Uvalde school officials will decide the fate of district police Chief Pete Arredondo during a special meeting Saturday after Superintendent Hal Harrell recommended the police chief’s firing.
The meeting falls almost two months after Arredondo was among the first law enforcement officers to arrive at the scene of Texas’ worst school shooting.
Blame for the fiercely criticized response to the massacre — during which law enforcement waited more than an hour to confront the shooter — has largely fallen on Arredondo. The district placed him on administrative leave roughly one month after the shooting.
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Much of Uvalde residents’ anger over the delayed response to the shooting has been directed toward Arredondo. In a school board meeting Monday, residents chastised school officials for not already firing Arredondo. They also criticized officials for what residents saw as slow attempts to improve campus safety.
Arredondo’s actions at the scene were also criticized in a Texas House committee report released Sunday, though the report also points to the failure of other agencies to respond appropriately. Arredondo was among 376 law enforcement officers from local, state and federal agencies on the scene. The responding officers, though, lacked clear leadership, basic communications and sufficient urgency to take down the gunman, the report states.
The consensus of those interviewed by the House committee was that either Arredondo — or no one — was in charge at the scene, which several witnesses described as chaotic.
In an interview with The Texas Tribune, Arredondo said he did not think he was the incident commander on the scene. Yet according to the school district’s active-shooter response plan, authored in part by Arredondo, the district chief would “become the person in control of the efforts of all law enforcement and first responders that arrive at the scene.”
See here and here for some background. I agree that Arredondo bears a lot of responsibility for the response – it’s mind-boggling that he didn’t think he was in charge, especially without having explicitly handed over command to DPS or Border Control or whoever – and I’d vote to kick him if I were on the Uvalde school board, but he’s hardly the only incompetent here. The report was clear that DPS and the other law enforcement agencies on site were part of the chaos, and we have previous and more recent reporting on DPS’s failures. Maybe someone should suggest to Greg Abbott that he do Steve McCraw next? But then Abbott would have to admit some responsibility as well, and we know that’s not going to happen.
On a more practical level, the “I didn’t think I was in charge here” issue is something that the Lege can and should address. It may be a matter of handing the issue off to a committee or an agency – ironically, DPS might be best suited for this – and then mandating that the process and its details be drilled into every current and future cop. Because Lord knows, until we actually get serious about curbing gun violence, situations like this will come up again. And we’ll have even less of an excuse for not knowing how to handle it. Texas Public Radio has more.
I’m surprised that the guy hasn’t resigned, but maybe he’s not very smart. It should be obvious that he has zero future in that town, which is way too small for him to try to be anonymous and wait for the heat to subside.
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