WHAT NOW MUST WE DO? is the only part that matters.
Devil's advocate indeed but here I go:
(feel free to hot-take and pile on but at least read the TL:DR first please)
Uvalde CISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo was the only one of 376 LEO first responders in Uvalde to speak openly to the media about what happened at Robb Elementary on May 24th, 2020. I'm not here to talk about whether he should keep his job or not, now that school is about to start back up. That decision has already been made by those elected to run the school district, and the clear majority of the students and parents of the school system seem to agree with the idea.
But wouldn't it have been better before they dismissed him, to force some accountability and transparency to occur somehow? Now he can (continue to) remain silent. Now his employers have no leverage to force clarity and wider accountability. He doesn’t work for them. The matter is closed.
TL;DR: We need accountability, yes but we need clarity and transparency just as badly if not more. And we need those two things first, and now we aren't getting it from this source, the original source that brought us any at all when others were stonewalling and spinning. Maybe the messenger has blood on his hands but we've “killed the messenger” without first questioning the messenger. Missed opportunity, fail.
Whatever one thinks of his actions, and I see the issue as highly complex, consider instead his POSITION in the overall struggle instead. Now another door has closed for the public, parents and survivors who deserve to know more fully what happened that day. One again those in authority have failed to bring clarity and transparency first, and accountability after and to include the parents and the public openly in the precess. However you think about Pete Arredondo, I see what happened yesterday as a failure. Another one, in a long line of SYSTEMIC FAILURES that haven’t yet been overcome or addressed as such.
Rather than re-arrange them endlessly and uselessly, now a deck chair has been tossed off the rail of the doomed Titanic, in a fit of pique. (Perhaps they should have been lashed together to form a raft instead, who knows?) But this was a REACTION, not a solution.
And it seems odd that essentially what they are firing him for is because he was seemingly - we don’t really know — providing bad leadership in a moment when there should have been NO leadership, according to training and policy regarding “Active Shooter” emergencies. During an active shooter event in a crowd, police are trained to rush forward, ignoring injured bystanders if necessary and ignoring chain of command, communication, backup issues and simply singly and as an ad-hoc group if convenient, press forward to engage the shooter. Just “do something,” until you can at least distract the shooter from their goal of a slaughter of the innocent. Pete did about as much of that as anyone present, more than others, and by 11:37:01, had made no real decisions at all except the personal one to press forward, with no body armor and only a pistol towards the person with an AR-15 hidden behind a door.
(Those who would demonize and blame him, don't worry, I am getting to that part. But it’s hard to find fault with his initial action to rush to the sound of gunfire.)
So it would seem that it was his actions, or his inaction, or his bad actions that are in question or at fault after the initial rush was brushed violently back by a burst of gunfire from inside the classroom by the shooter, which then drove LEOs back to the ends of the hallway where there was cover.
Start here, we seem to say. Okay, let’s. It’s 11:37:01 on the clock. Watch the video, don’t listen to what DPS tells you is on the video. Watch the videos.
If THIS is the moment when Pete failed to do his (leadership or first responder) job well, then those who were alongside him also failed to press forward as training specified. And there were two groups, north and south who had the means motive and opportunity to do so, and no communication was needed between them. Just GO, just “do something.” Pete told no one to hold back in that hallway.
But there was a somewhat understandable pause, two men were slightly wounded and the officer frozen in shock by the hand sanitizer had important information - his wife was inside, wounded. Too bad Pete was at the other end of the hallway. Ofc Ruiz, Pete’s CISD cop coworker failed to impress on others quickly the situation, especially the news about wounded children, which doesn’t seem to fully penetrate, excuse the inappropriate pun i suppose, the heads of the LEOs at the north end until the 911 call is shared at 12:09 or so.
But yes, let’s fire Pete by all means. He called for SWAT when he should have charged back into gunfire, right? I’m not being sarcastic. I’m asking what was the RIGHT move just then? The training says yes. “do something." Pete knew the training. Ruiz TAUGHT the training.
Whatever happened next, it deviated from the training and the policy. DPS says Pete called for SWAT. DPS doesn’t say what Mystery, lied-about DPS guy called for. SWAT didn't stop sh*t. “Ad Hoc BORTAC" did. WHO CALLED FOR BORTAC?
So now the disagreement is over what decisions Pete made as a leader, not as a first responder, which is fair enough to discuss and i'm not surprised they came to the decision that he failed as a leader. But if the current, latest, highest authority assessment is SYSTEMIC FAILURE occurred, did Pete fail them or did the system fail Pete and us all?
And shouldnt the prime directive still been for all first responders to press forward and engage the shooter and IGNORE command and control issues in the immediate ongoing active shooter posture?
It’s an odd distinction, but i think the response broke down not when BAD decisions were made at a command level (by Pete or by Mystery DPS guy) but when ANY decisions were made at a command level that were outside the training that says to press forward without waiting for command level decisions.
Let’s not mince words. Pete failed when he called for SWAT because instead he should have been one of many who pressed forward without leadership and jointly and spontaneously risked as many of them dying as was necessary to get at the doors of two joined classrooms where a shooter was inside with wounded and innocent children. But he CANNOT give the order for them to die. He can only join them spontaneously in a “Banzai charge” at the shooter, who was in a dark room behind a possibly locked fire door his bullets could easily penetrate. That is the CORRECT way for him to have followed the training, and any other action was the wrong action.
