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carlson1 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 01, 2024 10:50 pm

srothstein wrote: ↑Sun Jun 30, 2024 11:13 pm

carlson1 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 30, 2024 8:26 pmI think a conviction is unlikely. It will be like the SRO from Parkland, Florida.

I think that a conviction is highly likely unless they can get the venue changed out of the county. It might need to go out of the state to be honest.

For those who do not know, the law is Penal Code Section 22.041(c), which says:

(c) A person commits an offense if the person intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence, by act or omission, engages in conduct that places a child, elderly individual, or disabled individual in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment.

To me, in my legal thinking type mind, the only question is if "places" includes leaving a child that is already in a dangerous situation there. If you read section (c-1), it gives the distinct impression (c) only applies to case of having or using drugs near the children.

Steve do you think that there a big difference in Deputy Scot Peterson in Florida and Chief Pete Arredondo in Uvalde? Or do you think there is a huge difference in our laws?

Thanks
Carl

I think there may be a difference in the two but I am not sure. Peterson heard the shots and was afraid to even enter the building. Arredondo got the report of the shooting and at least entered the building with the team to try to do something. He stopped when the suspect barricaded himself inside a room while firing out the doorway at the officers. At that point, he decided that the situation had changed from an active shooter to a barricaded subject. That requires a different protocol as a response.

My question is what he knew at that point in time. If he knew there were still living kids in the room, he mad a bad decision. If he thought the kids were all already dead, it might not have been a bad decision.

Of course, we have some advantage of hindsight now and there were other tactics even he could have used. Two officers could have kept the suspect bottled up in the room, and he could have sent two others out to look in and shoot through the windows if they saw him shooting kids.

In this respect, there is a difference. Peterson was a coward who refused to even try to engage. Arrendondo might not be a coward and was just incompetent in his response. I am not ruling out that Arredondo might also have been a coward, but I don't know it for a fact. Part of the problem is that Abbott ran his mouth within an hour of the shooting saying someone was wrong. This changes the investigation from an honest and unbiased one into a witch hunt looking for a scape goat. And it changes everyone's responses in the investigation from what happened to "not my fault and you aren't going to blame me".

carlson1 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 30, 2024 8:26 pmI think a conviction is unlikely. It will be like the SRO from Parkland, Florida.

I think that a conviction is highly likely unless they can get the venue changed out of the county. It might need to go out of the state to be honest.

For those who do not know, the law is Penal Code Section 22.041(c), which says:

(c) A person commits an offense if the person intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence, by act or omission, engages in conduct that places a child, elderly individual, or disabled individual in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment.

To me, in my legal thinking type mind, the only question is if "places" includes leaving a child that is already in a dangerous situation there. If you read section (c-1), it gives the distinct impression (c) only applies to case of having or using drugs near the children.

One reason I cannot trust the report is that it was done by the DOJ. I do not trust the federal government very much in good times, and I especially do not trust them under this administration. A second major reason I cannot trust the report is that it was prepared by bureaucrats and lawyers. None of them have experience in police work to say what tactics were used correctly and not used correctly.

An example of this lack of knowledge is discussed above. The truck involved in the accident scene was left out and rained on, contaminating any possible evidence to be collected from it. What evidence was necessary to find in the truck? It was obviously driven by the shooter since he was seen in it and leaving it. Did he leave weapons or ammo in it? They would not have been harmed by the rain that quickly. Other than that, there was nothing of probative value I can think of in the truck.

Yes, I have a very dim view of the police investigation after the shooting. If we know who committed the crime, how he committed it, and who the victim's are, the purpose of the investigation is to collect evidence to prosecute. If he did not survive, there is no prosecution possible, so what is there to investigate? Are we going to prosecute the officers for not going in? That might justify some evidence collection, but I don't see that happening (not saying it shouldn't just that I don't think it will). An after action review to find out what went wrong should be done for sure. But the Governor announcing on the news that the police had screwed up less than an hour after the shooting contaminates the minds of everyone and turns any investigation into a hunt for a scapegoat to blame - and gets everyone involved running for cover to make sure they are not the chosen scapegoat.

