Were the Uvalde police cowards?

In the heat of the moment, I feel, they found out they were, indeed, cowardice.
Although, credits where credits are due, some were, possibly, not, because some decided to go in the school and get their own children out.

Generally speaking, yes.

In my opinion…YES, they were cowards!!! I know it is easy to sit in the safety of my home & say that. I get so tired of hearing law enforcement say that they feared for their lives. That IS THE JOB…you put your life in harms way to protect your fellow man!!! IF you’re NOT willing to do that, then you need to be in another line of work where you can remain safe. I don’t think that I could run into a building with an active shooter. That is why I NEVER applied for the job of an LEO!!!

The stories coming out days later just don’t add up. They claimed that they had to get a key from the janitor to get into the classroom, yet one little by who survived said that the gunman shot out the window of the door when the teacher shut the door to keep the kids safe. WHY would they need a key when they could shoot through an area with NO obstruction??? The Border Patrol who just arrived shot him dead shortly after arriving when every cop in town took about an hour to decide to do anything. As @rebbel pointed out, probably not ALL were cowards. I’ve read reports where some of the cops wanted to go in but were overruled by their Commander. I believe that it was the Commander who had the parents willing to go in peppered sprayed & arrested. The excuse there was that he was worried for the safety of the parents…BS!!! I’ve also heard the excuse that the Commander thought they were ALL dead, yet shots were still being fired after he arrived. WHY would a shooter continue to shoot IF everybody was dead??? He had NOTHING to fear from 30 or so dead 10 year olds!!!

At this point, I see the Commander as the coward (who probably has NO children) & feel he should be relieved of his duties!!! I’m sure that there were many good cops at the scene who would have handled things MUCH better when left to their own devices.

The little girl who regularly called 911 said that she thought that the cops didn’t come in because they hadn’t arrived yet & she wondered WHY it took them 3 hours to get there. When told it was only an hour, she argued that it had been 3 hours. I’m sure that it felt like an eternity!!! Now she is distraught over the fact that the cops were outside in the hallway & just didn’t come in. She is now afraid of ALL males & freaks out every time a phone rings. The shooter was playing death music on his cell while shooting her friends.

Um, well… They were most likely just following protocol. I doubt they want that to be public for many reasons. It may be as simple as if the suspect is in a hostage situation they have to send in the right people for that which takes time.
When you have only seconds the cops are three hours away….

My information has it that several officers did at first rush into the school and were wounded. Then Pedro Arredondo, the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, assumed command of the officers at the scene. Police are supposed to obey a chain of command, so from that point, it wasn’t about group courage but a command decision, and Arredondo seems to have reasoned that the shooter was barricaded by himself and not an immediate threat to more children, and seems to have ordered the officers not to rush in at that point, even though some shots were still being fired, and even though standard doctrine would I think tend to call for them to rush in.

That seems like it may have been a mistake, but I don’t know enough to call it cowardice on Arredondo’s part. The other officers at that point I wouldn’t expect to override his orders.

Yes, but I think that only highlights how insane it is that assault weapons are available to anyone. If trained law enforcement are afraid of that kind of firepower, what chance do students or teachers or shoppers or worshippers or anyone else have?!?!?!

Assault weapons of any kind should only be available to the military and illegal for everyone else.

@Blackwater_Park The city of Uvalde is only 5.5 square miles so NOBODY was 3 hours away. It just felt like 3 hours to one little 10 year old girl who had covered herself with blood & lay motionless pretending she was dead in hopes he wouldn’t shoot her while waiting to be rescued. The Border Patrol who actually neutralized the situation drove 40 miles & in less than 30 minutes still did more than the local cops who had been there for 1–½ hours STOPPING people trying to go in. Protocol says that in an active shooter situation that you don’t wait…you go in & kill that sucker!!!

As a parent, what would your first reaction have been when watching those paid to serve & protect discuss what to do while hearing gun shots on a regular basis coming from inside??? Mine would have been to go get my kid oout of there…dayum if I die in the process!!!

I don’t want to label it too fast except to say that it seems like it was a massive fuck up somewhere and I’d be furious if I were one of the parents of those kids.

@cookieman And I agree with you that assault weapons have to go.

Didn’t the Parkland SRO stay outside while those 17 kids were killed?

@cookieman To add insult to injury, the NRA held a convention over the weekend just a few hours away where ALL weapons were banned in order to attend. Even a pocket knife was considered a dangerous weapon.

@janbb YES he did!!! He claimed that he couldn’t tell from where the shots were coming & he didn’t want to shoot an innocent student.

@LadyMarissa I read that they were banned at the convention not by the NRA but because Trump was speaking and that was a security concern. Still, the NRA is awful.

We have one wise old man in my town who was saying yesterday that most cops start out as brave men & then the training at the police academy takes that away from them by training them that their lives comes first & foremost & there is an acceptable death percentage that does not include them. They start out as brave & honorable men but are brainwashed into becoming cowards!!! Nobody had an argument for that one.

