https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2022/06/10/uvalde-school-police-chief-uh-i-didnt-know-i-was-in-charge-at-the-scene-n475415
Uvalde school police chief: Uh, I didn't know I was in charge at the scene
hotair.com/allahpundit/2022/06/10/uvalde-school-police-chief-uh-i-didnt-know-i-was-in-charge-at-the-scene-n475415
I said it yesterday and I’ll say it again: What was the point of the mass shooting drills organized by the district if they failed to iron out basic details like the chain of command once a shooting started?
They didn’t have protective shields at the ready. Their police radios didn’t work well inside the building. The school doors didn’t lock automatically. They didn’t have a master key that could quickly unlock any door in the district.
And now, it seems, even the chief didn’t know who was supposed to be in charge.
What did they do with that $69,000 grant they got from the state a few years ago to “harden” the school?
Pete Arredondo, the head of Uvalde school PD, finally gave an interview to the media after 17 days of silence. Jazz wrote about the case of the missing keys this morning, in which Arredondo resorted to trying one key after another on the locked classroom door before police rustled up one that worked. Cops couldn’t kick in the door because it was reinforced with a steel door jamb, ironically a measure designed to keep shooters out. And they didn’t have a master key because … they’re asleep on the job, I guess. “Robb Elementary did not have a modern system of locks and access control,” the Texas Tribune reported as part of its interview with Arredondo. “You’re talking about a key ring that’s got to weigh 10 pounds,” his lawyer told them.
“Make sure police can quickly enter any room in the district if necessary” never made it into the mass shooting protocols, evidently.
The stunner from the interview, though, is Arredondo insisting that he wasn’t the officer in command even though standard police training would suggest that he was. He was among the first officers to enter the building after shots began and remained camped out in the hallway for the duration, which led him to believe that he was a front-line responder in this case. Even though he was literally the highest-ranking school cop in the district.
He said he never considered himself the scene’s incident commander and did not give any instruction that police should not attempt to breach the building. DPS officials have described Arredondo as the incident commander and said Arredondo made the call to stand down and treat the incident as a “barricaded suspect,” which halted the attempt to enter the room and take down the shooter. “I didn’t issue any orders,” Arredondo said. “I called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door.”…
Hyde said Arredondo did not issue any orders to other law enforcement agencies and had no knowledge that they considered him the incident commander.
The National Incident Management System, which guides all levels of government on how to respond to mass emergency events, says that the first person on scene is the incident commander. That incident commander remains in that charge until they relinquish it or are incapacitated.
1/