Why did it take so long for police to engage the Uvalde school shooter?

 

A mourner at a memorial for the victims in the attack. AP. 

Police took 90 minutes to put down the attacker in the Uvalde school shooting, raising questions about the response. AP. Disturbing video showed parents begging police to engage the shooter. The shooter had crashed his truck and was shooting outside the school for 12 minutes before entering the school. Early reports said that school police officer engaged the attacker but those reports were false. Police arrived about when the attacker entered the school but did not engage him for 4 additional minutes and then fled when the shooter opened fire on them. No other officers attempted to engage the shooter until a Border Patrol SWAT team arrived nearly an hour later. The Border Patrol team was delayed due to a locked door and had to wait until someone brought a key. 

My Comment:

I know I am breaking my long standing personal rule to not cover mass shootings on this blog unless there is something very important to discuss. The police response to this shooting is that exception. I still don't like covering this incident as I have long believed that the main reason that these shootings cluster up the way they do is because of media coverage. This post is not about the shooter and I have no desire to name him or speculate on his motives. 

But the police response here seems baffling. Even ignoring the rest of the coverage I have seen and relying only on the AP article, the attack here was preventable. First of all, how on earth did the attacker manage to get into the school in the first place? He was outside shooting for 12 minutes and nobody thought to lock the doors? Why was the door open in the first place?

The video is damning. The police are spending more time with the parents than they are confronting the shooter. Indeed, they cuff one of them for simply wanting to rescue their child. I can understand regrouping and maybe even waiting for tactical equipment, but in the video I saw the cops were well armed and should have been prepared to enter the building. 

I don't understand why they would wait for an entire hour. The suspect was contained for the moment but there were still kids in that school that could have been rescued. Taking him out should have been the number one priority but instead the cops were dealing with the crowd. 

This goes against everything we know about mass shooters. The most important thing is to confront the shooter as fast as possible. Many times when you do so the shooter will flee or kill himself. That didn't happen this time, but if the police had been more aggressive they could have put the shooter down and saved some lives. 

They failed to do so and because of that 21 people died, 19 of them children. At least some of those people would have been saved if they police had been more aggressive. If the shooter was busy shooting it out with the police he wouldn't have been able to shoot children. And if he was killed quicker it's possible that some of the wounded victims could have been saved instead of bleeding out for 90 minutes. 

The sad thing is that we know that rushing the attacker is the right thing to do because the last major school shooting, the Parkland Shooting, was made way worse by the fact that the police failed to confront the shooter. This was hard earned experience and it is insane to me that the police in Uvalde did not learn the lesson from that and other shootings. 

This is going to of course lead to conspiracy theories that this shooting was allowed to happen on purpose. I don't know if I buy that but there needs to be an explanation here why the response time was so bad. Incompetence is a much better explanation over some dark plot, but considering the fact that the shooter was supposedly known to law enforcement and the massive gun control push that happened right after, it's not surprising that people think that this was allowed to happen on purpose. 

I do think that this does hurt the gun control case that we should rely on police to protect ourselves and our children. Police don't always respond well to these kinds of attacks and if the teachers had been armed they might have had a better outcome. And had the parents of these children been armed they might have been able to rush the attacker a lot quicker. It might not have worked but at the very least they would have distracted the shooter, perhaps saving lives of children. 

We absolutely need to figure out why the police failed here. I know bashing the police is a major problem right now, but even defenders of cops are scratching their heads at this one. Mass shootings and other high casualty attacks are not going away any time soon and the only thing we can really do about it is deal with it when it happens. If police aren't up to that task we need to start looking at better alternatives.