said Sunday.

Only the families of the victims were invited to meet with committee members before a news conference with the media following the public release of the report.

Tina Quintanilla-Taylor, whose daughter survived the shooting, shouted at the committee members as they left the news conference, saying that they should have taken questions from the community, not just reporters. “I’m pissed. They need to come back and give us their undivided attention,” she said later.

“These leaders are not leaders,” she said.

According to the report, 376 law enforcement officers massed at the school. The overwhelming majority of those who responded were federal and state law enforcement. That included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials.

“Other than the attacker, the Committee did not find any ‘villains’ in the course of its investigation,” the report said. “There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making.”

The report noted that many of the hundreds of law enforcement responders who rushed to the school were better trained and equipped than the school district police — which the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state police force, previously faulted for not going into the room sooner.

Investigators said it was not their job to determine whether officers should be held accountable, saying that decisions rests with each law enforcement agency. Prior to Sunday, only one of the hundreds of officers on the scene — Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief — was known to have been on leave.

“Everyone who came on the scene talked about this being chaotic,” said Texas state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican who led the investigation.

Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety and U.S. Border Patrol did not immediately return requests for comment Sunday.

The report followed weeks of closed-door interviews with more than 40 people, including witnesses and law enforcement who were on the scene of the shooting.

No single officer has received as much scrutiny since the shooting as Arredondo, who also resigned from his newly appointed seat on the City Council after the shooting. Arredondo told the committee he treated the shooter as “barricaded subject,” according to the report, and defended never treating the scene as an active-shooter situation because he did not have visual contact with the gunman.

Arredondo also tried to find a key for the classrooms, but no one ever bothered to see if the doors were locked, according to the report.

“Arredondo’s search for a key consumed his attention and wasted precious time, delaying the breach of the classrooms,” the report read.

The report criticized as “lackadaisical” the approach of the hundreds of officers who surrounded the school and said that they should have recognized that Arredondo remaining in the school without reliable communication was “inconsistent” with him being the scene commander. The report concluded that some officers waited because they relied on bad information while others “had enough information to know better.”

A nearly 80-minute hallway surveillance video released Sunday showed for the first time a hesitant and haphazard tactical response, which the head of Texas’ state police has condemned as a failure and some Uvalde residents have blasted as cowardly.

Calls for police accountability have grown in Uvalde since the shooting.

The report is the result of one of several investigations into the shooting, including another led by the Justice Department. A report earlier this month by tactical experts at Texas State University alleged that a Uvalde police officer had a chance to stop the gunman before he went inside the school armed with an AR-15.

But in an example of the conflicting statements and disputed accounts since the shooting, McLaughlin has said that never happened. That report had been done at the request of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which McLaughlin has increasingly criticized and accused of trying to minimize the role of its troopers during the massacre.


Steve McCraw, the head of Texas DPS, has called the police response an abject failure.

The committee didn’t “receive medical evidence” to show that police breaching the classroom sooner would have saved lives, but it concluded that “it is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue.”

Michael Brown, whose 9-year-old son was in the cafeteria at Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting and survived, came to the committee’s news conference Sunday carrying signs saying “ We Want Accountability” and “Prosecute Pete Arredondo.”

Brown said he has not yet read the report but already knows enough to say that police “have blood on their hands.”

“It’s disgusting. Disgusting,” he said. “They’re cowards.”

Can't emphasize that last statement enough.

The shooter, not even taking into account the fact that he already used some to kill the kids and teachers (IIRC he fired around half of the rounds he had), had 316 rounds inside with him when he entered the classroom.

He couldn't have even killed every officer on scene if he'd tried, even if he made perfect one-shot kills somehow.

[Gondwanaland]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/document-...141506874.html

Document Shows Uvalde Officials Sought Favorable Account of Police Action



Days after the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the leaders of the grieving city fumed during a closed-door meeting with Steven McCraw, the state’s top police official.

They objected to McCraw’s public criticism of the response by city police officers to the May 24 massacre that killed 19 children and two teachers and, in a one-page document, laid out their own version of events, one that praised the officers for initially rushing to the gunfire and saving hundreds of other children in the school.

The document prepared by Uvalde officials and labeled “narrative” was obtained by The New York Times after a public information request. Its account of events differed in significant aspects from the one described by McCraw’s agency, the Department of Public Safety, which is leading the police investigation into the shooting and the law enforcement response.

The Uvalde officials pushed the document across the table to McCraw, asking him to publicly endorse it, according to a state police official who requested anonymity to describe the meeting on June 2. McCraw refused.

The heated encounter at Uvalde City Hall, which has not been previously reported, was among the earliest indications of a simmering feud between state and local officials that has since exploded into public view over who should be blamed for the 77 minutes it took heavily armed officers to kill the gunman after he first entered Robb Elementary School.

The competing accounts have obscured the actions of police and angered the victims’ families, who have pleaded for reliable information. The clearest picture yet is expected to come Sunday when a Texas House committee is set to report the results of its investigation, one of several overlapping inquiries into what took place.

The committee’s report was expected to spread blame beyond Chief Pete Arredondo, the head of the small Uvalde school district police force who McCraw has said was principally responsible for a law enforcement response that he has called an “abject failure.”

