Based on early reporting, I was inclined to push back against criticism of the police response to the Uvalde, Texas school shooting. It’s all too easy to second-guess actions taken in the course of such a chaotic and terrifying incident. I have some idea of what it’s like, and that was on my mind.
But it turns out that I was wrong.
There’s no way to temper or prettify the ugly fact that twenty cops stood around the classroom in which the shooter was holed up, while inside kids were still dying. Apparently—and inexplicably—the incident commander determined that he was no longer dealing with an active shooter. So he decided to wait for the arrival of a tactical team before taking further action—this despite the fact that desperate 911 calls from fourth-grade students were still coming out of the classroom.
And while the police stood around waiting, most of those students died.
This disastrously wrong decision contradicted the operational doctrine that’s been evolved by law enforcement to deal with mass shootings. Briefly, that doctrine mandates immediate action to neutralize the shooter. The outcome in Uvalde shows why: To wait is to add to the body count.
There are some things I’d still like to know, for instance whether or not the incident commander was aware of those 911 calls. And it’s not to be forgotten that other mistakes and acts of negligence contributed toward this tragedy. We know now that an officer of the school district police responded to the scene while the shooter was still outside, only to take off in pursuit of a teacher whom he mistook for the suspect. We also know that that a teacher had propped open the door through which the shooter gained access to the school. I don’t know whether that individual can be criminally charged, but he or she should certainly be fired. And we know that the people around him knew the shooter was dangerously unstable, but never raised the alarm.
We all prefer to believe that if the proper laws are passed, the proper procedures are put in place, the proper training is provided, the proper action is taken, horrors like the Uvalde school shootings will not happen. But this is to delude ourselves. Human beings themselves being imperfect and prone to error, no system, however carefully crafted, can be made perfect.
The incident commander and his officers who were present outside that classroom will be held accountable for their inaction, and rightly so. But remember this: The overwhelming majority of American law enforcement officers never fire their weapons except on the range. As I have seen for myself and felt for myself, not all the training in the world can really prepare a person for such a high-stress situation. You’ll only know how you’ll react at the moment of reaction. Our judgment of those officers should incorporate that understanding. Anyhow, I’m sure that we can reproach them no more harshly than they reproach themselves.
The Army, in which I served for many years, is big on “lessons learned.” That’s the bureaucratic term for “reviewing how you screwed up last time so you won’t screw up next time.” In like manner there will be a thorough review of the Uvalde massacre: what set the stage for it, how it played out, how the response to it was bungled. We can hope that the lessons learned will help to save lives going forward. That’s cold comfort, though, for the grieving families, the broken community, on which a monster in human form has left his bloody mark.
What I find most distressing is the way the leadership and the spokespeople really misled the public and, it seems, the Governor of Texas. I've been in a couple of industrial incidents and know that it takes time to sort out what really happened. However, I refrained from going out with speculations or misinformation because someone needed an answer.
I've seen nothing that changed my mind that the best defense is controlled entry and a trained, armed officer on site unless you add a real auditing process.
There are almost 99,000 public schools in the US, so incidents like this are very rare. It's hard to keep the training and awareness level up. That is a leadership problem.