Post-Uvalde, challenges for police remain, despite clear protocols
In their report this week on the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Justice Department officials strongly criticized local police and provided blunt, unequivocal guidance for the future: Officers must quickly confront a shooter, even if it costs them their lives.
The reprimand reflected the department's frustration over the inability of law enforcement officers in the 2022 fatal shooting to follow protocols developed over the past two decades and was intended to address the threat of gunmen armed with battlefield-grade weapons that can quickly kill dozens of people.
Most other forms of police training emphasize careful, coordinated action to minimize loss of life. But active-shooter protocols ask officers to abandon their civilian mindset and transform into a kind of warrior posture on the fly.
Federal investigators said the decision not to quickly confront the gunman was the biggest failure of leadership and training during the attack on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. It took 77 minutes for officers to enter the classrooms where the gunman had killed 19 students and two teachers before fatally shooting him.
The inadequate response has been highlighted in several investigations into the massacre. But in the time since the killings, officer training on active-shooter events has not been substantially revised to address the chaotic decision-making that led to the slow response, several police experts said. And it remained unclear how many of the nation's roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies, most of which are small and rural like the one in Uvalde, would do better.
Even in Texas, where lawmakers last year expanded training for active shooters, requiring each officer to complete a minimum of 16 hours of training, most courses do not specifically recreate conditions similar to what took place in Uvalde, where prospective officers faced off with a gunman stood behind a closed door. , and the determination of the on-scene commander that they were dealing with a barricaded subject with whom they might be able to negotiate.
“We don't have a Uvalde-specific scenario,” said J. Pete Blair, executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, whose courses required by Texas law.
Mr Blair said the group's training has addressed the difference between active shooters, who need to be confronted immediately, and hostage takers, who may need a slower response. But the gray areas create problems, experts say.
“The decision whether to intervene with an active shooter taking hostages poses significant challenges for law enforcement,” said Lt. Travis Norton, a police training expert in California who has studied active shooter responses nationally.
Lt. Norton, who was interviewed by Justice Department investigators during their investigation in Uvalde, said part of the challenge was that supervisors were often trained more in handling tactics than in leadership judgment when it came to mass shootings went.
“We were told these guys should have known to go in.” But should they?' he said. “We train poorly, and now we involve them in this complex event.”
Since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, when the first arriving officers waited for tactical teams instead of immediately trying to stop the two shooters, police officers across the country have been told to immediately confront engaging with an active shooter. By then, it had suddenly become clear that a rapid-fire, large-caliber weapon could turn novice shooters, like the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter, into mass murderers in minutes.
But even in the past twenty years there has been a major rethinking of the use of force by police in other contexts. Most officers spend much more time discussing and addressing situations where they must attempt to de-escalate a situation.
“There are two things going on in policing: active shooting, speeding things up, and on the other hand, when you're dealing with people in crisis with guns, slowing things down,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the police. Executive Research Forum.
“That's the challenge of American policing right now,” he said. “Police officers can get into trouble if they make a mistake by using too much or too little force.”
Some cases were clear-cut, such as a recent Nashville school shooting in which officers followed the sounds of gunfire and fatally shot the armed attacker in an open area. Others were more complex: In 2016, there was a three-hour standoff at Orlando's Pulse nightclub that ended only after a law enforcement vehicle drove through a building wall and confronted a gunman who had taken hostages and claimed to have explosives.
“I think we're getting better, but it's clearly getting better incrementally,” said Frank Straub, the lead author of the Justice Department report on the police response to the Pulse shooting. “We cannot train for the best situation. We have to train for the worst situation, when things don't go as they should.”
The Ministry of Justice has provided guidelines in its Uvalde report to remove confusion among officers. When faced with an active shooter in a room of victims, a confrontation must be attempted “regardless of the equipment and personnel available to those first on the scene,” the report said.
The Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Texas Rangers and state troopers, has issued similar new guidelines.
The department had dozens of state troopers, supervisors and Texas Rangers involved in the response to Robb Elementary; Like other officers on the scene, they did not rush in to confront the shooter. Many later said they believed that because the shooter had gone a long time without shooting, they were dealing with a barricaded subject and not someone who was actively killing people.
In 2022, the Department of Public Safety issued a simple rule for school shootings, similar to federal guidelines: Whenever officers respond to an active shooter at a school, they should never stop trying to confront the shooter.
State police are now being told never to treat a school shooter as barricaded, regardless of whether or not the person has locked in others. New recruits are given this clear direction at the academy.
Before the current school year began in Texas, the department says, it held active shooter training with school districts and communicated its new guidance.
But in certain scenarios, a quick confrontation with a gunman can pose other dangers, some police trainers said. “You don't want people going into a hostage barricade and starting shooting when shots aren't happening or haven't happened,” said ALERRT's Mr. Blair.
In Uvalde, federal investigators found, the crucial mistake came early in the police response.
Nearly a dozen officers arrived at the school during the gunman's first shooting, quickly reaching the classrooms where they thought he was. That was in accordance with their training and police protocols. As they approached the classroom doors, the gunman shot at them. Two were hit by shrapnel.
The problem arose after they relapsed, the report found.
The first arriving officers included senior leaders — Uvalde Police Department Acting Chief Mariano Pargas and School Police Chief Pete Arredondo — but they made the wrong decision, the report found. The officers waited in the hallway before they could enter the classroom, a decision that the Justice Department said was clearly a mistake and blamed mainly on Mr. Arredondo.
Mr. Pargas resigned after the Uvalde shooting. Mr. Arredondo was fired.
Mr Arredondo has done that previously defended his actions through an attorney, likening a quick approach to the classroom where the gunman had fired with an AR-15-style rifle as “suicide.”
“Of all the officers there, from all kinds of agencies and departments, not one came to him with even a suggestion that he should do things differently,” a lawyer for Mr. Arredondo wrote in 2022. “If anyone thought that if they had a better plan, he would have been completely over it.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police cites a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, as an example of how officers can prevent further bloodshed by acting quickly. In that case, the association said, two officers “took immediate action that successfully stopped the threat,” wounding the gunman.
Active shootings result in many casualties “usually before officers or other first responders can even be called,” the association said. Guidance 2018 on active shooters, so officers who arrive first must take “quick but calculated” action even if they find themselves short on weapons.
Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting from San Antonio.