That leaves everyone still ignoring the issues that helped contribute to the problem, such as the mixed departments responding and the lack of a single communication system (a problem called interoperability in the police communications world). More training on command and control at such scenes would help also, but hardening of the schools would be the biggest help.

And the law passed as a result may do a lot to get that hardening. Every school campus is required to have an armed officer or staff member there now. Of course, there are loopholes in the law allowing ISDs to waive it for themselves but it is a start.

ELB wrote: ↑Tue Oct 18, 2022 1:38 pm They should implement a Guardian program now.

If I were hired as the new chief, I would make consulting with the school safety center at Texas State University my first priority. But a Guardian and a school marshal program would be among my highest priorities. With the costs of training for either paid for by the ISD.

And in Uvalde, I would definitely recommend a written policy allowing parents and school volunteers who had an LTC to carry at the schools.

To clarify and answer the questions my post generated, you have to understand the difference between jurisdiction and authority, especially command authority. Jurisdiction is a combination of where you have legal authority to act and where you are employed. All peace officers in Texas are commissioned by Texas and have general jurisdiction to make an arrest anywhere in the state. There is one section of law that restricts the authority of county and municipal officers to the county that they are commissioned in. So, for example a Luling PD officer may write a ticket anywhere in Guadalupe or Caldwell Counties because his city is in both those counties, but he may make any other type of arrest anywhere in the state.

That means that DPS and Texas Rangers did have legal jurisdiction to act in the school shooting.

But then we have the question of what command authority they have. Can they simply walk in and tell a Uvalde CISD officer that they are now in charge and he must obey them? There is nothing in the law giving them any such command authority. They probably could have done this and the officers would not have argued about it too much, because no one knew what was going on in that situation and most of the officers were (IMO) looking for someone to do this anyway. In most cases, if an officer does this in other cases, the police officer will yield because he is too professional to argue on the scene and because cops are notoriously shy of taking authority. There is an old saying that you can't get fired if you do nothing (not always true but a decent rule of thumb for a lot of departments). But if the officer is old/salty or wants to do something his way, he could tell the DPS trooper to get out of his crime scene and would be 100% legally justified.

But that now gets us to the question of the county Sheriff. We used to have a law (clause in the Constitution) saying that the Sheriff is the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of a county. I cannot find this law now, though I still find a reference to it on the Grayson County Sheriff's Office web page. One reason I might not have found it is that our Constitution is organized fairly strangely, listing the sheriff as part of the judicial branch of government. But even if it is still in effect, there would be the legal question of exactly what this means. When I first entered Texas law enforcement, I was taught it mean almost exactly what you would think and that the Sheriff could stop other agencies from working in his county. But this cannot possibly be true because the Constable is also a position created by the Constitution, so could a Sheriff overrule the Constitution? Could a Sheriff tell Luling that they could not have a police department if Luling is in two counties?

While it was Florida (I think) and not Texas, we recently had a video making the rounds where a city police officer and a county Sheriff were each threatening to arrest the other for interfering in their cases.

Now, please consider if we really want to have a law saying who can take over or not. When we have a real cluster going on, and no one seems to be making a decision or taking action, this might be a very desirable thing. But what if we have an incident going on and the town officers are handling it properly and a DPS trooper shows up and knows nothing of what is going on but wants to take charge because he can? And we all know there are too many officers who are strictly politicians who would do it for the opportunities it might have to enhance their career. And this does not take into account what would happen when the local chief says to his men to let the person take charge and clear the scene. He is the guy who signs their checks and they have departmental rules saying his order will be obeyed. This could make a bad situation much worse very quickly.

The bright side of this is that most cops are professionals and will work with each other. Our system is designed to be applied using common sense. Most of the times it works out well. But when it does fail, it fails spectacularly and may (in this case did) cost innocent people's lives.

carlson1 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 7:36 pm No one has answered this so I will throw it out one more time. Once the DPS Lieutenant arrived could not the State Police take over and settle this? If that is true then why is Colonel McGraw the top cop running this investigation? Our State Troopers obviously failed. You would not have put 19 Troopers and one DPS Lieutenant on a scene in thr 80’s and them not take over.

