Move toward the gunfire and take out the shooter.
Today’s “active shooter” protocol, a lesson learned from the deadly Columbine shooting more than 20 years ago, did not happen at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High on Feb. 14, 2018. And it didn’t happen at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, where 19 children and two teachers were massacred in an attack that lasted more than an hour.
The incident commander made a bad call by not giving the order to breach the locked door where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos carried out his rampage, a top Texas state police official admitted Friday. Instead, the on-scene commander decided to wait for more officers and safety equipment to arrive.
“Obviously, based on the information we have, there were children in that classroom that were still at risk,” Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told reporters at a tense news conference Friday. “From the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. Period.”
Throughout the attack, teachers and children repeatedly called 911 begging for help from police, including one girl who pleaded: “Please send the police now.”
The police arrived quickly, but did not try to get past the locked door to the gunman, instead waiting for backup from federal agents. It was those agents who killed the gunman at 12:50 p.m., more than an hour after the shooting started.
‘In the line of fire’
At Columbine, it took police hours to reach the wounded because cops followed old rules when it came to school shootings: Surround the building, set up a perimeter and contain the damage.
Those rules have long since been abandoned. But the current protocols don’t necessarily prevent a delayed response, experts say.
Dennis Kenney, another former cop and professor at John Jay College, was hesitant to criticize the decisions made by the officers in Texas who responded to the shooting.
“I don’t want to get into the position of second-guessing what the officers did on scene,” he said. “I wasn’t there. It’s hard from a distance to critique the response in the short term when you weren’t there and don’t know all the facts. As you said, the story is evolving.”
If the incident commander thought the gunman was barricaded in a room with no survivors, the decision to stand down makes sense, Kenney said.
“If you don’t believe you have an active shooter and the suspect is barricaded, then you have time,” he said. “There’s no point in rushing recklessly. If you’ve got victims in the line of fire, that makes no sense. In an active shooter situation, the longer you wait, the more people get killed. You want to eliminate the threat as quickly as possible.”
But cops are human like the rest of us, with their own fears and instinct for survival, says Eugene O’Donnell, a law professor with John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who was a police officer and prosecutor earlier in his career.
“Cops are civilians with guns who have had minimal training,” he said. “Some of them are heroic. But not all. You’re asking for Zeus-like cops to speed to these scenes and be ready to put down mass killers. And cops are being told to stay out of trouble by the courts, the media, the culture. That’s their alpha and their omega.”
Culture of critics
In today’s political climate, many are just trying to make it to the next day and not wind up on the front page, O’Donnell said. That means officers might not be so eager to rush in if they’re worried about being criticized later for missing the gunman and shooting a kid.
“Most departments are trying to get through the day where they’re not the story,” he said. “If one child gets killed by police, what do you think the front page story is going to be? That will eclipse the event.”
The culture of critics that weigh in nationwide after a school shooting has taken a toll on police morale, O’Donnell said.
“The local police are an insurance policy in times of a crisis,” he said. “And you can’t beat them up for a decade and then ask, ‘Where were you when the shooting started?’ All of the energies are aimed at avoiding conflict and controversy. All of these departments are running for cover at this point.”
In Texas, the local cops couldn’t get the job done, O’Donnell noted.
“The chasm between what you need from the police and what you’re going to get is going to be Grand Canyon-esque,” he said. “It’s ironic that the Border Patrol had to be front and center on this. Policing is presently in disarray with the police focusing on not being the villains. That is bad on a daily basis. Terrible when a crisis comes to town.”
Uvalde: May 24, 2022
At a news conference Friday in Texas, McCraw offered the following timeline about the Uvalde shooting:
The gunman arrived at 11:28 a.m. and began firing into school windows from the parking lot.
The school’s resource officer was not on campus but heard the 911 call about a man with a gun at the school. He drove to the school and passed the gunman, who was hiding in the parking lot.
At 11:32 a.m. the gunman walked into the school, entering through a door left propped open by a teacher. One minute later, he began firing into a classroom.
Two minutes later, three police officers entered the school and walked toward the gunfire, but retreated after two of the officers were grazed by bullets.
At 11:51 a.m. U.S. Border Patrol agents started to arrive. But they did not breach the door and kill the shooter until nearly an hour later at 12:50 p.m.
The incident commander, who is chief of police for the school district, told Border Patrol agents to hold back from confronting the gunman because he believed no kids were at risk inside the classroom, McCraw said.
By 12:03 p.m., 19 officers were standing in the hallway.
The incident commander decided the active shooter had become a barricaded suspect. He decided to wait for more officers and special safety equipment to arrive that would shield officers when they entered the room.
“There’s no excuse for that, but I wasn’t there,” McCraw said. “We have a lot of questions. We’re seeking answers.”
McCraw laid out what should have happened: “Every officer keeps shooting until the suspect is dead, period.”
Parkland: Feb. 14, 2018
In Parkland, a series of failures by police and school staff led to the loss of 17 lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.
For 58 minutes, no one took charge while Nikolas Cruz unleashed a barrage of bullets on a campus where students were stranded with nowhere to hide.
At 2:19 p.m., security monitor Andrew Medina spotted Cruz walking through an unguarded gate with a rifle bag 20 minutes before dismissal. He radioed another campus monitor, but did not go after Cruz or call a Code Red to put the school on lockdown.
Two minutes later, Cruz fired his first shots in the hallway of the first floor.
Another campus monitor heard gunfire and raced up to the second floor, then ducked into a janitor’s closet.
Cruz walked the hallway, shooting through the windows at people in his line of sight.
At the same time, Deputy Scot Peterson — the school resource officer and only armed cop on campus — met with Medina, got into his golf cart and drove toward the gunfire.
Once outside the building, Peterson drew his gun but failed to go in. Instead, he took cover between two other buildings while Cruz stalked the second floor.
Instead of ordering deputies toward the building, Peterson used his radio to order a school lockdown. More deputies arrived, but hung back even though they could hear the gunfire.
At 2:34 p.m. Peterson — still sheltering by a building — told a Coral Springs officer the shooter was on the second or third floor. But Cruz had walked out of the building more than six minutes earlier.
An hour and 20 minutes after his rampage began, Cruz was found wandering along a neighborhood street by a Coconut Creek officer and placed under arrest.
Now, jury selection is underway in Broward County in the sentencing trial for Cruz, who pleaded guilty in the murders of 17 and the attempted murders of 17 others. The jury will decide between life in prison, or death.
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