Since the Columbine High School massacre more than 20 years ago, police have been trained to quickly confront snipers in the horrific attacks that have followed.
But it took more than an hour for officers in Uvalde, Texas to kill a gunman who massacred 19 children, a time lapse that will likely be a key part of a Justice Department investigation into the police response.
The rare federal review comes amid growing, agonizing questions and changing police information. Authorities now say several officers entered elementary school just two minutes after alleged gunman Salvador Ramos and exchanged fire with him, but he was not stopped until a tactical team entered a classroom for more than an hour. after.
This is a confusing timeline for law enforcement experts like Jarrod Burguan, who was chief of police in San Bernardino, California, when the city was hit by a terrorist attack that killed 14 people in 2015. Officers entered the facility, a training center for residents with developmental disabilities, within two minutes of arrival.
“Columbine changed everything,” Burguan said Monday. Officers are now trained to train and enter buildings to confront shooters as soon as possible to prevent more people from being killed. “This has been introduced to this industry for years.”
Justice Department officials investigating the Texas killings will examine a series of questions about the police response to Uvalde. A similar review that largely praised the response to the San Bernardino massacre was over 100 pages long.
Announcing the review, Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said it would be conducted fairly, impartially and independently and that the findings would be made public. It could take months. The review is the department’s Community Police Services Office.
A key question for Maria Haberfeld, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, is why a school district police chief had the power to tell more than a dozen officers to wait in a hallway. the Robb Elementary of Uvalde.
“The key question for me is, who appointed him responsible?” she said.
Officials said they believed the suspect was barricaded inside adjoining classrooms and that there was no longer any active threat. But school police officers don’t usually have more experience with active shooters, and Haberfeld wondered why people with more specialized training didn’t take the reins.
A U.S. Border Patrol tactical team finally used a janitor’s key to open the classroom door and kill the gunman, and asked more questions about the choice of entrance.
“It is not a fortified castle from the Middle Ages. It’s a door, “he said.” They knew what to do. You don’t need the key. ”
The Justice Review will not investigate the crime itself, nor will it hold the civil or criminal police directly responsible. What it will likely do is look at things like the way the police communicated with each other, said Thor Eells, executive director of the National Association of Tactical Officers. It is unknown at this time why the head of the school, Pete Arredondo, was shot dead.
“I think we have to be a little patient with that and wait to make sure we understand what that mindset was,” Eells said. “It simply came to our notice then. What information did they have? ”
The review will also likely examine how well-prepared officers were with equipment such as weapons and body armor. The shooter was wearing a tactical vest and was armed with an AR-15-style rifle, a powerful weapon capable of piercing basic bulletproof vests.
In previous shootings reviewed by the Justice Department, non-specialist law enforcement units did not have the type of body armor needed to fully protect themselves.
In the 2016 massacre that killed 49 people and injured dozens more in the LGBT community at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, a detective at the scene exchanged shots with the suspect, knowing that his gun “did not compare “with the firing gun. the club. Despite this, the first officers at the scene formed a team to quickly enter the club and start looking for the shooter, according to the report.
In San Bernardino, on the other hand, only one of the first officers at the scene was carrying a shotgun and several were not carrying body armor. But they still used their training in active shooter situations to form a team of four officers to enter the complex immediately.
Moving quickly is important not only to prevent a shooter from killing more people, but also to help the injured. In San Bernardino and Orlando, Department of Justice reviews showed a quick response when transporting injured people to treatment within a “golden hour” where victims are more likely to survive.
It is unclear what impact the delay in entering the Texas classroom could have had on any of the children who were injured and needed treatment more than an hour away in San Antonio.
Police need to quickly analyze the risks to themselves and others in a violent and rapidly changing situation, but they are also trained to prevent people from getting hurt, Eells said.
“Getting into this room is very, very, very dangerous,” he said. “But we’re going to take that risk, knowingly and willingly, because our priorities are to help those who can’t help themselves.”
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Whitehurst reported from Salt Lake City. Associated Press writer Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.
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