Uvalde Cops Didn’t Even Try to Open the School Door?

CLAY: Very few shows out there will support police more than this one. We need more cops on the streets, we need more criminals behind bars, we need more support for law enforcement, period. But it doesn’t mean cops are without flaws. And as more and more of the details come out surrounding the Uvalde school shooting, it becomes increasingly clear that this was a failure of epic portions when it comes to the response that was brought to bear inside of that school.

Now to reiterate, for a lot of you out there who may have forgotten some of the details, this shooter went into the school. Two minutes later, according to the timeline, the first Uvalde police entered in behind him. Reports are that they exchanged gunfire in some way and for a long time basically since this story broke, Buck, the report has been that the shooter locked the door behind him in the classroom and they couldn’t find the key and they had to wait for the right group to be able to breach that door. Now there is a report that came out over the weekend — and we increasingly don’t know the most basic details here — that suggest the door may not have been locked at all.

And that there was, therefore, no need whatsoever to have ever waited in the hallway while that madman was in there with the kids and the teachers. This matters in a massive way because he was left in there for up to 75 to 77 minutes before he was finally challenged by the Border Patrol guys who went in through that door. We still, Buck, to my knowledge, haven’t seen any photographs of these classrooms. Were there windows that could have been accessible as opposed to the door?

But if the door of the unlocked and they simply didn’t grab that door and swing it open, how many lives were lost unnecessarily as people were in there wounded, bleeding, kids and teachers, and when will we know the full truth? Because more and more this begins to look like one of the most incompetent police responses we have ever seen in a mass shooting situation, certainly inside of a school in the post-Columbine area. What was your reaction when you saw that the door may not have been locked at all?

BUCK: They’re going to delay the final results of the investigation as long as they possibly can because there is simply no way to explain the fact patterns, the reality that we’ve already seen here that does not make it seem like a huge failure of command and procedure on the ground. And to some of those folks involved what’s even more troubling, perhaps a failure of nerve. This is something that we don’t often talk about.

This is something that, you know, we just assume because we have such an incredible military and such an incredible law enforcement apparatus in this country, so many people that work in law enforcement who will lay their lives down for their community, for their country in a moment’s notice, that that is the case everywhere and with everyone. It is not, though, the case. There are always individual instances of people who may freeze in the moment, who may lose their nerve.

And there is still reporting, for an example, for anybody — and I know some people, they almost take it personally when you say — even if they’re not members of law enforcement — that some individuals from law enforcement may have suffered from a moment (or longer than that) of cowardice here. That is possible. Some people take it very personally who had nothing to do with this, of course. They just seem to get very upset at the notion.

It deeply disturbs them to think that there could be cowardice amongst some members of law enforcement, the same way when I was with the NYPD, Clay, they had a term “perps in uniform” which is what cops would disparagingly refer to cops who actually break the law in serious ways as, and they say we hate those guys more than anybody because they make our lives miserable. Internal affairs comes down on everybody. They make the job harder for the 99% of officers who are doing everything the right way.

So, you know, we’re speaking about the less than 1% here in the possibility of the degree of failure we saw in the Uvalde response from law enforcement. There is still reporting — I have not seen it retracted — that there was a girl who shouted out — this is one of these things you read and it’s just haunting — who called out to police outside the window when they called in and then she was immediately executed by this mass murdering psychopath. That was after police had already gotten into the hallway, already in the building.

CLAY: Received multiple 911 calls from inside; so they knew there were survivors.

BUCK: They knew there were survivors in there, there was a gunman. It’s simply inexcusable that these armed men who have guns, who have body armor, that they did not try a breach to stop the slaughter from going on. There is no justification for it. It’s hard for people to hear, especially I think a lot of people that believe very strongly in law enforcement, who believe — as we do.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Remember, when we opened up the lines when this story first started to come together in this way, every law enforcement officer who called in said this was a massive failure, this absolutely is an unacceptable response. So, you know, we’re not — we’re not sitting here, we’re not sitting here as cheerleaders for any law enforcement action. That’s not the way we do things. And in this case, I think the lessons learned are gonna be really hard ones for people to take. And it also raises questions about, okay, you say if we just have a fast enough law enforcement response. Well, that may not be sufficient.

CLAY: They were in two minutes after he breached the school.

BUCK: How much faster can you be than that?

CLAY: It’s almost impossible to think how it could have been any faster.

BUCK: And I’m sorry. The Pulse nightclub. I talked about this I believe with you before, Clay, on the show. We talked about it off air. The Pulse nightclub shooting was very similar. There were SWAT teams on the scene very quickly, the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida. And there was a long wait before any… He was walking around shooting people who were wounded.

And they said, “Oh, we were worried that maybe he had rigged the place with a bomb.” Okay. So, you’re gonna take that concern above the real-time executions going on of defenseless people inside that nightclub? So, you know, the policy — there has to be — the policy has to be if the active shooter is still active, you have law enforcement on the scenes, they go in and stop the threat. It can’t be, Clay, they call for negotiator in Uvalde.

CLAY: I know. I know. And they were getting calls from inside of those classrooms from teachers and students so they knew there were still people alive. And every profession is filled with imperfection. Nobody is perfect in the way that they would respond. And, frankly, we still don’t know exactly the command structure or what those officers who were arriving were being informed about what was going on there.

But if that door was unlocked and there were police within that school two minutes after, and then there were dozens of police within five, 10 minutes in that hallway, how in the world did they not go in? You’ve been trained in tactical situations, Buck. We were talking about this at dinner on Friday night. We were out… A lot of these police… I read that Uvalde police had just been through tactical training for how to respond in the event of a school shooting. To have a failure of command and response in this magnitude at this situation is just devastating to think about.

I can’t even imagine if you had had a wounded child in there and you look back at the autopsy results and you think, my goodness, maybe if I could have gotten in there within five minutes, there wouldn’t have been the loss of blood, there would have been an ability to treat some of these kids, and less kids and teachers would have been shot and maybe less would have died. I don’t know how you sleep at night if you are involved in that police response as more and more of these details come out.

BUCK: The final report, I think, will be very damning whenever it does come out, Clay, and I do believe that the bureaucracy involved will slow roll it as long as possible because it is such a gut punch, in addition to the atrocity that occurred here, that there was such an entirely insufficient response — again, BORTAC went in there, Border Patrol agents went in as soon as they heard.

CLAY: And they killed him. And credit to those guys. But why were they not in, the Uvalde police, faster? We’re big supporters of police. That doesn’t mean that police are infallible. And this situation, it increasingly looks more and more indefensible.