One of the members of my range is a police chief in a nearby town.
Of course, someone asked him about Uvalde.
He cannot understand what the cops were thinking, how this debacle happened, and how the failures happened.
He didn’t want to be an armchair quarterback, and pointed out that he wasn’t there…… BUT:
His training (and, apparently the standard for most officers and jurisdictions in the area) is that in a school shooting or other active shooter situation is that the first two officers go in. If only one is available, he goes in BY HIMSELF if backup is more than 3 minutes away. No matter what.
He feels that this debacle at Uvalde will set relations with police in smaller towns back badly. That people will no longer believe that police are protectors, and are just ticket writers, rather than sheepdogs.
He is disgusted, not only with the leadership of the Uvalde police, but with the officers who didn’t do what they should have immediately, before the on-scene commander issued orders otherwise…(Or even after).
He did point out that, in his opinion, most officers coming into the force in the past 15 years lack initiative, critical thinking, adaptability, and the ability to adapt without orders….In other words, the younger officers will wait for orders and follow them even if the training tells them otherwise.
But he feels that this was a failure in every way. He is disgusted.
The “new guys” were raised and schooled to follow directions; no one ever taught them to develop initiative. Then again, “taking the initiative” may be more of a genetic thing than a learned skill (although The Basic School does successfully teach it).
Retired now, but our instructions were “first there, first in” because time is very much of the essence. The nuts who do this sort of thing always have a plan because they’ve been thinking about it for a while; I’ve never heard of a situation where it’s a totally spontaneous act (although I’m sure it’s happened, just not in a school. Yet.). The earlier you can stress their plan the more you can force changes in it and create opportunities to change/derail/stop it; Boyd called it “getting inside their OODA loop.”
We also understood that the job comes with certain risks and you accepted that when you signed up and when you reported in each day; “risks of the job” doesn’t mean “kamikazi mission” but, sometimes, the end result can be the same.