While 18-year-old Salvador Ramos was in adjoining classrooms, a group of 19 law enforcement officers stood in front of the school’s classroom for about 50 minutes, waiting for room keys and tactical equipment, CNN reported. Meanwhile, children in the classroom repeatedly called 911 and asked for help, Texas officials said.
Texas Public Safety Colonel Stephen McCrow admitted mistakes in police response to Tuesday’s mass shooting. The commander of the scene, who is also the head of the school police in Uwalde, “believes he has moved from an active shooter to a barricaded site,” McCrow said.
“It was the wrong decision. Point. There is no excuse for that,” McCrow said of the supervisor’s call not to confront the shooter.
“Every second counts” during active shootings
Thor Ils, executive director of the National Association of Tactical Officers (NTAO), said the commander’s determination was “100% wrong”. The barricade is urging officials to slow down, analyze whether the subject is alone and negotiate, he said.
“If you are in a classroom with innocent victims and I know they were shot, I have to commit to you. “Even if you stop firing, I’ll enter the room so we can start managing life … saving money for all potential victims,” Ayles said.
The delayed police response in Uwalde runs counter to the well-established, often taught active shooter protocol established after the 1999 Columbine School shooting, Ils said.
“Even under fire, officers are trained to deal with this threat because every second counts,” said Jonathan Wacrow, a law enforcement analyst with CNN. “What we saw here was that the delay cost the lives of the children, period.
As the Columbine shooting unfolded, Colorado police waited about an hour after a shooting broke out at the school for SWAT teams to arrive, during which two young men killed 13 people.
Prior to Columbine, law enforcement agencies were usually trained in tactical principles called ICE, which meant isolation (suspect), detention (suspect), and evacuation (scene). Once involved in the ICE protocol, police will request a specialized unit of tactical SWAT teams that will respond and contact the suspects or suspects, according to Eells.
The Columbine shooting has forced law enforcement to reorient its focus in response to situations of active shooters. After Columbine, police began acting on behalf of those in danger instead of defending themselves, Eells said. The first responders also began training in tactical training to prepare for active firing, taking some of the responsibility from SWAT teams, he added.
There are no national guidelines for standardizing law enforcement training and response in active shooter situations. The NTAO was the first to develop an active curriculum and shooting courses that have since been adopted or modified by other training organizations across the country, Eells said.
The curriculum includes safety priorities to guide decision-making as officers respond to active shootings, based on a person’s proximity to injury or death. They have been instructed in all 50 states, according to Eells.
Each training gives priority to engaging the subject first. The list of security priorities considers hostages and innocent civilians a top priority, followed by law enforcement and then suspects, Yiles said.
As their tactics evolved, law enforcement acknowledged that waiting even a few seconds to react during an active shooter scenario was potentially catastrophic, Ayles said. This prompted police training organizations to develop a strategy for faster response. Now officers have been taught to do everything possible to stop the shooter as quickly as possible and even bypass the aid of the wounded, Ils added.
“Unfortunately, this is a continuous and uninterrupted learning process,” he said. “There is a very good chance that there will be some critical lessons learned from Uvalde, which may then find their way into our recommendations on how you can change your answer.”
The case shows how a quick reaction saves lives
Eells cited a shooting in 2013 at a high school in Colorado that shows how a quick police response can lead to very different results. The shooting happened within two minutes, during which a high school man lit a Molotov cocktail and fired his rifle with a pump at the school, shooting a deadly 17-year-old girl.
But the attack could have resulted in many more casualties had it not been for the quick response of a deputy sheriff who worked as a school resource officer at the school, CNN reported earlier. After learning of the threat, the deputy ran to the shooter, introduced himself as the county’s deputy sheriff, and told the people to come down. While holding the stage, the shooter took his own life.
Ramos did not face police before entering the school, MRF regional director Victor Escalon said on Thursday.
While active shooter protocols are widely recognized among the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies, the main problem is the decentralized nature of police standards at the local, state and federal levels, according to Maria Haberfeld, a professor of police science at John Jay College.
“The way the Uwalde officers reacted was in line with the fact that they probably did not have the proper training,” Haberfeld said. Local police agencies tend to rely more on specialized tactical units, she said.
All Texas law enforcement officers are trained to follow the guidelines for working with active shooters. In March, the consolidated independent school district of Uwalde hosted active shooting training for law enforcement officers in the Uwalde district, according to its Facebook page.
The manual reads: “The first priority of the police officer is to move and face the attacker. This may include bypassing the wounded and not responding to cries for help from children.”
The list of security priorities, Eels said, would serve to guide officers at this time. The decision to wait in the hallway instead of breaking through the classroom door keeps innocent civilians in danger while benefiting the shooter, he said.
“The whole time they were in the hallway,” Ells added, “even while evacuating children, they had to deal with the suspects at the same time.”
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