Uvalde School District Chief of Police Pete Arredondo is trying to spin his pathetic, incompetent reponse to the active shooter who invaded an Uvalde elementary school and methodically murdered children and teachers. Here is his explanation:
Only a locked classroom door stood between Pete Arredondo and a chance to bring down the gunman. It was sturdily built with a steel jamb, impossible to kick in.
He wanted a key. One goddamn key and he could get through that door to the kids and the teachers. The killer was armed with an AR-15. Arredondo thought he could shoot the gunman himself or at least draw fire while another officer shot back. Without body armor, he assumed he might die.
“The only thing that was important to me at this time was to save as many teachers and children as possible,” Arredondo said.
The chief of police for the Uvalde school district spent more than an hour in the hallway of Robb Elementary School. He called for tactical gear, a sniper and keys to get inside, holding back from the doors for 40 minutes to avoid provoking sprays of gunfire. When keys arrived, he tried dozens of them, but one by one they failed to work.
I am not Monday morning quarterbacking. In my previous life I supervised the U.S. State Department’s Anti-Terrorism Assistance Training Program. The courses offered included training foreign police SWAT teams. In 1992 I traveled to Quito, Ecuador with the head of Miami’s SWAT team, Bill O’Brien (Bill later became Chief of Police for Miami, Florida) to conduct an evaluation of Ecuador’s SWAT team (Grupo de Intervencion y Rescate). I learned a lot from Bill. (I also learned to not go jogging with him in Quito, which sits at 9,350 feet above sea level. He almost killed me, but I survived the run.)
Why did Pete Arredondo not grab a shotgun loaded with slugs to breach the door? I find it hard to believe that none of the police on scene or nearby did not have a shotgun. Here is what American Cop has to say about the utility of a shotgun as a breaching tool:
When it is properly employed, a shotgun can provide teams with safer and faster door breaching than other methods of breaching. It is not limited to just doors. Shotgun breach can also be employed to breach iron-barred windows, and take out sliding glass doors and defeat padlocks.
Utilizing a shotgun for breaching offers tactical teams several advantages. It is quicker than manual breaching, jamb spreading or ramming and is safer and requires less training than thermal and explosive entry.
Uvalde’s School District Chief of Police has more questions to answer. The failure of the Chief and his officers to act creatively to deal with the unexpected may be a lack of training and finance. But they were not the only ones on scene. Uvalde also had a Chief of Police for the city. Where the hell was he? Surely he had some resources to bring to bear on the crisis. The goal of this investigation should not be trying to find a scapegoat. The goal should be identifying the failures in decision making and tactics that could have changed the outcome and saved more lives.ould have changed the outcome and saved more lives.
Interesting. What type of cartridge filling is used? Any danger of ricochets?
A slug will get the job done. This is from the American Cop site:
Frangible breaching rounds, such as the Royal Arms TESAR-1 Copper Frangibles shown, are designed to disintegrate into a fine powder as they defeat the door mechanisms or padlock hasps, minimizing the potential for ricochet or injury to any individual on the other side of the door.
And how many of the kids in the room would have been wounded or killed? There were no hasps on those doors. They have complex locking systems because they are designed to prevent someone from getting inside.
You shoot the lock. That’s the point. Standing outside doing nothing got more kids killed.
Thanks for the explanation, Larry. Next question: Aren’t the police at Uvalde given this training, considering the increasing school shootings?
Small town police. Not a lot of money.
Larry, bear in mind that this not a wooden residential door. It was a reinforced steel door. Maybe buckshot would have penetrated it or slugs but then again, maybe not. Some of Ramo’s rounds may have gotten through the door or they may have come through the wall by it. Bear in mind that this was NOT a SWAT team. In fact, they called for SWAT. Allegedly, the UVALDE police had one. Maybe they were there. The real issue here is that the media spun a yarn as they usually do. I have seen articles claiming that the police left the building. Actually, they were right there all the time and they evacuated the rest of the building, or most of it at least. This man was not some cop from a headquarters somewhere, he was local, had attended that same school and visited it probably every day. His cousin’s wife was one of the teacher’s who died and her husband, his cousin, died of a heart attack a few days later. Second-guessing is easy. Dealing with reality is hard.
You miss the point. A shotgun breaches a steel door. I am certain this was not a bank vault quality steel door. Shooting the lock is the key to opening.
Please watch the video. It shows how this is supposed to be done.
You shoot the locks?
I am a long time out of this but once upon a time you removed the hinge side.
Many good reasons why back then, doubt that has changed now be that your school or an Embassy.
IA (immediate action) was widely passed down from the Military to local policing Worldwide 40 years ago. Why would this not still be understood?
101. You show up and if no one is shooting at you you make a plan (if they are shooting at you, shoot back and fight your way in).
The idea was you have two minutes to come up with a plan of what to do if things went bad (hostage was shot etc).
It was basic and to the point, normally direct assult be that by door, window, wall, roof or floor. Still within two minutes you had a plan to do something to try to stop what may happen.
If nothing was happening and loss of life was not imminent, you spent every minute making a better plan to end the situation while getting more support in to give you more options.
No disrespect to the people involved but something went wrong here!
Wonder if the defined police and send in the social workers had anything to do with the hesitation or if it was just sheer incompetence and cowardice.
You don’t want police scared of its own shadow and clueless.
LMAO these are the guys (The police ) that the government is planning to send to take away OUR guns? Good luck with that.
Jeffery Snider’s quote of “call for a cop, call for an ambulance, and call for a pizza. See who shows up first.”
…remains apropos.
Blaming someone else for not showing up “on time” to an in-progress gun fight is a deflection from personal responsibility and duty of those adults who had custody of the children.
Consider who has the “duty to protect” of those minors in one’s custody. (Here’s a hint: it is NOT the police.)
Note the “teacher” who advised his wards to “pretend to be asleep” is now publicly calling the unnamed third responders “cowards” (that is, he is group-bashing) when in fact he, as the first responder on-scene, “played dead.”
Consider the definition of moral cowardice…
WTF? Are you calling the unarmed hostage “teacher” a first responder?
Notwithstanding your use of code phrases, “unarmed” or armed, or [whatever] has no bearing and does not define whether a party is first, second, or [whatever]. (Unless you believe persons—hostage or otherwise—are incapable of making a response without being classed as “first responder.”)
Getting beyond propaganda code phrases, the party that responds first is a “first responder.” The party that responds second is the “second responder.” And so on…
The fact remains that the “teacher,” when confronted by the gunman “responded” first. His response was as indicated above.
Excellent video, thanks!