My main premises:
1. This incident reflects an absolute failure of training.
2. This incident reflects an absolute failure of leadership. Uvalde Chief Arredondo is a disgrace.
3. Teachers and students in this incident are absolute heroes.
Here's why I think this:
Every active shooter/school shooter incident in training and in reality is an absolute shitshow! The prevailing quote in incident management is "managed chaos". School shooting incident management contrasts this, and the efforts are not to control the chaos at all, just know it will be there while direct action/neutralization/smoke the bad guy in the face prevails above all. Save the babies! This includes stepping over victims, not addressing victims shouts of help until the threat is addressed. Bullets in the bad guy are the best band-aids at this juncture in the incident. In unfortunate circumstances where the police don't have keys, key cards, traditional ways of gaining entry, an officer plows a squad into the front gates to the school in hopes to at least create a crack to get in. This is the mentality of training being properly drilled into law enforcement response to a school shooter.
On the other side of this co-op solution between LE and the school, the staff and students are trained to barricade or evacuate as they deem the most appropriate response based upon their boots on the ground intel and assessment on the location of the shooter.
Gunshots right outside the door?" Barricade.
Gunshots on the other end of the school? GTFO and rally point.
Weaponized classroom countermeasures employed if the shooter starts in a room as a student or gains entry. One example is a barrage of a hundred cans of soup at the shooter who gained entry. Stick him in the eye with the flag pole, baseball bat to the head, etc. "Doing something is better than nothing" is now taught. The duck & cover drills where students just wait to get shot are over. Long gone old training like the duck & cover nuclear attack drills.
POLICE TRAINING FAILURE
Police agencies across the nation, since even Columbine, have addressed the critical need for contingency training & proper response for active/school shooters. Reinforced by school shootings in succession of Columbine. So, how did Uvalde land in a vacuum/ignorance void of these longstanding efforts? There have been some really impressive programs, SOPs, and equipment innovations to address a school shooter scenarios. Uvalde incident response/lack of response blows my mind in this regard. (This training to police, and especially the small town bubbas, gives them a sense of purpose and focus outside of the mundane shit of road tax extortion and tall grass tickets. The training is excellent in it's tangent benefit realized here)
Points taken from the video that support this premise:
- Disconnect in training between school & officers. Those teachers and kids were still following some of the training they received. Staying quiet? Little kids laying in pools of blood and looking at their classmates slaughtered, with a bad guy in the room, and especially their leader, their teacher shot? My God those kids are beyond heroic!
- This leads into the next point of the reacting (Not responding, since "response" denotes well planned thought and actions) officers confused about the lack of sound and reasonably expecting there were no victims in the room with the shooter. If the officers were trained properly and effectively, this quiet state of the room would still make sense that children are present and the direct attack response to take out the shooter would have been executed in the first minutes of the incident.
- Lack of this training makes the barricaded subject assumption plausible in the minds of the officers on scene. So, they default to their highest level of training or instruction on this scenario. This is completely understandable at this point in the incident. There was still a reasonable disconnect in mindset also from a traffic crash on the roadway to a barricaded subject in the school that some of the officers mentioned in their depositions. Throw in the reasonable thinking of same officers that end of school year classes might be out of the room engaged in field trips and such. With their lack of training these state of mind statements are plausible at this point in the incident.
- Officers stated there was no chain of command and no incident command center established. Properly trained officers wouldn't wait for this to be established. Majority of school shootings are done in 5 minutes. Bad guy suicides or gets taken out by proper police response. So, the improperly trained/pure lack of trained officer are doing their drone roles of awaiting instructions from command. This really kills me as all police officers should be generalists and not specialists. Just take out the leader and the rest will faulter comes to mind like the Russian Army or the WWII Japanese Army philosophy where leadership is not delegated throughout the ranks.
LEADERSHIP FAILURE
This Chief Arredondo - to say nothing about the litany of complacent acts and negligence made neon from this incident, he is the fault for lack of proper training of his personnel. He is also a coward for not owning up to his failures by stating he thought their training was adequate to handle this incident. Absolutely bullshit!
- "None of us have ever been in this type of situation". Uttered multiple times by multiple officers. Evidence of NO training for the shit sandwich/CHAOS expectation that gets addressed in proper training mentioned previously. Even one role played scenario based training event would have helped this "helpless" sentiment expressed by the officers on scene. Remember the one officer pleading for better training?
- In the infancy of the incident I thought the chief was responding according to proper training. He was telling his officers to "get inside" and he appeared to be direct threat neutralization minded. I know he got fumbled up with the quiet classroom and barricaded subject thing with the rest of the officers on scene, but when he was given the information that there were victims in the room and the shooter still present, he should have relayed that information and he didn't. Sadly, I really don't think it would have mattered since they were going about the notion the classroom door was locked. However, with proper contingency preparation and planning the locked door thing would have been addressed and officers would have a master key or in some schools, keycards, to make this obstacle a non-issue in regards to entry.
- So, the tickle down of more fuck ups after the major fuck up puts the chief clearing the rest of the building that is done after the threat is neutralized.
OVERALL QUESTIONS OF A SHITSHOW
- Was the school also not enforcing the school shooter training they received? It was reported the shooter gained entry via propped open door that wasn't to be propped open.
- One officer stated "I didn't bother to throw on my rifle plates at all" Other officers claim .223 can cut through armor "like butter". Well, they're called rifle plates for a reason, right? Because their rated to defeat rifle rounds, right?
- The safety commission spokeswoman said, "The door was likely unlocked the entire time". Well, this is an assumption I guess nobody will know either way. I would hope the commission wouldn't use this against anybody, just as I hope the propped open door teacher wouldn't have that held over their head. It was a training failure. If trained properly, teachers and police would be much less likely, if ever make the mistakes they did.
- An officer on scene remarked, "None of us thought this would happen in the small town, but then immediately followed that statement with, "We always said it's not a matter of if, it's when". That could have just been nervous utterance, but it does not look good.