Ya know, on Wednesday I wrote that there was something different about this school shooting. The GOP, everybody from Texas Governor Greg Abbott to the national GOP kind of seemed to be on their heels, unsure as to how to deal with this one.
For good reason. The initial briefings that Texas law enforcement gave were a dogs breakfast of stupid. The timeline Abbott introduced on Tuesday night made no sense, and was contradicted by other alleged facts that he spouted. And they had no answers for the discrepancies. And each briefing only made it worse.
But now it’s become different for another reason entirely, one that has nothing to do with Abbott or the GOP. I’ve been pretty much married to this tragedy for something like 96 hours now, mostly because it’s all MSNBC has been covering. And especially after the Texas press conference today, I saw something else I’ve never seen in the coverage of a mass shooting tragedy, and it is definitely different.
MSNBC has a top notch group of former law enforcement professionals, such as retired NYPD detective Marq Claxton, former Assistant FBI anti terrorism head Frank Figliuzzi, and former ATF supervisor and chief hostage negotiator Jim Cavanaugh. I have spent more hours than I care to recount watching and listening them dissect the latest mass tragedy. But today, especially after the Texas law enforcement news conference, they shared one common trait.
They were all supremely pissed. Oh, they tried to hide it, but you could tell by the tone of their voices, and the syntax of their words, they were outraged at the response of the local Texas officers at the scene of the crime for waiting almost an hour to breach the classroom door and take the shooter down.
Figliuzzi told Nicolle Wallace that he wasn’t a magician, and couldn’t provide a logical answer to what happened. The source of his greatest disgust was how the school district chief of police, with a 6 man full time staff, somehow or other ended up being the senior officer on the scene? Why not the Udalve police chief, or the county sheriff? It was like putting Barney Fife in charge of the D-Day invasion.
Cavanaugh had a different kettle of fish to fry. He took extreme exception to the decision made on site to change the priority from an active shooter drill to a hostage barricade situation. The shooter never stopped shooting, two cops were wounded, and children were dying. A hostage situation implies time that the cops simply didn’t have.
Claxton’s beef was with the balls of the officers on scene themselves. Ever since Columbine, the national law enforcement has been to immediately get in, confront the shooter, and stop the slaughter. Claxton stated that officers regularly run down dark alleys after armed criminals to protect innocents. They barge through doors and face down death to save innocents. And the Texas cops just stood there for more than 40 minutes while the shots rang out.
That isn’t how this is supposed to go. That’s not what cops are trained for. You wanna know what they’re trained for?? Cast your mind back to July 8th, 2016. There was a large, totally peaceful protest through the streets of downtown Dallas, Texas. It was so peaceful that the police chief actually marched for a few blocks in the front row of the protest with the organizers. Protesters gave the crowd security officers walking on the sidewalk bottled water, and the cops were in summer uniform blouses instead of tactical gear.
And then shots rang out of nowhere from an upper level of a nearby parking garage, and the Dallas cops followed their instincts and training. They immediately ran into the fire, and towards the garage. Five Dallas police officers were killed, including one who threw himself on top of the body of an innocent protester, and took the bullet instead. That’s how real cops serve and protect.
What happened in Udalve on Tuesday is going to be a lasting black eye on not only Texas law enforcement, but the state of Texas for at least a generation. After all, Texans are supposed to be the last of the rugged individualists, and their cops are the best equipped, best trained cops anybody can have. And they stood cowering behind a locked classroom door for more than 40 minutes while innocent 10 year olds died. Shame on the whole fucking bunch of you!
What an atrocity this whole thing was, nobody could seem to find their own ass with both hands, cops just standing around looking stupid ! What the hell were they waiting on ? This was just shameful. And the NRA was having a big party down the street , they didn’t even care enough to cancel the damn meeting !
I just read this. Only one comment? Perhaps the one comment made such a forceful argument that no one felt they could add anything meaningful.