Uvalde massacre response was a cluster
“Mistakes were made” is almost as cruel a joke as “thoughts and prayers.” Yet it remains a staple of post-tragedy explainifying. In Uvalde, Texas, post-shooting investigations and recriminations continue. Nineteen children and two teachers died.
Three minutes after the gunman began shooting children and teachers at Robb Elementary on May 24, officers arriving on scene had enough equipment and firepower to storm the classrooms. But didn’t. They waited an hour and 14 minutes.
“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander,” Steven McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, told a special Senate committee in Austin on Tuesday. McGraw called the police response “an abject failure.”
“Mistakes were made. It should have never happened that way. And we can’t allow that ever to happen in our profession. This set our profession back a decade is what it did.”
Ruben Ruiz, a police officer for the school district, was on scene at the school and received a call from his wife, teacher Eva Mireles. Mireles called Ruiz to say “she had been shot and was dying.”
“And what happened to him, is he tried to move forward into the hallway,” McCraw said. “He was detained and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.”
The more we learn, the worse it gets.
Revelations have trickled out in the press: The New York Times has described officers’ doubts about the decision to wait; breakdowns in communications and tactics; and the fact that officers held off from the confrontation even though they knew people were injured, and possibly dying, inside. The San Antonio Express-News reported that there is no evidence that officers tried the doors on rooms 111 and 112 — contradicting a key assertion by the Uvalde schools police chief, Pete Arredondo, who told The Texas Tribune that officers tried the doors, found them locked and had to wait for a master key to unlock them. On Monday evening, the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE-TV revealed that the officers, in effect, had more than enough firepower, equipment and motivation to breach the classrooms.
Arrendondo, the commander, “decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children,” McGraw said. Arrendondo delayed confronting the gunman for over an hour to wait “for a key that was never needed.”
Everybody makes mistakes. Most do not cost others their lives. Victims not already dead bled to death on the classroom floor.
Outside, “armed to the teeth, the good guys are just standing around,” writes the Washington Post’s David Von Drehle. Compounding the problem, Drehle adds, “officers were quickly on the scene from at least four agencies: the Uvalde school district police, the Uvalde city police, the Uvalde county sheriff and — eventually — the U.S. Border Patrol. Texas Rangers arrived at some point, as did the FBI. That’s six agencies in a city of about 16,000 people.”
Drehle continues:
This proliferation of jurisdictions is a distinctly American problem. According to one ballpark guess, the United States is home to around 18,000 distinct police agencies. Sweden has one. Canada spans a continent, like the United States. Canada comprises local and provincial governments gathered into a federated whole, like the United States. But Canada has fewer than 200 agencies.
That’s right: The United States has close to 100 police agencies for each one in Canada.
Perhaps that’s because we have so many guns in this country. More guns in private hands, more guns in the hands of police. More freedom for us. More profits for gun marketers.
We seem unable to stop the proliferation of any of it. Even in small ways. The gun control bill advancing in the Senate “falls short of the sweeping gun control measures Democrats have long demanded.” The gun lobby is pushing back against efforts to close the “boyfriend loophole” and managed to weaken language in the bill to close it.
At this point, we’ll just accept “eight percent of the hundred percent package we need,” says longtime gun-control advocate, Cliff Schecter, in a commentary. (Subscribe here.)
Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans refused to accept Steven Dettelbach, President Biden’s nominee to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, deadlocking 11-11 on the nomination days ago. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) filed a discharge petition to bring the nomination to the floor where confirmation is expected.
The ATF hasn’t had a permanent director in seven years. The position, which has long faced opposition from gun rights groups who don’t want anyone confirmed to run the agency charged with regulating them, has only had one Senate-confirmed director in 16 years.
Ahead of Dettelbach’s committee vote, chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said a vote to confirm him is a vote to make the nation safer. He noted that Dettelbach, who has a two-decade career as a Justice Department prosecutor, has been endorsed by virtually every major law enforcement organization in the country.
“Seven years, no leadership,” Durbin said. “For stability, for responsiveness, for accountability and for agency morale, this is long overdue.”
Out of control equals freedom in this country. Freedom to kill and be killed.
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