@cookieman Define assault weapon. I’m not sure why people think that an AR-15 is some sort of super weapon that is the primary cause of these issues. That kid could have gone in there with a couple of .22 pistols and done the same thing. Actually, he could have done much worse. That would have been discreet and he may not have alerted the cops. Walking around with that rifle was like holding up a sign. The real problem is someone with his issues was able to get any kind of weapon and then walk right into a completely unguarded building. Then the cops stood back for whatever reason. I don’t think we are getting the full story on why that happened. The whole “assault weapon” thing is moot. The people saying “ban assault weapons” cause more issues out of ignorance. It’s again, detachable magazine capacity that makes going against a shooter like this hard. If we ban the AR-15 or any specific gun then people have done nothing at all.

@janbb The first report I heard said it was t**** ’* people who requested that guns be banned. Then as the day progressed, that narrative switched to the NRA requesting it. Since t**** doesn’t like looking bad, I simply figured that he requested the narrative be changed so it wasn’t HIS fault!!!

@cookieman He had over 150 rounds of ammo with him.
Walking around with that rifle was like holding up a sign…NOT in Texas where that particular rifle MAKES YOU A MAN!!!

Despite what you may think, that’s not how it works in Texas or anywhere else.

To anyone that is intrigued by the popular statement “the only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun” I suggest to watch Jordan Klepper’s video on becoming a good guy with a gun, on YouTube.
It has some sobering facts in it.

“Active Shooter Incidents”, of which the perpetrator was ‘stopped’, between 2000 and 2013, 3% were done so by good guys with guns….

Part of this issue is the fact that ultimately mass shootings are difficult to prevent and stop and we don’t want to admit that fact. We want there to be something we can do, but the question is why are there are so many often young men in this country who feel that the only outlet for their issues is killing a bunch of people? A mass shooting (or stabbing or whatever) is a shock to systems—legal, social, etc. If someone wants to kill a bunch of people, there are many ways they can do it, regardless of what legislation is in place. I’m not “pro-gun”, but acting like this issue is all about guns seems to assume that everywhere else has an equal number of people who want to commit mass killings and the only difference is that in the U.S. we have more guns, but is that actually true? What if there are more people in the U.S. who want to commit mass killings, for whatever reason? That’s a tangent, but I have to say it because for obvious reasons this issue has been in the spotlight for weeks and I think we’re all getting fucking sick of mass killings, especially of children.

I can’t exactly blame small town police who aren’t necessarily prepared for live combat failing to stop a mass shooting, because that’s basically what it is—it’s warfare in an elementary school. I do think there is more to this story and I’m wondering why certain things that happened were allowed to happen, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they should’ve submitted themselves to a barrage of bullets and I’m not convinced that this was cowardice. And now I’m hearing talk of more militarization of schools as a solution and I just think we are headed to a very dark place as a nation if we aren’t there already.

I know why funding scaled back for mental health housing several decades ago.
As a child, I visited a place called a county home, where indigent elderly, and mental health cases were housed. As a group, we visited people who rarely saw people from outside. It was dark, depressing, scary. I saw one girl who appeared to be in her teens. I asked her why she was there. I didn’t get a straight answer, I realized eventually because I was so young, and she was protecting me. She simply said she thought wrong things sometimes, and it was better for her to be there.

County homes were awful places in most communities back then. People we’re more okay about improving conditions for elderly than for mentally unsafe, so taxes supported improvement for one, by turning out the other.

We are overdue, to backtrack, and pick up on housing of people who are dangerous to themselves and others. After that is made tons better, then we can look around and see what we think.

Fear is normal. Everyone experiences fear.
Cowardice is the inability to overcome your fear.
I won’t label the police that way. I will question their strategy.

^ditto

@filmfann I saved a fortune cookie once that I keep to remind me when I’m feeling a little fearful. It said the same sort of thing: bravery is not the absence of fear, it is the mastery of fear.

I’ll say it: YES. The Uvalde police and almost every police officer in the country is a fuckin’ pussy. Cops shooting people in the back, shooting people having a mental health crises, using much, much more force than necessary, etc. Cops have shot and killed people in situations that I found myself in on a weekly basis when I worked as a counselor at a residential treatment facility. All we used was our words and physical techniques that made the person immobile and no longer to hurt themselves or others. No one died in the 4 years I worked there.

Police make me sick. I have no respect for any of them.

That’s a strong word, and the DPS screwed up too, not just the local police. I heard on the news, from the Director of DPS at a press conference, that they initially thought they had a hostage situation, as opposed to an active shooter. I’ll withhold judgement until I can piece more of the timeline and Police activities together.

I have respect for many police but in this case, with 911 calls coming in while the police were standing outside, I don’t see there being any excuse.

Imagine the torment the poor parents have to live with, not only knowing how tragically their children died, but knowing that the children were calling on their cell phones, asking for help, specifying that the shooter was still there, and no help was coming. What a giant fuck up.

@jca2 Absolutely. And I think the public as well as the State are trying to line up DPS Colonel as a sacrificial lamb or scapegoat. He was literally almost crying in the press conference interview, he knows he is at least partly responsible.