Uvalde report out

A

Aguila Blanca

Staff
I considered posting this under Tactics and Training but most of us here aren't LEOs and won't be responding to school shooting, so I'll put it here.

The Department of Justice has issued a report detailing the failings of the police response at the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting. It's worth a read, and should be required reading for every member of every school board in the country.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24366914-uvalde-report
 
Holy smokes 610 pages. This one will take a while to digest. Tragic.......... While I despise "Hollywood stars" involvement and input in our lives, this was Matthew Mcconaughey's home town. He gets a pass from me in that respect. I could not stand silent in the same circumstance, regardless, I would be sharing my opinion and shouting actually.
 
Those of us that live in larger population areas have come to expect well trained and prepared Law Enforcement. However, I suspect, many smaller areas just don't have the resources to properly prepare for events like this. While, I agree, that waiting so long to enter is unforgivable, but I suspect these Officers just did not know what to do.
 
BarryLee said:
Those of us that live in larger population areas have come to expect well trained and prepared Law Enforcement. However, I suspect, many smaller areas just don't have the resources to properly prepare for events like this. While, I agree, that waiting so long to enter is unforgivable, but I suspect these Officers just did not know what to do.
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I respectfully disagree. I know a number of police officers and retired police officers who work or worked for small towns. It doesn't matter what size the department is -- ever since Columbine the training for police has been for the first responder(s) to head for the gunfire and engage the shooter. Every single LEO I've talked to has been thoroughly disgusted by what happened at Parklands and then at Uvalde.

Remember -- at the time of the shooting, Uvalde had only recently gone through an active shooter drill. When the balloon went up, they didn't just throw the playbook away, they shredded it and burned the shreds.
 
Leadership starts at the top, and it appears that in this situation NO ONE was in actual command, or at least no one stepped up and gave clear orders.

It seems everyone was standing around waiting for someone to start giving orders, and short of those orders and conflicting orders, no one did anything.
People who tried to do something were stopped because of conflicting orders, so no one did anything.

In Florida a police officer just plain failed to act due to who knows what reason...confusion, cowardliness, or just brain vapor lock.
In Texas it seems to have been a chaotic command that failed to give clear orders, a command structure unsure of what to do, and inertia on everyone's part.

It's taken law enforcement time to come to grips with the new threat.
In years past these were seen as barricaded suspects that had to be negotiated with and talked into giving up.
In those cases the police were trained to slow everything down because time was on their side, and the longer it went the better the chance was no one would get hurt.

Now it's someone out to kill as many people as possible before they kill themselves are get killed by the police.
Now, the need is to get inside, find the shooter, and kill them as fast as possible to limit casualties.

A major failure in crisis situations is that people who have no authority but some rank start giving orders, and others give conflicting orders.
The result is that no one knows what to do or what orders to follow.

When Daryl Gates started up the first SWAT Team in the LAPD, the procedure was that when SWAT was called out, the SWAT commander would officially accept command of the situation and no one else was to interfere.\

In one of the first SWAT call-outs, a captain who shouldn't even have been there starting giving bad orders to the SWAT commander that would have made it worse.
When the commander told the captain that what the procedure was, the captain told the commander to follow his orders or he'd take his badge.

Legend is that Chief Gates showed up and heard what the captain was doing, Gates took HIS badge.
 
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Legend is that Chief Gates showed up and heard what the captain was doing, Gates took HIS badge.
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This would be the same Gates who ordered the police out of LA where the riots over the Rodney King beating were happening???

So, now we have an official report (600+ pages??) telling us what was basically obvious and common knowledge a few days after the shooting.

Our tax dollars at work....again....badly....:rolleyes:
 
Gate was roundly hated in LA in his later term in office, and he botched?? the King rioting.
But he was an effective chief and did introduce a lot of what is now standard police work like SWAT teams.
He was old school, and the LA-Hollywood set really hated that and eventually got him out.

You get the government and police department you pay for and want, whether you really understand that's what you get by voting for ineffective people.
 
Pages 18-19 provide a summary that leaves me with the impression it was a leadership failure, not necessarily a failure of the individual law enforcement officers being too frightened to do their job.
 
I'm not going to wade through the thing, but based on what was public knowledge in the aftermath, it was clearly a leadership and "attitude" failure.

People didn't act because they didn't get orders to act, and some people who did try to act reported that they were stopped by others, because there were no orders.

The "attitude" I'm referring to is not acting without specific orders, could put your job at risk. It's a chaotic situation, You (the individual officer) might think you know what going on, but you might not be right, and acting on your own could possibly make things worse.

This sort of thing can be a "damned if you do, and double dammed if you don't" kind of thing, and can also be a human nature vs training and doctrine thing.

I don't assess cowardice to the officers present, but I do assess misfeasance to the various leaderships for not having their act together.
 
44AMP, my impression of your post is that you made a 0.00 MOA shot right into your target. Fantastic. Thank you. And I am not a LEO.
 
I absolutely agree that you get the government and police force you want and pay for, whether you understand what you're doing or not.
 
Uvalde will live forever as the worst law enforcement failure ever. And a permanent stain on Texas law enforcement. "One Riot, One Ranger" yeah, right............
 
"Uvalde will live forever as the worst law enforcement failure ever. And a permanent stain on Texas law enforcement. "One Riot, One Ranger" yeah, right............"

No, there have been some real wifferdills in the past.
Maybe not as many people killed, but some just inexcusable incidents.

A number of early FBI mistaken shootings, a New Orleans shooter on a roof top that saw several officers shot by their own ricochets fired long after the bad guy was dead, and any number of cases of innocents, office's, and bad guys shot during non-SWAT entries.
And that's just a very few.

Humans make mistakes, sometimes inexcusable.
 
I would like to think if I was in that situation with children being killed, my job security would not be anywhere close to my top priority. I don't think that is a harsh take either.
 
zincwarrior said:
I think this is the key to what happened.
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I think it is the Cornerstone to the foundation, not the key that opens the lock.

Until they can excise and prevent reentry of the same degree and magnitude of incompetence, mismanagement and doubling down of clearly incorrect thinking this will happen again. Until this can be corrected the leadership will continue to fall over, over and over again. In this case children were caught and killed in the crossfire of this mismanagement. Who will it happen to next? What strategies and training will they use to better guide, strategize, reformulate, rebuild into a better faster stronger and more efficient police force to deal with the evil that lives in the heart of man?

In a perfect world the police would have developed a clearly defined plan and utilized clear tactical strategies, assembled in superior numbers and training and equiptment, to go in and HUNT this terrible DEMON and KILL it!!

Clearly legislating evil out of the heart of man does not work. Clearly mandating courage in a frightening situation does not work. It takes a certain type of anger to run forcefully into a terrible situation, especially when you know you can get trapped and be killed.

This is a really difficult question, and I think I would be asking too much for any of the leadership involved to maintain any sort of self-awareness, and honesty in the same breath.

I would expect they will scatter like cockroaches when you turn the light on.

The shame they feel for this and any failure like this must be unbearable. But maybe I am projecting my emotions on to them. No I did not read a 500 page document, I'm not going to, I have enough books to read.

Some truths are self-evident, and this is one of them.
 
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