Next if the Sheriff is the highest law Enforcement Officer in the County why did the Sheriff’s Office not attempt to take charge?

One of the flaws of the law enforcement system in the US is that each agency is independent and has no authority over other agencies. A city officer is neither above nor below a county officer or a state officer. The general rule is that the first agency on the scene has control over it. Any other officer responding is an assisting officer. There have been many known cases of arguments over which officer is responsible for handling what call, but they are almost always officers saying "Not Me." For example, officers may argue that an accident is in the city limits or in the county, with the county officer saying it is the city officer's jurisdiction and the city officer saying it is not in the city and the county officer has to handle it.

I should point out that these are almost never emergency calls and officers will work as needed to get the emergency handled and then argue about the report being written later.

In the instant case, I don't know whether the Uvalde City Officer was first or the ISD officer was. Either way, other responding officers would not have authority to order anyone to do anything other than when protecting a crime scene and telling them to get out of it. For complex incidents like this, there is a system the feds have produced (ICS) that is supposed to resolve who is in charge and set up a command post to run things. of course, it was designed for disasters like floods or tornadoes, where the incident takes a lot of time and agencies working together to resolve. It was not designed for the short time emergency of a shooting in progress. In theory, the incident should have been handled before there was enough time for a command post to be set up and take over command.

This was a complete breakdown of how a police response should be. I have tried a few times to explain possible causes of how this came to be so messed up, but I truly do not understand it. It truly should have been the first officer on scene handling and giving instructions. I assume some supervisor made the scene from one of the first agencies and that is what led to part of the confusion. If they did not take charge, who will?

As you might be able to tell, I do not believe a true "what happened and why" after action analysis has been done yet. This turned into a political cover-up and blame game too quickly to let the analysis go. ALERRT is who i would trust the most for this normally, but they got talked into doing an investigation first, instead of waiting and analyzing the results of the other investigations and an after action analysis. They were not allowed to consider some of the things that are not politically popular to look at, like why officers are not taking pro-active action. I am hoping they get to go back later and do a better analysis so that we can do training on avoiding this kind of mess up again.

PriestTheRunner wrote: ↑Wed Jul 13, 2022 9:40 pm

Paladin wrote: ↑Wed Jul 13, 2022 8:08 am Video certainly backs up the ALERRT report and most of its conclusions.

For those who may want to view it: https://alerrt.org/r/31 ALERRT Report at that link.

I watched the video. From what I can tell (and yes I understand this is arm-chair QB'ing) the senior officer (presumably a sergeant) almost gets clocked at 7:43 or so on first entry. As he did not have the appropriate entry method or backup of teammates, he pulls back and everyone falls back with him. At that point the on-site officer's appear to go into decision paralysis and the near-miss of the leading officer (larger guy in green) is the primary cause of the shock and indecision.

I'm sure the experts have dug into this much more than this, but to the much less trained eye, that appears to be one of the root causes.

The first attempted entry was garbage with no assistance and no room clearing technique at all.

I do not know how many of the investigations looked into this decision paralysis in this case. I had not heard it mentioned and I did not watch the video (due to it being edited by the media). I cannot say for sure that this happened because of what I am about to postulate, but it is something we should always consider.

Cops are, for better or worse, humans. And one known psychological problem for humans is that groups tend to act in concert with one another. It is sometimes called the bystander effect, where a group of bystanders waits and watches until one person decides to act, then the whole group kicks in to act too. It was first discussed in reference to the Kitty Genovese case, though it was later proven to be a false rumor about that. We know it happens when cops shoot, where one cop sees a threat and shoots so other cops also start shooting(1). In that case, it is generally called contagion shooting. We have seen it in crowds of protesters, where the crowd is peaceful but upset and then one person starts to vandalize something and it rapidly becomes a riot.

