Uvalde Police Chief Finally Speaks, Says He Didn’t Tell Anyone to Stand Down – Opinion

Uvalde School Police Chief Pete Arredondo spoke to media Thursday for the first time since the tragic May 24 Robb Elementary School shooting, but his responses in an interview with the Texas Tribune bring more questions than answers. Worst of all, he stated that he had never thought himself incident commander. He also said that he did NOT give orders to responders to cease their work.

Who was it then, and who did it?

Since that horrible day, law enforcement has come under fire for taking more than 67 minutes to enter the building and shoot the attacker. RedState’s Cameron Arcand reports that roughly a dozen children were still alive in two classrooms during that long period. It is impossible to know the number of teachers and students who could have been saved had police acted instead.

Further tarnishing the image of the on-site police, it was Border Patrol agents who finally went in, and despite Arredondo’s insistence that no stand-down order was given, they claim to have been told through their earpieces at one point to “not enter that classroom.” Arredondo denies it was his voice.

“I didn’t issue any orders,” Arredondo said, noting that he “called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door” to the classroom where the shooter was barricaded. He continued:

No responding officer hesitated for one second to risk their lives to save children. The information we received was correct and we were able to adapt to what we saw. We set out to save as many students as possible. Before we were able to access the gunman, we extracted the victims from their classrooms. This saved the lives of over 500 Uvalde teachers and students.

One can sympathize with someone who has just witnessed horror, but his statement is completely at odds with what’s already been uncovered. You mean that not one officer hesitated. It’s been proven that 19 officers hesitated in a hallway for over an hour. The evidence against him contradicts his claims about trying to save as many students as possible, and prioritizing their extraction. Cops did not go in to free the kids, at least not in the shooter’s location—and forcefully stopped parents who attempted to do so. Meanwhile he says “we” gained access and eliminated the threat. No, “we” didn’t; it was the Border Patrol.

The Chief also didn’t carry his radio because he thought it would slow him down, and he wanted both hands free to hold his firearm. Why don’t Uvalde police have utility belts instead?

Also, he described how dozens of keys were used to unlock the door which separated the police officers from the shooter. “Each time I tried a key I was just praying,” he said. You’re the Chief of School Police and you don’t have a key to one of the schools under your command? There’s nobody who can give you one?

Although the Tribune’s story was not heavily critical and attempted to let the chief tell his side of the story, they did note that they interviewed seven law enforcement experts who thought Arredondo made serious mistakes:

The most striking thing was that they claimed the chief entered the school without any key or radios.

The story is terrible at all points, with the ineptitude and confusion of the officers on the scene adding to the misery. I want to forget about this story and just turn my back. I certainly don’t wake up with the desire to criticize a school police chief. He receives death threats, he’s routinely called a coward and a villain, and presumably knows a lot of the families of the victims in the small town.

Pete Arredondo

The officers forced parents to stop trying to rescue their children from being killed inside by their officers.

You asked your police officers to refuse to help you, but parents tried to take on the task.

You waited while children were being shot.
Cowardice made children bleed to death. pic.twitter.com/v4V3uvxsdP

— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) June 10, 2022

There’s no getting around it: the response was simply awful, from lost keys to long delays, to not having radios, to apparently not even knowing who was the incident commander. If you read his long account of those fateful 67 minutes in the Tribune, you can see he made efforts —but his decisions were disastrous. Tellingly, although he claims he did not order a stand down, it doesn’t appear he gave the crucial order to go in, either.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Texas Department of Public Safety are both investigating the response, and our only hope is that they come up with some answers to what happened–along with some solutions to prevent it from ever happening again.