Originally published at: Report: 376 cops at Uvalde waiting, cowering and roughing up locals who wanted them to save the children | Boing Boing
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Related:
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@beschizza
More reliable source: Law enforcement failures in Uvalde shooting went far beyond local police | The Texas Tribune
Texas Tribune does good work and if they say they got eyes on the report- they did
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Also- coverage of what the families of the victims have to say
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Why did they need a key? Isn’t that one of the things their guns are for?
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Geez, they must need even more funding than we thought! Sorry guys, we’ll get right on that…
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Done, thank you. I invariably regret linking to or citing outlets like the NY Post and it can’t be fixed by using archive links.
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So infuriating that one of the few steps congress was actually willing to take in that new technically-better-than
-nothing-but-still-mostly-useless “gun control bill” last month was to provide even more money to put cops in schools.
Maybe the idea is to pack the schools so full with cops there won’t be any room left for a mass shooter to squeeze in.
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Police officers said they assumed [school district police chief] Arredondo was in command or did not know who was in charge…
But Arredondo told The Texas Tribune in June that he did not consider himself the incident commander… He said he assumed another officer outside would fill that role.
Rifuckingdiculous. 400(ish) cops from however many different agencies and nobody does anything because everybody thinks somebody else is in charge. Just standing around deferring to some imagined other authority. For a fucking hour. In all that time, apparently nobody got around to having a conversation along the lines of “Hey, you’re in command here, right? What should we do?” “Who me? No, I thought you were in charge, I’m barely even a real cop”.
“If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there,” Williams said at 11:56 a.m.… An officer in the hallway responded to Williams that “whoever was in charge would figure that out”
Oof.
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Apparently the “good guy with a gun” approach becomes even less effective for stopping mass shootings when you bring in more and more “good guys.”
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Unfortunately, I think that this behavior is probably pretty common. A whole bunch of people from a whole bunch of organizations, so nobody knows who’s in charge.
Obviously, the most blame needs to fall on those who arrived early and who, 1) didn’t act and 2) didn’t quickly establish who was in control. If they had established early who was in control, and definitively handed control off as more qualified individuals showed up, then maybe someone would have acted sooner.
Arredondo is the person who, even if he felt he was not the one in control, should have been the one to make sure that someone was in control.
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The thick blue agglomeration.
I would also have accepted “The thin blue spine”.
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So, 400 cops got extra danger money for doing fuck all, yeah?
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Fucking Bastards.
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Sure, when it’s an activity with no urgency and no pre defined plan of action. This was neither.
I think there’s actually more blame for those who arrived later. The later the person arrived, the more likely they were more qualified and more experienced. The inability to immediately identify that nobody was in charge and simply take over is inexcusable.
After this, our school system confirmed to us that the predefined plan is that whomever is there goes in immediately. That whomever shows up, they also go in immediately. There is no directive to wait for a leadership decision or direction. The only plan is, as long as there is an active shooter the plan is to immediately engage them. There is no scenario that involves letting the shooter move about without being engaged. Threat to the responding unit is not considered. Threat to the students and teachers will always be worse than the threat to the responding person.
Now, that’s clearly not the plan I would want for storming the castle or planning a war raid. But, responding to a school shooter isn’t either of those. It’s the only plan, it’s predefined, there’s no need for leadership. It’s the plan the parents were trying to follow and they were clearly less equipped for the task than any of the responding officers.
Every officer that arrived later and later failed at this worse than the ones before. They were not caught off guard, but had whatever delay of time to know where they were going.
This excuse tracks with the common excuse we’ve been seeing from all types lately. They were simply incompetent at their job and not actively trying to do the wrong thing. It’s never clear why this should be a better excuse. For some reason, people do seem to get away with it to often. If you’re incompetent, you really shouldn’t be doing whatever that job is.
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Stealing that.
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And things didn’t go particularly well there, either.
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