So, it would not surprise me that when the group leader reversed course, it threw the group into disarray and they waited for a leader to emerge and take action or give orders again. I am not excusing any of the police actions, nor does this justify it. It might help explain it from a psychological standpoint though.


Footnote (1): In 1976, I went through Army MP training. MPs at the time were almost always in two man cars. During one of our training sessions, the Drill Sergeants were telling us that if we were ever involved in a shooting, both officers better shoot. If not, either one was using unnecessary force or the other was derelict in his duty to assist the first officer. This training stuck with me enough that in 1991, when I was involved in a shooting in San Antonio, it ran through my mind afterwards and I mentioned it to the department psychologist I had to see. I pointed out that I did not recall ever making a decision to shoot and wondered if I really saw the threat or not? He convinced me it was irrelevant to my shooting based on the timing and sequence of events and my description of what I saw as I shot. But old training can stick with you and pop up at weird times.

rtschl wrote: ↑Tue Jul 12, 2022 4:44 pm 4 minute edited video published of start to end.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/20 ... 370384007/

Never trust an edited video for anything. If they cannot release the whole thing without any changes, they are lying, no matter which side it is. This is true no matter who is doing the editing and for what reason.

One of the problems that this shows may only be apparent to police officers or people who have been keeping up with officer attitudes. The Uvalde officer reportedly had the shooter in his sights and asked for permission to shoot. This reflects one of the most common problems in law enforcement today - officers are afraid to do their job because they know they will be punished for anything that can be dreamed up as a mistake and castigated in the media. I do not know how bad the Uvalde PD and Uvalde CISD PD were at making sure the officers knew they could do their job but this part of the report makes me think the departments had gotten very political on things.

If you want another example of how this goes down, consider what will happen with the Border Patrol Mounted Unit the next time they encounter a large group of illegal aliens coming into the country and are told to stop it. I would bet they are much less likely to be on the scene in time to do anything.

Paladin wrote: ↑Sun Jun 19, 2022 3:37 pm

philip964 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 19, 2022 2:44 pm https://www.insider.com/uvalde-classroo ... ays-2022-6

Apparently even if the door was locked, they had a halligan pry bar to open the door.

Uvalde police didn't check to see if the door to the two connected classrooms the Robb Elementary shooter barricaded himself in with children was unlocked, a source close to the investigation told the San Antonio Express-News...after viewing surveillance footage, investigators believed the doors may have not been able to be locked from the inside due to a malfunction, the source the Express-News.

It is a certainty that law enforcement had access to tool that could be used to pry the door open, but its pretty jaw dropping that apparently the doors were never locked in the first place.

I have a couple problems with this, besides the anonymous "law enforcement" source. First, the article does not say police had the tool, but they had access to it. This is, of course, a true statement. I have never seen a police patrol car with a halligan tool in it. But police do have access to it, by calling for the fire department, who has them on almost all trucks, to bring them one. I don't know if that was done or when, but saying the police "had access" to the tool does not mean they had it immediately available.

In the second, a source close to the investigation says that investigators viewed the video footage and believe there was a malfunction where the door could not be locked from the inside. Unless there is a big hole in the door where the lock used to be, how can anyone tell if it works by looking at a video of it later?

There is still too much mis- or dis-information being played in the media on this event. I don't generally trust the mass media, and in this case, I certainly cannot. An event where they can bad mouth both guns and cops is just too tempting for them to ever tell the truth.

The Annoyed Man wrote: ↑Sun Jun 12, 2022 8:45 pmThus, you do not lose your RKBA simply because you are beyond the age of 45—which was 25 years ago for me personally. The 2A doesn’t say your RKBA is age dependent. It says it shall not be infringed.

I have argued that this last part does make it absolute, no matter what Biden claims.

The First may be not absolute because it simply says Congress shall make no law, which leaves other possible restrictions allowable. The Third is not absolute because it says "except in a manner prescribed by law." The Fourth is not absolute because it only forbids unreasonable searches and seizures. Similarly, there are exceptions or unusual clauses making most of the others not quite absolute. But "shall not be infringed" is an absolute restriction on the government.

