As the horror was unfolding in Uvalde, Texas, law enforcement swarmed the area surrounding the school. Many were outfitted in camouflage. They paced around with semi-automatic weapons strapped to their chests and stood next to a Lenco BearCat, an armored vehicle that’s basically a tank.
Uvalde—an agricultural community dotted with modest houses, is not drowning in excess wealth—yet the police and border control agents have the tools and weapons more befitting of Seal Team 6—thanks to federal grant programs that pass military grade equipment to local police at no cost.
After the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine—which was such a rare, unthinkable event that my high school teachers stopped class so we could watch live reports—we’ve increasingly upped police budgets and police presence in schools. There are 52,000 school safety officers and 15,500 law enforcement officers in schools.
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And as the Intercept reported, the Uvalde School District employs a chief, five officers, and a security guard.
Even though local officers were at the scene, Salvador Ramos locked himself in a classroom, told the class, “It’s time to die,” and proceeded to slaughter 19 third and fourth graders and two middle-aged women over the course of an hour. This all happened while police waited for backup outside.
During that time, video shows desperate parents begging the officers at the scene to go into the building. “Go in there! Go in there!” shouted women at the officers, the AP reports. One man, whose daughter was killed in the attack, shouted, “Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to.” Instead, the video seems to show officers performing crowd control to keep the frantic parents away from the school.
Although a bunch of unarmed, hysterical parents storming the school may not have helped, it’s striking that police appear to have waited about an hour for backup before entering the school.
Juan Cloy, a retired former assistant chief of the Canton, Mississippi Police Department, is currently a lead instructor at the Justice Training Institute. While Cloy declined to comment on the shooting in Uvalde, he told The Daily Beast that when an active shooter situation occurs, law enforcement must pursue that attacker right away.
“Even if you’re off duty, if it’s an active shooter, you go straight to where the gunfire or commotion is,” Cloy said. “You run straight into it, to stop the killing, stop the harm.”
A boy who survived the Uvalde shooting described what happened when police finally penetrated the premises.
“When the cops came, the cop said: 'Yell if you need help!' And one of the persons in my class said 'help.' The guy overheard and he came in and shot her," the boy told KENS5 News.
Telling the children to yell out was yet another strange decision by the responding officers. Active shooter drills instruct victims to remain quiet.
“If the active shooter is nearby, Lock the door. Silence your cell phone and/or pager. Turn off any source of noise (i.e., radios, televisions). Hide behind large items (i.e., cabinets, desks). Remain quiet,” the Department of Homeland Security advises. And although SWAT teams bust down doors using battering rams with some regularity, a school staff member had to unlock the door to the classroom.
Uvalde was not the only recent high-profile shooting where law enforcement failed to stop the murders. A “school safety officer” assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida, was charged with child neglect and perjury in 2019. The officer, Scott Peterson, allegedly “refused to investigate the source of the gunshots, retreated during the active shooting while victims were being shot and directed other law enforcement who arrived on scene to remain 500 feet away from the building," the state law enforcement department said. Department Commissioner Rick Swearingen said in a news release that Peterson "did absolutely nothing" to stop the shooting, and that his inaction cost people their lives.
Alongside “thoughts and prayers,” pro-gun lawmakers come up with all kinds of explanations to avoid a reckoning on guns in America. It’s violent video games! Rap! Metal! Mental illness! Drugs! Feminists! Fatherlessness! And after the bickering over common sense gun control fades, the solution we seem to settle on is, more cops, more guns, including the ludicrous notion that teachers carry loaded weapons.
“The research shows that when guns are introduced into an environment they produce accidental shootings, suicides, and interpersonal violence, such as intimate partner violence,” Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, notes.
“Policing is a reactive enterprise that has proven incapable of preventing these horrible events even when present at the school,” Vitale tells the Daily Beast. “This is especially true when they confront a heavily armed and armored shooter. We must switch to vigorous prevention programs rooted in mental health services, creating healthy inclusive school environments and systems not rooted in the criminal legal system.”
Let’s hope this display of law enforcement incompetence nudges Americans towards solutions beyond just simply adding more men with badges and guns into children’s spaces.
