Uvalde Families Demand Law Enforcement Face Charges After Critical DOJ Report
“It is hard enough waking up every day and continuing to walk out on these streets, walk to a (grocery store) and see a cop who you know was standing there when our babies were murdered and bleeding out.”
Those who lost loved ones in the Robb Elementary school shooting renewed their calls that Uvalde law enforcement face charges after the DOJ exposed their failures.
“I’m very surprised that no one has ended up in prison,” said Velma Lisa Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was one of the two teachers killed in the May 24, 2022, shooting. “It’s sort of a slap in the face that all we get is a review … we deserve justice.”
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“We need our community,” said Brett Cross, who was raising his 10-year-old nephew, Uziyah Garcia, when the boy was killed in the shooting. “It is hard enough waking up every day and continuing to walk out on these streets, walk to a (grocery store) and see a cop who you know was standing there when our babies were murdered and bleeding out.”
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As what happened has become clear, Jesse Rizo has been among those left looking for more accountability. Rizo, whose niece Jacklyn Cazares was among the shooting victims, still hopes [Uvalde County District Attorney Christina] Mitchell will bring charges, but he has little faith in those in power.
“You hope for the best,” he said, “but the past will tell you basically what your outcome is going to be.”
The DOJ destroyed the police for their failure to step in and stop the murderer.
Authorities waited 77 minutes after arriving on the scene to confront and kill the murderer.
The DOJ acknowledged some of those who arrived first engaged in accepted practices but left when the murdered fired at them.
Once they left, “the law enforcement responders, including UCISD PD Chief Pete Arredondo—who we conclude was the de facto on-scene incident commander—began treating the incident as a barricaded subject scenario and not as an active shooter situation.”
Unfortunately, President Joe Biden used the report to push for more gun control. From a press release sent via email:
Congress must now pass commonsense gun safety laws to ensure that mass shootings like this one don’t happen in the first place. We need universal background checks, we need a national red flag law, and we must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The families of Uvalde – and all American communities — deserve nothing less.
The longer we wait to take action, the more communities like Uvalde will continue to suffer due to this epidemic of gun violence.
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Comments
I’ve no doubt the police will fall back on that Supreme Court decision stating that the police have no obligation to protect the public.
I’m also cynical enough to think that had the child(ren) of Someone Important had been in danger, the police would have acted far different.
Yeppers – this again
That said – is it actionable that the police prevented others / parents from acting?
you’d better explain that one, how can the police be liable for keeping civilians away from a mass shooting scene,..I wish that they could be, especially that cop shown on video inside the school working the hand sanitizer dispenser while children were being murdered
Yup! I feel for the parents but I think their calls for justice will not be served in the least. Those cops should all be fired and never see the badge again but that will not happen.
Yep, also known as the SCOTUS decision that paved the way for police forces to be a para-military extension of the government instead of actual law enforcement agencies.
Oh and your 2nd point is spot on. Well except for the fact that no one of “importance” would have allowed their child to go to school with the smelly peasants. They would be in the private school with armed security.
I’d be in prison if my son was amongst the dead. The police chief would be top on my list.
you know, that might be what it takes to get cops to act, knowing that they had a choice, either face a single shooter, or face several pissed of parents
I am surprised it hasn’t happened yet
Accidents happen everyday…
You know in many fiction books I have read situations like this are solved when a group of armed veterans shows up and give the police a choice to either get out of the way or face immediate and extreme consequences and then they deal with he situation.
Let me be clear I have never been involved in any discussion of this in real life, nor have I ever heard of any discussion among veterans regarding this response and I would immediately oppose any such suggestion. Seriously, I would.
Though I think it is interesting that some school districts instead of inviting police to come defend their students, instead they have armed veterans who patrol the school.
far better is the programme that was developed in Ohio in the ake of the Sandy Hook school massacre. Teachers who step up are carefully trained in all manner of skills necessary in an active shooter situation. Once through the training and qualification, they can now carry their own weapon at will, or not. NO ONE knows at any time who is armed and who is not. Only th school administrator has a list of those who are qualified, but no roster of who IS armed on any given day. The entire programme training range time, ammunition, etc, is DONATED and costs the government/people nothing. Oh, and since the programme first started there has not been ONE gun-relate incident at any school in any district which has trained their adult staff. Even the janitors and cooks can qualify.
WHY is not this programme nationwide? I’ll tell you.. because incidents like these are necessary to continue feeding the “we gotta DOOOO sumthin narrative over disarming We the People.
Excellent, I agree wholeheartedly that this should be a model for all schools in the nation.
