UVALDE, Texas — With the police response timeline laid out in the school shooting in Ulvade, Texas, a security expert in Michigan says officers waited too long to confront the gunman.
A Homeland and National Security Law Professor at Western Michigan University Cooley Law School says there are two lapses in the police response at that school shooting.
Three days after 19 students and 2 teachers were shot and killed, and multiple more injured, Texas law enforcement officers admit they were wrong to wait to confront the gunman. Officers didn't engage and kill him for nearly an hour.
"Of course, it was not the right decision," Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference Friday. "It was the wrong decision."
"I think we've got a number of lapses here," Retired Brigadier General Michael McDaniel says.
He's served in the Department of Homeland Security, and he says the first wrong move was the open door, propped open by a teacher.
"If you've got a door open, there has to be an alarm on that door, or there has to be a security officer or a school resource officer on that door. None of those things appeared to have happened," McDaniel says.
Texas authorities say there was not a school resource officer at Robb Elementary School at the time when the gunman arrived.
14 minutes after the first 911 call was made, 19 officers were outside the classroom the shooter was in. But they didn't go inside; instead they waited 30 minutes for a tactical team to arrive. More than 30 minutes after that, the SWAT team arrived and officers then entered the classroom and killed the gunman.
"It was confirmed today at the news conference was this idea that they believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter (situation) to a barricaded gunman (situation)," McDaniel says.
He says even if police officers had assumed the situation had changed, that's no excuse to wait that long to take more action.
"Either way, it doesn't matter. Because the bottom line is since Columbine in 1999, and this was reinforced with the Parkland, Florida shooting in 2018, that you do not wait if there is any possibility that individuals still has the capacity to inflict damage upon individuals," he says. "And remember, we're talking about little kids, 10 year old kids, then you are to go in immediately. You don't hesitate."
McDaniel says the standard is well set to run to the sound of gunfire in a situation like this.
"Even if you do not know if there is a barricaded gunman circumstance or not, you still go in if you don't know who it is, how many there are, how many weapons or the type or capacity of the weapons that they have, the muzzle velocity, the weapons, you still go in" he says. "We expect our law enforcement to attempt to save, especially when it's little kids in this circumstance."
He says that after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, an officer faced criminal charges for waiting for backup. He says he wouldn't be surprised to see similar criminal lawsuits against law enforcement agencies and the school district in Uvalde.
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