Unfit to Lead

T here are times when rank and title must yield to experience and courage.

A former LAPD colleague once faced a situation in which he was forced to choose between assuming control from a superior or watching that superior imperil the lives of several police officers. The superior had been promoted based on criteria other than her demonstrated prowess in the grittier aspects of police work, and the decisions she had made on the day in question placed my colleague and several subordinate officers in a tactically untenable position.

As satisfying as it may have been to see the superior make a fool of herself, my colleague could not in good conscience bear the risk of the disastrous outcome that may have resulted. “You’re going to get us all killed,” he told her. To her credit, she recognized her errors and allowed my colleague to correct them, with the result that the situation was resolved with no injuries to anyone involved, save for the one to the ego of the involved superior, who remained diminished in the eyes of her subordinates for the duration of her assignment.

How unfortunate it is that on May 24 there was no one at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, who dared to be similarly blunt with Pete Arredondo.

Arredondo is the chief of the Uvalde School District Police Department, and it was he who came in for much of the criticism Tuesday, when Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, briefed a state senate committee on the Uvalde massacre in which 19 students and two teachers were murdered.

I can only speculate on the peculiarities of small-town politics that led to the creation of a school-district police department in a town of fewer than 16,000 people, and on those that led to Arredondo’s selection as its chief, but it seems safe to say that quick thinking and tactical proficiency were not among the criteria considered in choosing him. After Tuesday’s briefing, we now know what we could only assume since the day of the shooting. McCraw summed it up with brutal accuracy as he began his presentation. “There is compelling evidence,” he said, “that the law-enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.”

McCraw went on to lambast Arredondo specifically, though not by name. “Three minutes after the subject entered the west building,” he said, “there were a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject.” The only thing stopping them, he said, “was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”

Devastating stuff, surely, but abundantly well deserved.

McCraw’s allusion to the Columbine massacre refers to the April 20, 1999, shooting in Colorado, in which two student gunmen murdered twelve students and a teacher and wounded an additional 21 people before committing suicide. Columbine led to the development of “active shooter” training for police across the country, which dictates that officers immediately confront suspects without waiting for SWAT teams to arrive. Arredondo’s department had conducted a training session on active-shooter tactics just two months before the massacre in Uvalde.

But no amount of training can compensate for a lack of leadership when the time arrives for the skills to be put to the test. Police departments are paramilitary organizations in which a chain of command is strictly observed, and rare is the officer who, like my LAPD colleague discussed above, can call out a superior and assume command of a situation when such a move is warranted, as it clearly was in Uvalde.

An analogous and even more disastrous example of this dynamic was the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, in which two 747 jumbo jets, one from the Dutch airline KLM, the other from Pan Am, collided on a runway at Los Rodeos Airport in the Canary Islands. The investigation revealed that the captain of the KLM plane initiated his takeoff roll without proper clearance and after failing to discern that the Pan Am plane was taxiing toward him on the fog-shrouded runway. The KLM captain was one of the airline’s most senior instructor pilots, and investigators concluded that his copilot and flight engineer were deferential to him even as they suspected the runway was not clear. The crash was the deadliest in aviation history, with 583 people killed.

Why the chief of a six-officer department should have been accorded this level of deference is beyond me, but this seems to be what occurred in Uvalde. For reasons Arredondo has yet to explain, he regarded the incident not as an active shooter but as a barricaded suspect, this despite the fact that the gunman was still firing, though only sporadically after his initial barrage. But even if Arredondo’s judgment had been accurate, it still would not have justified the excessive delay in confronting the suspect. There is no way of knowing how many of the victims bled out and died while waiting for the rescue that would come too late.

Like the Columbine shooting, Uvalde will inspire changes in police training, and those changes will have to include the question of how to respond when the incident commander is unfit for the role.