I know it is the weekend and I try to keep it light and informative…..but this story broke and I feel that my readers deserve to see the BS as it unfolds.
There have been many accusations and recriminations of the Tuvalde police SWAT team for there inaction during the recent school shooting…..and now the police chief has spoken after many days of silence.
In his first extensive public comments since the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas, school district police chief Pete Arredondo tells the Texas Tribune he did not consider himself the incident commander, though that’s the way the state Department of Public Safety has described him, and that he did not instruct police to avoid breaching the classroom, as has also been reported. “I didn’t issue any orders,” Arredondo says. “I called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door.” He said the classroom door, which had a steel jamb, could not be kicked in, and he waited on dozens of keys to open it, none of which worked. It was 77 minutes after the shooting began that police finally unlocked the door
Arredondo firmly pushed back on the criticism that has been leveled at him and other officers on the scene: “Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” he says. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. Our objective was to save as many lives as we could, and the extraction of the students from the classrooms by all that were involved saved over 500 of our Uvalde students and teachers before we gained access to the shooter and eliminated the threat.” But law enforcement experts the Tribune spoke to also questioned why Arredondo had no radio; he left both his police and campus radios outside when he entered the school. He tells the paper he wanted both hands free for accurately firing at the shooter, and was also afraid the radios would slow him down.
Even if he and other officers in the hallway outside the classroom had had radios, Arredondo’s lawyer says they would have turned them off because they were trying to remain quiet so as not to give their position away to the gunman. No one passed along crucial information to Arredondo, including 911 calls that were coming from inside the classroom, and he continued to believe the incident had become a barricaded hostage situation. He says he considered himself a responder on the front lines and assumed someone else had command of the larger situation, and he recounts sending officers to break windows in adjacent classrooms to evacuate children. Read the whole piece at the Tribune. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports officers at the scene waited more than an hour for shields to arrive, even though they were informed children inside the classroom needed medical attention.
Okay my thoughts….why have a SWAT team if they cannot act independently to a dangerous situation?
The inaction caused children to die….that cannot be justified or explained away.
And yet I do not see any justice for the dead…..those children died because the SWAT was in a circle jerk waiting for the proper time to intervene.
That is pathetic.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
In Saner Thought 