Instead, the committee was expected to find fault broadly among the several law enforcement agencies and officers that responded, including dozens of officers from the U.S. Border Patrol, the local sheriff’s office and the Department of Public Safety, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The conclusion, the person said, would be that the delayed response was not one person’s failure, but rather that of dozens of trained officers and supervisors. Nobody knew what was going on and nobody tried to take charge, the person said, citing failures of inaction and communication by the agencies.

Such a finding would echo what others have already concluded after studying the sometimes contradictory versions of events offered by state and local officials.

“There was no incident commander, that’s the truth of the matter — it was complete system failure,” said state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who represents the area and has been critical of the version presented by the state police that holds no other law enforcement agencies accountable. “Why didn’t they take command and control of the situation?” he asked.

McCraw had said that Arredondo had been in charge at the scene and had made “the wrong decision” in treating the gunman as barricaded inside the classroom — a situation that would call for a more careful, tactical approach — rather than as someone who was actively shooting and whom officers are trained to immediately confront. Arredondo has not spoken publicly but said in an interview with The Texas Tribune that he did not see himself as the incident commander.

In the account the Uvalde officials laid out in their narrative, they focused on the quick arrival of officers at the school and their success in containing the gunman inside a pair of connected classrooms while clearing children from the rest of the school. They described a scene that was dangerous to officers and a response that was not chaotic but focused on getting children to safety.

“There was zero hesitation on any of these officers’ part, they moved directly toward the gunfire,” the document said, only to be repelled when the gunman fired at them. Two of the officers were grazed by debris from the gunfire.

“The total number of persons saved by the heroes that are local law enforcement and the other assisting agencies is over 500 per U.C.I.S.D.,” the document said, referring to Arredondo’s department, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police force. “But for U.P.D. and U.C.I.S.D. being on scene IMMEDIATELY, that shooter would have had free range on the school.”

The document also said that specially trained Border Patrol agents had been pushing to clear the other classrooms first. “BORTAC insisted that all the rooms be cleared, i.e. all the children and teachers be removed, PRIOR to use of the shields and breach of Room 112,” the document said.

“Absent the shields, every U.P.D. officer was of the opinion that breaching the door was suicide and every Texas Ranger or D.P.S. agent who took their statements agreed,” the document read. “Not a single officer present, including D.P.S. troopers and Texas Rangers, believed that they could save lives by approaching that door and being killed one by one.”

That description conflicted with the account McCraw has presented of officers not following standard training, developed after the deadly shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, that calls for officers to quickly confront a gunman and end the shooting. At a hearing in the state Capitol last month, McCraw said officers had enough firepower to confront the gunman within three minutes of his entering the school, but had been prevented from doing so by Arredondo.

The Uvalde officials, in their document, made no reference to a lack of keys as a reason for the delayed confrontation with the gunman, which Arredondo had said in his interview was another big reason for the delay.

Instead, they defended the protracted response, saying that the extended time period before confronting the gunman was “not wasted but each minute was used to save lives of children and teachers.”

Some of the footage from the scene raises questions about the city’s account.

Video from the hallway of Robb Elementary — which was reviewed by the Times last month and published by the Austin American-Statesman this week — made clear that shields began arriving in the hallway outside the classrooms long before the officers moved in.

And several Border Patrol agents had expressed frustration at the lengthy delay in getting clearance to enter the classroom, a person briefed on the investigation told the Times.

The gathering at Uvalde City Hall had been arranged by Gov. Greg Abbott’s office because of rising tensions between Uvalde officials, including Mayor Don McLaughlin and the county judge, Bill Mitchell, and state police officials.

By that point, more than a week after the shooting, McLaughlin had requested that the Justice Department conduct its own review of the shooting, an indication that he did not trust the state police to impartially review the actions by officers.

And several key points about the shooting and the police response had already changed during a series of news conferences convened by the state. For instance, Abbott, speaking in Uvalde a day after the massacre, said that “the reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do,” and praised “their quick response.” The governor later said he had been “misled” about the facts.

After the video from the hallway emerged, Abbott told reporters Thursday that “none of the information in that video was shared with me on that day.”

Also in attendance at the June meeting was the local district attorney, Christina Mitchell Busbee, and the Uvalde city attorney. The mayor, county judge and local district attorney did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the state police declined to comment.

Abbott’s chief of staff attended the meeting, as did his general counsel, who sought to play the role of mediators.

But things quickly went off the rails, the senior official said.

The Uvalde officials voiced their strong displeasure with McCraw. Early in the roughly hourlong meeting, the city attorney presented the document, which was the product of interviews with police officers who responded to the scene, the senior official said. The Uvalde officials wanted McCraw to have another news conference in which he would present the narrative from the document. He told them he did not agree with its summary, the senior official said.

Busbee, the district attorney, also objected to its release and argued the point with the city attorney, the senior official said. Some in the room raised their voices.

“I objected to the release of any information given that the Texas Rangers had only begun their investigation and there was no way to assess whether that narrative was accurate,” Busbee said in an email. “I was concerned with the release of inaccurate or incomplete information that would adversely affect the investigation and further traumatize the families.”

The document was not made public at the time.

[rogue06]

The keystone kops would be more competent....

They would have at least tried.

[Christianbookworm]

The keystone kops would be more competent....

[NorrinRadd]

None I know of - only termination, and then they can go apply at some other police department and start all over again.

Sheesh, it's like they're pastors or coaches or something.