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Fucking cowards.  Fucking running away from a classroom full of kids as soon as you take a couple of incoming rounds?  Fucking gas mask on one of those retards? Fucking hand sanitizer while an active shooter is in a classroom 30 feet away?  Fucking standing there with rifles, body armor and ballistic shields?  Fuck every single one of them from the top to the bottom.

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Yes, that's what he said and that's the husband of one of the slain teachers. This is worse than thought, even he walked away. He couldn't even leeroy jenkins that shit to get to his wife. He just stepped out of the building. The cop who's daughter was in the classroom seemed to do the same, just wait it out in the hallway.

If they couldn't even go in for their loved ones, those kids were pretty much screwed.

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This is the LEO who's wife was shot in the classroom. She's the one who texted him and why he checked one of his phones. Though he has two phones, one in the left pocket and one on the right.

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Not stand there with body armor and a rifle and let that shit go down.

This is not a difficult problem to solve. Dangerous, yes, but not difficult. You find the guy doing the killing and you kill him.

...which, thankfully, when someone with a goddamn spine showed up he proceeded to do precisely that.

In Parkland, unarmed JROTC cadets and an unarmed football coach put themselves between the shooter and innocent people in an attempt to save lives. They had no duty to do this. They had sworn no oath, had no body armor, no backup, and no weapons...but they figured out what the right thing to do was even without any training and did whatever they could.

Let's not pretend that this gaggle of shitheads was just insufficiently trained.

I've been involved in training for 20+ years now. Police, in the main, don't fucking train beyond department minimums. And for 20 years I've heard police from all over the place bleat and whine about how training should be provided and they should be paid to do it on department time and not lose any of their own time because reasons. Meanwhile every other profession in the goddamn country involves people investing their own time and their own money in learning or improving skills that are useful in their employment. If someone works in IT, medicine, construction, law, accountancy, or any host of other professional tracks in this country, they spend hours outside of the office learning or honing skills they use on the job. They take time away from their lives and their families to get it done because that's what it takes. Even the fucking useless HR drones do that shit on their own time and their own dime. If you are in a job that doesn't involve asking if you want fries with that, you are going to have to spend your own time and your own money improving your skills just to keep up. That's the reality of the working world.

But cops? No, somehow cops are uniquely exempt from the requirement damn near everyone else in society has to invest in their own capability.

You're not wrong that any number of departments in this country would fail just as spectacularly as Uvalde's cowards did. But that's because those departments have a toxic leadership culture full of cowards. Which means they produce a department full of toxic cowards who will fail like this. Partly that's on the voters for not holding that sort of leadership accountable...but whenever he voters do make any attempt then the shitbags wrap themselves in the flag and claim their heroes to avoid any accountability.

...just like the Uvalde cowards have done here.

The bottom line is that policing in the United States is islands of competence, professionalism, and courage under continuous assault by tidal waves of mediocrity and cowardice. But that doesn't excuse the failure of individuals who are swimming in that shit to do better, especially when it's this fucking obvious.

One of the reasons there's so much suck is because so much of it gets wrapped in the flag and excused because CoPz!!! Motherfuckers running around with TBL stickers and TBL catchphrases jerking each other off about brotherhood, heroism, and other stupid lies.

How much brotherhood is involved in holding an officer back while his wife is literally bleeding to death a few feet away? Zilch.

The first step to fixing the problem is acknowledging it.

Lack of training isn't the core problem.

Lack of character is.

A friend of mine has worked two active shooter calls in the last couple of weeks. In each case he was furthest away, but first on the scene. In each case he grabbed a shotgun and went in hard to find the problem. All by himself. He's the only one on his department that has sought out training outside of what his department provides.

His character drove him to be better. Not the other way around.

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Complete and utter failure to follow even the most basic principles of Active Shooter response as they were taught at least as far back as 2008, when I began training and instruction for AS.

Feckless.

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What you said is the biggest crock of shit ever posted.  If you are correct, there is zero point in having police. You serve no fucking purpose.  Defund and disband every department if what you say is true.  

This epic failure is due to the leadership and liberalism destroying American values and institutions. Shit hiring due to checking the correct boxes and nothing to do with the person's abilities.  They hired from the top down based on a person's skin color, sex, orientation, and political party. They ended up with a collective group of people that had no business being in law enforcement being led by someone with no business being in charge. Period. I don't even have kids and I know I would have stormed the fucking door.

If you truly believe what you posted, you should turn in your badge and encourage every person on your force to do the same, you are unfit for duty.

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Those kids were dead in that first 2.5 minutes he started shooting into the classrooms. Major failure because it took an hour to stop the threat. Its your duty as a civilian in your community to know who your neighbors are. When everyone communicates you have the ability to react and protect.

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I'm not going to speak to the intent of Wes' post. I work for the largest agency in the state. Almost 30 years. Most of the guys I work with would have ignored any stand down bullshit we heard. We are old school and react and make decisions. What I can tell you, even in my own agency, this type of officer is being weeded out/discouraged/not hired. They want supervisors to make every decision. If there isn't one they will wait around until one arrives. I have seen it for several years and it only gets worse. You can have an active shooter class and tell officers they have to act, but if every other single police action they take they have the de-escalation shit being crammed down their throats this is what happens.