I have several problems with these changes. My first question is if the proposed change would have prevented the shooting that provoked the law (or any other). The only proposal that MIGHT have avoided this shooting was raiding the age to 21 to buy the weapon. I disagree with this based on my belief that a person is either an adult or not. Whatever age we have for being considered an adult should be the same for ALL adult decisions. If I can trust an 18 year old to vote or defend the country, how can I not trust him with a rifle or pistol or buying alcoholic beverages? If it goes along with raising the voting age and the age of consent for sex or marriage, etc. then I can support this.

My problem with allowing juvenile records is that it does no good. It might help on involuntary commitments by courts, but that is a very small chance of doing anything, especially for juveniles. It cannot help on criminal records because juveniles are not convicted of crimes in Texas. They are shown in a civil trial to be guilty of conduct in need of supervision, with an underlying basis of whatever they were arrested for. This is not disqualifying yet (I think). So, this could be done if other laws were changed, but do we really want to take away anyone's rights based on civil offenses? Or do we change Texas law to allow juveniles to be criminally charged and convicted (which I might be able to support). And of course, children under 10 are not even allowed to be charged with CINS, let alone criminal charges.

What the liberals are trying to do is a simple answer to a very complicated problem, if we assume they are actually trying to solve a problem and not just seize more power for the government using this as an excuse (which is what I think they are doing). The correct solution is going to involve a lot of cultural changes to restore discipline and respect where it is certainly missing today. It will also take changes in mental health care, which involves a lot of expense.

carlson1 wrote: ↑Sat Jun 04, 2022 7:45 pm The easiest and quickest way is to have everyone coming to school to have to enter through one door. I am not even against the “man cage” that they use at a lot of banks and like they use when going from sally port to inside the jail. One door has to close and lock before the next door will open. Not that hard.

This works in low traffic volume situations, but would never work at most schools. We have schools in Texas with over 6000 students in them, and the majority of schools have over 1000. Think of trying to get 1,000 kids in through one door and set of metal detectors all in time for their first class - that means at the same time. As an alternative, consider how well TSA gets people scanned. Lines at most airports back up for a minimum of 10 minutes. And it can back up to an hour or more when it is crowded.

I am not opposed to making all access go through security screening. I am just saying it will take more tan one entrance point and more money than is expected.

The Annoyed Man wrote: ↑Wed Jun 01, 2022 8:13 amHere’s what I do know:

seph wrote: ↑Tue May 31, 2022 11:04 pm Never talk to the police after being involved in a shooting and never depend on them when your life or the lives of your family is on the line.

I do not know if the facts I snipped are really facts or not, but your last line and TAM's post are both 100% correct and unarguable.

C-dub wrote: ↑Tue May 31, 2022 10:07 pm

philip964 wrote: ↑Tue May 31, 2022 6:18 pm
Uvalde Police and school police no longer Cooperating with State Police investigation.

I think this is incorrect. I read that it was the chief of the school districts police that was not responding to a second interview request. He is not part of the Uvalde PD.

The Chief has obviously heard our advice to never talk to the police after you are involved in a shooting. The governor and the media have already characterized his decision as wrong and are looking for someone to blame for this tragedy. We all know who is primarily at fault here (the shooter), but there are enough mistakes that someone else will go down in flames. Will it just be a career ending decision or are they going to try to put someone in jail over this?

Look at what the media is doing to the Uvalde ISD Police Chief. Look at what they were doing to the unnamed teacher who propped the door open to go get something from her car. Does anyone on this forum still think the advice to not talk to the police if you are involved in a shooting is bad advice?

PS> I do not know if the ISD chief made a bad decision or not. I was not there and I do not know what was happening when he made the decision. I do know that the investigation is now going to take an even longer time to complete, at least in part because of the rush to judgment. I also do know that there are very different protocols for police handing an active shooter versus a barricaded armed subject, either with or without hostages.