The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Gunset Training Group or its affiliates.
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A week or so ago, I saw an online post about this active shooter incident. This article is about some of the problems I see with this incident. The final report hasn’t been released and there are some questions about why it’s taken this long to release the report and all the associated videos. This article is just going to cover the issues that are clearly visible in the video that has been released. The surveillance video from the school is pretty grainy so the screen shots I’ve taken are not the greatest, so I’d suggest watching the video and then coming back.
Like the shooter in Nashville, this shooter entered the school by breaking out a window in a door and crawling through the opening. Unlike Nashville, this could have, and should have, been stopped right there. But it wasn’t because the “security guard” who was RIGHT THERE AND HAD THE DROP ON THE SHOOTER, was unarmed. In reality, unarmed security guards are just targets. Call them hall monitors. I don’t blame them for not stopping this shooter. It’s the school and the legislature that are to blame. In the picture below, the red arrow points to the shooter, who is crawling through the opening at the bottom of the door.
As you can see, the hall monitor is clearly in a position to drop the shooter right there before he even gets into the main part of the building. I give them credit because they stuck around longer than many people would have.
Now the shooter is through the door. The hall monitor is still in a position to stop them. If they had a gun. If the doors had the 3M security film, things may have turned out differently.
This picture is from a few minutes after the shooter entered the building. The arrow points to a different hall monitor who had an opportunity to stop the shooter. If they had a firearm. Instead of stopping the shooter, they just ran away. Again, I don’t blame them.
This shooter clearly wanted to engage law enforcement. He waited in the hallway for several minutes looking at the top of the stairs where any responding cops would appear.
He also clearly knew that he was being watched on surveillance cameras. He even gave them a single finger wave.
After waiting for a few minutes, he retreated into a computer lab just to the bottom right of the picture above. This is where the responding officers found him. The officers who responded showed up as a group instead of a single officer or two.
There are at least 10 Officers in this picture. One has a rifle, one has a shotgun and the rest have pistols (based on what video I watched).
So what are the takeaways from the surveillance video? First, hiring UNARMED “security guards” is ridiculous and does a disservice to not only the people they are supposed to protect, but also to the security guards themselves. The school could have legally allowed those security guards to carry a pistol with a concealed weapons permit. But they chose not to.
Second, the school could have also installed some sort of glazing (like the 3M film) on the window that made it much harder for the shooter to get inside. But they chose not to. Why schools still refuse to take the simple precaution of adding the 3M film to their doors and windows is beyond me. Especially where there are school safety grants available for projects like this.
Third, the Officers in the surveillance video are clearly disorganized and don’t appear to have a plan. I’ll talk more on this later.
So let’s get to the body camera video. I warn you (if you haven’t watched the video) – it’s not pretty from here out. STLMPD is extremely fortunate they didn’t have a blue on blue death during this incident. I’ll post a series of screen shots and then come back and talk about them in detail. The screen shots are all from the same Officer’s body camera. Watching the body camera video as the officers enter the building, you can hear them (like the Nashville Officers I talked about in this post) focus on getting the Officer with the AR15 to the front of the group. I only saw the one AR15 in the video, but I also saw at least one plain Jane 870 (more on that later). I’m curious if prioritizing a rifle up front is something they emphasize in their training (I’m assuming they actually have active shooter training). I understand the desire to have a rifle up front, but I hope they didn’t wait for one to show up before they entered the school.
I came up with three main training points from the body camera video:
- Muzzle discipline and shooting from the back of the bus
- Over-reliance on long guns
- Failure to shift missions
Muzzle discipline/shooting from the back of the bus – these two things often go hand in hand like they did in this incident. There are two Officers in this video that clearly need some remedial training – the Officer wearing the body camera and the shotgun armed Officer. While the muzzle discipline is obviously a problem, I think the biggest problem is what we call “shooting from the back of the bus”. Which means you are shooting behind other people who can easily step in front of you while you’re shooting. This grisly example from Johannesburg, South Africa is exactly what I’m talking about and what I expected to see in the body camera video.
So how do you avoid it? Well, there are a couple of ways. For shotgun Officer, having “muzzle in front of meat” would have been the best way. This just means that the muzzle of your firearm, at the very least, is in front of the person you are shooting next to. For the body camera Officer, he should not have fired shots unless he was standing next to or “in line” with the other Officers. This is something that should be covered on the range and reinforced during training sessions.
Over-reliance on long guns – specifically the AR15. If I’m headed to a gunfight, I want a rifle or a shotgun. No doubt. If I have one. If there is time. When it comes to responding to active shooters, waiting for an AR15 to show up to take the front spot is wrong. You go with what you have. Properly set up pump action shotguns with proper ammo are great people stoppers for the ranges we see in this body camera video. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the 870s in question were properly set up. It looks like plain-Jane 870s with crappy sights, no sling, no extra ammo and no extended tube. It is not surprising that they ran out of shotgun ammo during the gunfight.
The distances involved in this incident were well within what I think is effective handgun range. But if their SOP is to wait for a rifle before advancing to find the bad guy, then they need to buy a rifle for every patrol car. Not having a rifle in most patrol cars is foreign to me since just about every patrol car in my area has them. Heck, quite a few of the unmarked cars also have them.
Failure to shift missions – what’s the mission for active shooter response? For the first Officers in, it’s to find bad guy and stop bad guy. Eventually, there will be enough Officers on scene that some of them should be changing missions. In the videos you can see that many of the Officers are standing around and not doing anything productive. Once they knew the shooter was confined to that room, I’d propose that at least a third of them should have gone in search of any injured people and extracted them. This is something I don’t think we train for or talk enough about. Rapid extraction of the injured people should become a primary focus once we have the suspect contained. The injured people were not extracted for over half an hour.
So let’s talk about how they dealt with the suspect. If you watched the video, you could see the Officers looked into the classroom from two different angles. There were no kids inside the classroom (at least I would hope not considering the way they used the shotguns to breach the door). Did they need to force their way in and expose themselves to the suspects return fire? Or could they post a few Officers on the doors to continue the containment and turn this into a barricaded suspect situation? It’s hard to say for sure based on the limited information that we have, but it is absolutely something that should have been considered. If there are no innocents in that room to rescue, then there really was no need to rush in the way they did.
But wait, weren’t the cops in Uvalde crucified for treating that like a barricade? They were. And rightfully so. But there is a huge difference between Uvalde and CVPA. In Uvalde, they KNEW there were injured people inside those classrooms. Here, it appears they could look right into the classroom and see there were no kids in there to rescue.
We have to be better than this. Keep training, keep planning. Encourage your co-workers to do the same.