Every day we ask ourselves, "How much worse could it possibly get in Uvalde?" And every day the answer seems to be, "Oh, much much worse."
Two minutes after a gunman burst through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School and began shooting inside a pair of connected classrooms, Pete Arredondo arrived outside, one of the first police officers to reach the scene.
The gunman could still be heard firing repeatedly, and Mr. Arredondo, as chief of the small school district police force in Uvalde, took charge.
But there were problems from the start. ...
Oh, "problems"? No no no no no:
Chief Arredondo did not have a police radio with him, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, which may have impeded his immediate ability to communicate with police dispatchers. ...
Using a cellphone, the chief called a police land line with a message...
The decision to hold back while the gunman went on his rampage in the school is well-known at this point. Lesser known was the fact that the school's chief of police didn't have his own radio.
In the wake of what appears to be a once-in-a-century level of pathetic incompetence and cowardice from local police, we should not forget that the ultimate heroes of the day were those who ignored all officialdom and just went into rescue mode:
The officers who finally breached the locked classrooms with a janitor's key were not a formal tactical unit, according to a person briefed on the response. The officers, including specially trained Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and a sheriff's deputy, formed an ad hoc group on their own and gathered in the hallway outside the classroom, a tense space where they said there appeared to be no chain of command.
They were done waiting for permission, one of them said, according to the person, before they moved toward the classroom where the gunman waited. They continued even after one of them heard a command crackling in his ear piece: Do not breach.
Lesson: Be less like the UPD and more like an "ad hoc group" that rescues children from being shot. That's all.
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