Some other things I have read about the Texas school shooting. The first two officers on the scene trapped/isolated the gunman in one classroom. The gunman barricaded himself in the classroom. This after a teacher propped open a locked door to make a cellphone call and then forgot to close the door. Normally all the school doors are locked and can not be opened from the outside. There was not a school policeman at the school when the gunman entered because the armed school policeman had just left and may have unknowingly passed the gunman as he, the officer, left the area in his vehicle. The school district police policy in place is when there is an incident in which a gunman barricades himself in a room or a school, it becomes a hostage situation and they request a negotiator. Apparently, the chief of school police made this call, which turned out to be wrong. The 20 officers outside the room have been roundly criticized for not storming the classroom but they were under orders not to do so, but the bottom line is they did not have the equipment to get into the room rapidly. They were facing a steel-cased reinforced door ( allegedly bulletproof) that was locked. In addition, the windows in the door and/or adjacent to the door are the wired mesh security glass. The glass may or may not be bulletproof, but if it is not the glass still does not shatter if you shoot through it or hit it with a gun butt. The police could not see the gunman from the hallway or the exterior of the building. It took police a little over half an hour to retrieve a key, a master key which was provided by the US Border Patrol. Once a key was secured, they immediately entered the room and shot the gunman.
So I am scratching my head on this one. Why did the School District Police Department not have any keys to enter the school or the classroom? Surely they have to investigate break-in alarms, so why do they not have a master key? Why didn't they get a master key from the school principal or better yet, the school janitor? Janitors have a key to every locked door on a school campus. Why does the Border Patrol have a key to a US Public School?
There have been claims that local law enforcement officers went into the school to save their own children, but I think that the officers were actually evacuating the remainder of the school. As for the police preventing parents from entering the school of their own volition, there is not a police force in the civilized world that is going to let an armed parent storm anything, much less a school where children are barricaded in a room with a gunman.
This is an epic tragedy and there are multiple points of failure. Clearly, background checks need to include a person's entire criminal history, just not their criminal history as an adult. Teachers must adhere to the safety protocols whether they are a pain in the ass or not. School police departments need master keys to all school district facilities.
So I am scratching my head on this one. Why did the School District Police Department not have any keys to enter the school or the classroom? Surely they have to investigate break-in alarms, so why do they not have a master key? Why didn't they get a master key from the school principal or better yet, the school janitor? Janitors have a key to every locked door on a school campus. Why does the Border Patrol have a key to a US Public School?
There have been claims that local law enforcement officers went into the school to save their own children, but I think that the officers were actually evacuating the remainder of the school. As for the police preventing parents from entering the school of their own volition, there is not a police force in the civilized world that is going to let an armed parent storm anything, much less a school where children are barricaded in a room with a gunman.
This is an epic tragedy and there are multiple points of failure. Clearly, background checks need to include a person's entire criminal history, just not their criminal history as an adult. Teachers must adhere to the safety protocols whether they are a pain in the ass or not. School police departments need master keys to all school district facilities.
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