I bet those same cops were uber macho manhandling cost accountants who refused to wear a mask during COVID.
Don’t forget their treatment of motorists with out-of-state plates.
Millions of honest upright hardworking citizens REFUSED to slap those mug nappies across our faces. So what’s that got to do with coppers refusing to go in and do their job? Turns out those mandating the facerags were WRONG. A chain link fence will NOT keep the mosquitos out.
If you told me a Hispanic police force would let this monster kill their children
Basically they were all cowards, I never would have believed it
The English and the French speaking world have their cowards to, of course there are cowardly Spanish speakers.
“to ensure that mass shootings like this one don’t happen”
It is impossible to stop this kind of thing. if no a gun it could be a knife or a bomb, the possibilities are endless.
Up until 1993, the largest mass murder in US history (87) was committed with a jar of gasoline.
That includes the US Government’s attempts to beat that record at Waco (80).
The record was taken by
John Doe #2Tim McVeigh in OKC (187) with rental trucks full of oil and fertilizer, if you believe the government version… and since it undercuts their own entire gun control narrative, let’s say we choose to do that.You are absolutely correct. The issue here was the response to the event.
Getting shot at is scary. Really scary. Especially when others are dying. If it hasn’t happened to you, don’t judge. You have no idea how you’ll react. Maybe you’re Medal of Honor material. Maybe not. How easy it would be to tell yourself you’re setting up a perimeter while taking cover and waiting for your superiors to arrive.
Blaming the Police for not quickly putting the shooter down is looking for a scapegoat. There is one person responsible for this massacre. Salvador Ramos, but he’s dead so it’s natural to try to find somebody to punish. Grief management.
bullshit
it is their job to protect
there were plenty among them who were itching to go in, but they were held back by ‘leadership’
it was an utter failure of leadership
this. There are so many handicaps put on law enforcement, on our military, even on “good samaritans.” Leadership doesn’t want to act wrong, and they cannot let their officers act at all.
Yes, this is a problem with the officers. But more, it is a problem with the leadership of law enforcement in our society.
I would have gone in, job be damned
There were officers that tried. Officers that were trained to deal with a mass shooting, they were stopped from doing so.
Sorry hit down key instead of up key
no it is NOT their duty to protect. Only to enforce the laws. ANY of them could have just gone on in in spite of their “leadership” messing their drawers. If I remember correctly it was a group of just a few who went in over the objections of some grand poohbah who kept everyone else out except for the few that finally DID go in and take care of bidniss. The worst consequences any officer could have taken for refusing to follow orders abd stand down would have been insubordination. Go ahead, fire me. I did what was right. Aren;’t YOU glad those kids I got out alive are still here?
Expecting the police to act quickly when an emergency arises is scapegoating,….are you serious?
I would suggest a more careful reading of my comment. IMHO, Referring a Police officer for criminal charges because he didn’t respond like a Call of Duty character in a combat situtition is scapegoating. Left unanswered is , exactly what charge the policeman would face. Your opinion? You can say he didn’t earn his pay that day, but that’s a civil matter, not a criminal one.
That cowardice isn’t a crime under civil law is a damn slim nail to hang your argument on. The military have sure learned how to make it one.
Yea your post said nothing even close to that effect. Now you are just lying to try and cover your ass. Like any good coward would.
Expecting to sue them or demand some type of criminal justice is unrealistic. Should they have acted? Yes. Were they ordered not to? Absolutely so they were doing as they were trained. Training is a thing and breaking out of that is very hard.
“Just following orders.” Got it.
LEO to murderer ratio was almost 400 to 1.
They refused to defend anyone in that school.
You are as cold hearted and useless as they were.
They were sure manly enough to cuff the parents that wanted to go in for their kids, though.
Every time I see that number, I think about how big a group of people that actually is.
How do you even stuff 400 cops into the elementary school of a city-in-name-only?
Yep there were literally enough “officers” on site that they could have made a wall of bullet proof shields and vests and advance while under cover, if not to engage the shooter then at least to block line of site while first responders could treat the wounded and evacuate the others.
Nope. Not even close. Post Columbine the tactics shifted to a straightforward find and put down shooter.
I agree getting shot at sucks. Many of us have experience with CQB from the sandbox and other unfriendly places. Training and strong tactical leadership overcomes it. Ultimately though it comes down to willingness to act. LEO letting this guy shoot up a school for an hour + while they established a perimeter demonstrates lack of willingness at minimum on the part of the on site leaders. The claims about a confusing chain of command are BS either they knew who was in charge and let a moron run things or the agencies involved had zero planning for coordinating such an event; either is negligence.