Personally I would have been through the door shooting but I am a dinosaur. We are being pushed out of the profession by constant bullshit and I fear what will be left. Society will not function without us, but the shit they are feeding us is setting terrible precedent. I just heard my agency is looking for officers to be on a committee to discuss fingernail polish standards. I shit you not.

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So will the press release a list of names of all the officers with armor and rifles who stood there and did nothing?

Or are all cops in the area going to be painted with the coward brush?

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For all the saber rattling going on by the "professionals" here that would've done it better-- I'm not convinced this scenario would've happened ANY differently no matter where it occurred.

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Those kids were dead in that first 2.5 minutes he started shooting into the classrooms. Major failure because it took an hour to stop the threat. Its your duty as a civilian in your community to know who your neighbors are. When everyone communicates you have the ability to react and protect.

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Oh, there was a failure of leadership, alright. But it began long before that day in May.  It began the moment the Mayor and the City Council hired Arredondo and continued unbroken until that BORTAC guy walked into the classroom. It began again as soon he walked out and continues until today as those ass covering poltroons continue their utterly transparent efforts to cover their utterly worthless asses.

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Serious question - are they afraid of consequences if they defy orders?   If someone is telling them not to go in could they be opening themselves up to prosecution if they go in anyway, especially if they accidentally shoot the wrong kid.  Just wondering if the liability mindset is part of the problem here.  Could legislation exempting them from prosecution in these cases avoid this?

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What would you do?

Seriously. You're now in charge of Texas DPS, or whatever Texan agency you want, circle January 2022. What do you do differently? What do you differently that would actually work? What is it in the hiring process you change? The training courses that are offered? The electoral voting of leadership of local agencies?

I've been saying all along that "cowardice" isn't the explanation. It's the answer that everyone wants to hear, because it's easy and satisfies the righteous anger, and dovetails oh so nicely with the ragebait articles, and doesn't need any further analysis or worry. There was a clump of cowards in Texas that day, and let's go imprison/execute them all, and that makes the world a safe place again. Or maybe it's just that all cops are cowards, our tax dollars are wasted, and maybe those anarchists have a point and we should just give it a whirl, no? Texas DPS Director McGraw would like you to believe it was all the fault of a single man (who isn't the shooter, I might add). Is he right?

The answers aren't simple. They aren't a matter of adding a new PowerPoint to the training doctrine. They can't be solved via legislation, or incarceration. Uvalde is just the latest in a long line of human violent conflict that shows that leadership in battle is a rare, precious resource that's impossible to mandate and incapable of artificial creation in a lab. Either it's there at the onset of the gunfight, or it's not.

Honestly the video released yesterday doesn't really show anything new or groundbreaking. The shooter had time to fire over 100 rounds in the classroom before any officers entered the building. We see nothing of the officers outside in this video, though their coordinated entry suggests they staged way too long outside...we don't get to see how, and where.

It's been said over and over again, but the majority of cops are not gunfighters. Their agencies give them a box or two of ammo a year, they aren't shooters, and they don't even know what they don't know. The endless critique of random SROs and patrol cops for not being DEVGRU utterly ignores that the average cop might get 24 hours of training..on a good year...across medical, legal, driving, firearms, ground fighting, computer systems, and equipment usage. To say nothing of the mandatory diversity, equity, and bullshit training. You can't get blood out of a stone. All of this means that when shit hits the fan, it takes some seriously commanding leadership to roll in, make a fast plan, and execute it with guys who aren't trained or equipped for a SWAT-level action. Particularly if they're spread across half a dozen different agencies.

After Parkland, I said at my old agency that we would have done no better on average if it had happened in my AO instead of Parkland. After Parkland, the average patrol guy's view in my area was still "wait for backup, don't go in solo". I went off and wargamed with my SROs how best to ram school gates with my cruiser to come into the fight; most guys didn't even think about what they'd do.

I'll just say this, the capstone of all the things no one here wants to hear: if you grabbed 100 random arfcommers, 90 of them would be the guys hanging at the bottom of the screen by the camera, weapon at the ready but unsure what to do or where to go. 8 or 9 guys would be the meds dude, directing people to the fight or making plans for the wounded. 1 or 2 of those 100 would actually be bumrushing that door and working triggers. That was true in Heraclitus's day back in good ol' 500 BC, and is still true today. Period.

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You have people in countless professions that think that learning opportunities to be better in their profession should be come with compensation by their employers and/or be provided by their employer. Most people are content to remain mediocre and not look for ways to improve themselves.....that is simply society as a whole.  To single out police as some anomaly when it comes to wanting to be paid or have the learning opportunity provided by their employer is BS.     Yes; cops should be seeking out training on their own, but that applies to literally everyone that wants to perform better at a given task.

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A professional in the private sector will be left behind if they don't keep their skills relevant.

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The only police I know of who pay for their own off duty training are cops who are into guns already. Almost no cop who isn't into guns goes to a gun class on their own dime, I think I met two who did.

I've never heard of a police officer paying for anything but a gun class

I guess I should backpedal, there are police officers who attend college for degrees like masters in "public administration" but the only technical training I have heard of is cops who are into shooting or karate going to classes similar to their non work interest in firearms or martial arts. I've never heard of a cop who was a bad driver paying to go to a driving school

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How much aftermarket training does a cop need to understand the concept of "Go shoot fuckers that are shooting little kids"?

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Instead of running away, maybe a mag dump through the classroom door would've stopped that asshole.