Personal Accountability And Initiative Vs. “The Process We Follow”
You probably know the high-level of what happened in Uvalde about a year ago now, where several officers — at one point 30 officers from eight different law enforcement organizations — didn’t enter a classroom against one armed dude for about 54 minutes, thus likely creating more casualties. Here’s a good video summary of that:
In Nashville, which happened a few months ago, the cops basically charged in, and eventually killed the shooter on the second floor of the building. I can’t tell entirely, but it looks like 3–5 cops were involved.
If you look at protocol from the feds around mass casualty shooting events, there’s some political and bureaucratic nonsense around whether it’s an “active shooter” or a “barricaded individual,” and that was one of the confusion points at Uvalde (apparently). If you watch that Uvalde video from The Washington Post that I embedded above, you’ll get some audio from the post-action interviews with different officers, and the main theme is “I ain’t suicidal, man.” They didn’t want to rush into action because the hallway created a “fatal funnel” whereby a bunch of cops would have had to die to save kids. It’s a tough trade-off and it’s easy to blame the cops, but if we were in that hallway, we might have waited too.
The general protocol is that you’re supposed to “go go go” with a wall/phalanx once you have 3–5 officers, which seems to be what happened in Nashville. One of the officers got a general lay of the land and layout of the buildings and then they just went.