I don’t accept the “Confusion of Leadership” argument. The Chief of the School Police force was on site, they were in charge, period.
I also would note that the Chief was fired in 2022 specifically for his handling of this event.
“If it hasn’t happened to you, don’t judge.”
If you have such doubts about yourself, don’t take a paycheck for it and an oath to do it.
As someone who has been shot at on multiple occasions at the behest of the US Government and even twice since then when idiots fired into areas that I happened to be, I can say you are unequivocally full of horse exhaust and have no idea what you are talking about.
Yes it is scary, it was scary to advance on the enemy for the combatants in every major and minor war/engagement since the beginning of time, but they did it. Because they are trained to do it and so are police.
The first cops who went in didn’t know what they were doing, they retreated after one of them took a shrapnel graze from concrete for Christs sake, not a bullet wound. Also, this was the only “wound” suffered by a responding officer. Well other than type 2 diabetes from all the Star Bucks they where slurping down while children were dying.
Even after they had the shooter “barricaded” “Leadership” stopped first responders from going in to treat the wounded that weren’t in line of site of the shooter.
They stopped parents from going in who were willing to go in unarmed and attempt to get Children out of harm’s way.
“Leadership” never attempted to evacuate any of the children.
Hell, they even stopped a team of officers from a neighboring jurisdiction who were highly trained in Active Shooter situations from going in or even being a part of the process, because they were telling them to go in and deal with the situation.
No they were incompetent, immoral, cowards who treated the situation as a game.
However, the biggest indicator of cowardice is that not even one officer had the guts to try to get a group of officers together and arrest the leadership for endangering the public, child abuse, and any other thing they could think up and then cuff and gag the cowards in charge and stuff them in a police car and let real adults handle the situation.
I am old, fat, and my military training is 30 years in my past and I would have gone in with a pocket knife and a sharpened stick to save those kids and they would have had to incapacitate or kill me to stop me.
The fact that you are defending them says much more about your own personal cowardice than anything else.
They took an oath, and they broke it.
The daughter of a teacher who bled to death during the 1999 Columbine High School shootings has reached a $1.5-million settlement in her lawsuit against the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.
The sheriff’s office admitted no wrongdoing in the agreement announced Tuesday and both sides still disagree about whether more could have been done to help the teacher, Dave Sanders.
Assistant County Atty. Bill Tuthill said the sheriff’s office’s insurer, which he did not name, decided to settle.
https://archive.is/nDgEJ#selection-1937.0-1937.114
Abolish qualified immunity if we truly want to rectify this type of gross malfeasance and egregious deriliction of duty. As it stands, we live in an era where public officials are rarely held accountable for anything, so it’s not gonna happen. We’re simply not a serious country, anymore.
Abolish qualified immunity would be a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, even if it were possible to remove qualified immunity, that wouldn’t matter. As another commenter mentions, there have been a couple landmark Supreme Court cases that have held that the police (and some other government agencies) have no ‘duty to protect’ you. A plaintiff would need to get over that bar before any even beginning to address qualified immunity.
Removing qualified immunity would be more helpful in cases where the police act negligently in some way. Unfortunately, NOT acting is not acting negligently, under existing Supreme Court precedent.
Alan Korwin’s “Supreme Court Gun Cases” can be a dry read for those not passionate about the subject, but it delivers the goods and is an excellent reference work.
I remember learning from it that the very first SCOTUS case on “duty to protect” concerned a wild west lawman enroute to the hoosegow with a desperado in tow, who was set upon by a gang who had a beef with either him or his captive (I don’t remember which). The lawman was faced with the legal duty to risk his life to protect his dirtbag captive, while simultaneously taking down the interlopers.
An arrestee is entitled to protection by police because they have stripped him of his right to self-defense by arresting him, therefore police must assume that duty. You, on the other hand, are not so entitled because nominally you retain your right of self-defense… notwithstanding that in many places you have been effectively stripped of it by a legislature (or in places like NM, an executive), which is somehow more acceptable.
Bottom line: if you want police to protect you, get them to arrest you. Then just hope they’re competent enough to execute the duty properly.
You can’t send cops to die. You shouldn’t. You can’t advocate for this AND more hires OR higher standards.
And the White House wants to use this incident of police “incompetence” to rob you of the only remedy; self defense.
How about soldiers? Do we wrap them in bubble wrap too?
Thankfully, not all the schools have cowards responding to criminals. Some have actually acted courageously.
The community didn’t police it’s police.
