Two former Montreal police officers severely criticize the slowness of the police to act to “neutralize” the shooter who killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Texas law enforcement officials admitted on Friday that they made a “bad decision” by waiting more than an hour before entering the classroom where the murderer was buried on Tuesday.
“Looking back, where I am now, of course, it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period. There is no excuse for this,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said in a Friday press conference. “I was not there, but from what we know now, we believe that we should have returned as soon as possible” to the classroom where the 18-year-old shooter was, added the senior official.
The latter gave point by point the most detailed account to date of the shooting which occurred Tuesday in a primary school in Uvalde, a small municipality of just over 15,000 inhabitants which was uneventful before a shooter there. kills 19 children and two teachers. It is the worst school shooting in the United States since the one in Sandy Hook, Newtown, on December 14, 2012, in which 26 people were killed.
An underestimated threat
At 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, teachers called 911 to report a young man carrying a gun. A few minutes later, Salvador Ramos starts shooting inside a classroom. “We know from the video evidence we have that he fired at least 100 bullets,” said Colonel McCraw, adding that the young man had 1657 rounds of ammunition intended to feed his semi-automatic assault rifle. automatique.
Gradually, the number of police inside the school climbs. Around noon, there are 19 in the corridor of the establishment. Meanwhile, several people, including children trapped in classrooms, call 911 to beg the police to intervene. The police, who believed they were dealing with a “barricaded subject” who did not threaten the safety of the children, did not finally enter the classroom where the killer was located until around 12:50 p.m., after obtaining the key to unlock the lock with the facility’s concierge, McCraw revealed. The killer is then shot.
“Obviously, according to the information we have, there were children at risk inside and an active shooter, and not a barricaded subject,” raised the colonel with hindsight. However, when the police are dealing with an active shooter, “the rules change”. “Any policeman should be able to go in there and shoot until the suspect is dead, period,” McCraw continued during his 40-minute press conference.
He said the initial decision not to enter the classroom where the killer was was made by Uvalde School District Police Chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo. The police investigation, which is continuing, has also shown that a heavily equipped tactical team which had moved in front of the school on Tuesday had then received the order not to enter it because “it had time and that no child was at risk,” McCraw said.
“A lack of training”
The details provided Friday concerning this police intervention, which shook the relatives of the victims, raise questions as far as Quebec. Joined by The duty, two former Montreal police officers expressed their dismay at the slowness of the police to act on Tuesday in Uvalde. A drama that is now at the heart of a national debate on gun control.
“What seems to be coming out of the news from Texas is that the police officers don’t seem to be trained in rapid deployment, they seem to be trained again like we were in the days of Polytechnique. It really looks like that, ”says with astonishment the ex-policeman of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) Stéphane Wall, who for 13 years trained police officers on the judicious use of force.
Following the December 6, 1989 shooting at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, in which Marc Lépine killed 14 women and injured 13 others before committing suicide, the slowness of the police to act on the day of the tragedy raised questions. The way to proceed at the time in the case of shootings, explain Mr. Wall and the former sergeant-detective André Gélinas, retired from the SPVM, was to wait for the arrival of the tactical intervention group before proceeding. .
In the years since the killings — and especially since the 2006 Dawson College shooting — police training in the province has been revised to respond more quickly and effectively in life-threatening situations. by a killer. “We will try to isolate him and shoot at him from different angles to encourage him to isolate himself […] the threat must be neutralized. That’s the goal,” says Wall. In Montreal, the police would therefore have “entered the class” where the shooter was much more quickly than what was done in Uvalde, he believes.
“We learned from past mistakes,” adds Mr. Gélinas. “Speed, time, that’s our main enemy,” continues the retired detective sergeant, who recalls that the goal of an “active killer” “is to kill as many people as possible before ‘to be arrested “.
But how is it that in the United States, where dozens of shootings have taken place in schools since the beginning of the year, we were able to witness a deficient police intervention in Uvalde on Tuesday? “It’s hard to understand, but it’s really a lack of training,” concludes Mr. Wall.