Rather than wait for 400 useless police to respond to their own incidents, a few right-thinking schools have empowered faculty and staff to retain and exercise their constitutional right of self-defense (after diligently ensuring they are properly trained in both self-defense law and marksmanship). Up the road a ways from Uvalde is the town of Junction, TX, where school properties are decorated with these notices. It’s a peaceful little town indeed, and a favorite place of ours to spend time on the road.
Other schools in other states attempting to adopt this solution have been shortstopped by their own insurance companies. Insurance companies would rather see kids die than have to pay out for the possible bad judgment or negligence of the people to whom you entrust the lives of your children every day. Obviously, if you constrain people to do nothing, they can’t do the wrong thing. And this is why our country is no longer in charge of America’s historically self-reliant adults, but is run by cowardly slaves and drones.
Many moons ago, when my kids were young and we lived in Plano, the elementary school principal there had a policy that if you 1) had an LTC and 2) had a certificate of firearm (specifically handgun) proficiency, then all you had to do to carry there was go into the office, display both, and they gave you a card that authorized you, in writing, to carry on the premises. I was an LTC holder at the time and I was an NRA Certified Firearms instructor. The principal, vice principal, and several teachers became Handgun Certified in my class. Sadly, that policy (and principal) did not carry over to the middle or high school.
Fortunately, my kids are now grown adults. I know my son carries on a daily basis where he works in IT. Pretty sure (and G-d I hope not!) my daughter doesn’t.
Ohio’s FASTER Saves Lives was developed in the wake of Sandy Hook massacre. It does exactly this and at NO cost to the taxpayer at any level. Since it started there has not been ONE gun related incident in any school district which has joined in this programme. It WORKS.
I would like to see a discussion of the relevant statutes with discussion of charges over the cowardice.
I understand parents are still grieving, nobody here is among those parents. If you want charges you should explain which ones.
Unfortunately, there is no criminal recourse at this point. However, Civil recourse may still be possible.
According to the news search results, the official at the Uvalde shooting who had previously been in a school shooting was Pete Arredondo, the former police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District12. He was one of the first responders to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, when he was a lieutenant with the Connecticut State Police3. He later moved to Texas and became the Uvalde school district police chief in 20184. He was fired in August 2022 for his role in the Uvalde school shooting that killed
Police are trained, nationwide, according to “ ALERRT” active shooter methods, many purchase their own breaching equipment. Go to the sound of gunfire, stop the killing with dynamic and quick action, as was seen in the Memphis shooting. Standing around while people are dying is not an option. Watching them stand around in Uvalde was maddening, much like the one in Florida. Some of us were watching as these unfolded and every one had the same thought, “God I wish I was there”
This is all interesting discussion but it is no more useful that armchair quarterbacking after the final score is lit up on the game board. NONE of this addresses any of what went on leading up ti the point where that dirtbag kid with the rifle walked onto the schoolyard and through an OPEN outside door and into the school building.
As in every other such incident, there WERE warning signs, plenty of them. They were, as always, IGNORED. WHO got them and then ignored them> What has been done to assure any future similar warning signs WILL be followed up on? (the horse has escaped the barn, how are we gonna fix the barn door so he can’t do it tomorrow?)
Two other questions have been nagging at me since this incident went down.
I know the perp was pretty young, barely old enough to buy a long gun, which he did. He was also marginally employed. Apparently had no signficant wealth nor access to it. I undrstand his implement of destruction was a $3000 Daniel Defense rifle then he bought pkenty of mags and filled them with live rounds. WHERE did such a kid get such miney WHO paid for that rifle? If he did WHERE did the money come from?
Second, considering what I just wrote, HOW is it that he was driving what I understand to be a fancy pickup truck worth many thousands of dollars ? Whose truck was that? If his, HOW did he get the money to pay for i and fuel it? Looks to me like someone was supporting and perhaps setting this guy up for his Swan Song. Some sort f Sugar Daddy. WHO? That kid had more value in his rifle and pickup than I paid for my first house. HOW?
Exactly. Makes zero sense. Kid with an expensive rifle. Where’d the money come from? From across the border?
Call me crazy, but I think the FBI has a budget for this. Just like the do for that nifty “patriot front” outfit they have.
“WHERE did such a kid get such miney WHO paid for that rifle? If he did WHERE did the money come from?”
I raised this suspicion again just this week elsewhere, and was rewarded by a response from national gunwriter Dean Weingarten:
“Uvalde doesn’t fit [the template of suspected FBI grooming]. It has been documented how he [he killer] saved money from his job to buy the guns and ammo he used. Not hard if you work even minimum wage for six months and have no expenses, living at home.”