I’m of the belief that YES, that was the right thing and i wish it happened. I am pretty sure that if the 11 who were present at 11:37:01 PLUS the DPS supervisor who was also right outside the hall had all said, “Let’s Roll,” they could have saved innocent lives and they SHOULD have saved innocent lives. Some of them would have doubtlessly been shot. Some of them were VERY LIKELY to have died. There was a huge risk to children, any were alive or present, which they didn’t clearly know. If the door was locked, or barricaded with furniture it’s likely nothing would have been accomplished. But the training and the duty and the badge and the job was to do that. AND NOTHING ELSE.
And that to me is the larger question too. If the rules brought you to this impossible point, isn’t the thing to indict the system that made the rules, not the people who can’t figure out how to follow them anymore when they lead to a dead end?
And, this is where my own bad logic leads me into a circle, so allow me to repeat myself.
If THIS is the moment when Pete failed to do his (leadership or first responder) job well, then those who should be firing whom?
Pick one, did he fail as a first responder (as others did) or did he fail by asserting any form of leadership at all, and thus stalling the active shooter training response? Or was it that he made a BAD leadership decision, or a BAD first responder decision? I still don't get it. And we've got no public inquest to discuss this in, and certainly if we had one now we've got no Pete to discuss it with, either.
So now the disagreement is over what decisions Pete made as a leader, not as a first responder, which is fair enough to discuss and i’m not surprised they came to the decision that he failed as a leader. But if the current, latest, highest authority assessment is SYSTEMIC FAILURE occurred, did Pete fail them or did the system fail Pete and us all?
Is there anyone onboard the Titanic who can FIX the fact that the ship is filling with water and doesn’t have enough lifeboats? lsn't the school board as guilty of failed leadership as anyone? to me, they failed the children BEFORE 11:37:01. Pete failed them after.
Was Pete the Captain of the Titanic? Hardly. Did he give the order to sail into the iceberg seas in a fog at night? Or was that the fatefully dark and dooming directive of those who built and owned the ship and were on board themselves, hoping openly for a record maiden voyage, demanding the best for the least amount of protection? At best Pete was the leading first responder on the Titanic in my mind. He was tasked with mitigating catastrophic damage. Certainly you could say the captain has that job on a ship, mitigating disaster, being the calm voice and leader in a crisis.
But should the captain of the Titanic have been summarily fired — those who hired him were present — and replaced? Would that have solved the problems? “Your ship hit an iceberg and you can't fix it, so you’re fired, pal?“ Seems like a bit of a closing the barn door after the cows wandered off situation to me.
Yet, if there had been a way to summarily fire Pete and replace him with someone else, maybe the situation at Robb could have been mitigated much better, maybe it couldn't. And how should the employer figure this out in hindsight? By having the ship captain NOT answer questions? Pete is going down whit the ship, I guess, willingly or unwillingly. Honor or none. (I know which option I favor, none. But I wasn't there and I dont know what else was happening.) Captaoin Pete Arredondo won’t be present at the Admiralty's requited PUBLIC inquest.
Me, devil’s advocate here again, would prefer he be present at the ship's inquest to speak to the pressure he felt to steam into an icefield at night in a fog, and to speak to the design of the ship that was fully built before he ewas. appointed captain of it. What I’m saying is, have him present at the inquest to ask the hardest questions anyone can dream up, at great length and THEN fire his sorry ass if you feel like it. But not before the inquest.
The School Board is trying to say SYSTEMIC FAILURE occurred BELOW the level of the School Board. Color me unimpressed, skeptical, unconvinced. Firing Pete is just a CYA move on their part, an attempt to insulate the blame from their own level of leadership and responsibility. Because isn’t Robb Elementary a ship in THIER fleet? And didn’t THEY hire the crew and appoint its captain, and pay to train them and equip them?
So where did the train jump the tracks? I tend to see it differently, that the big mistake began at 11:37:02, when first responders ALL failed to continue to adopt an active shooter situation posture. We’re all, all of us bystanders clenching our teeth and fists and calling out to no one, “DO SOMETHING " as we watch the sparse video from the hallway and bodycam that PETE ARREDONDO contributed to making public, it can be argued. (More on that below*.)
The failure at 11:37:02 was for the RIGHTFULLY LEADERLESS LEOs not to spontaneously press forward again, even if it meant almost certain death. We need to admit that is the case, this is what we all want as we yell out loud at our tv monitor watching the videos. “That's what they signed on for that's why they cash that paycheck, that’s the job, etc. “ I don't disagree with the sentiment, not at all. It's just that once again I think we are needing to harken back to the parable of the Big Ship That Went Down and the lesson of what is truly meant by SYSTEMIC FAILURE. The question of, "why didn't they keep assaulting the door to get at the shooter somehow?" is the wrong question. The question is, “why do we have cops at all?” Stop insulating OURSELVES from the concept of SYSTEMIC FAILURE, which means, top to bottom the SYSTEM and the decision it presents to any inside it are all wrong. You may as well blame the passengers in the icy Atlantic Ocean for not building rafts quicker. There was no better decision for Pete than to call for SWAT and HOPE that hearty volunteers made a second storming the machine gun nest attempt unbidden. He could have led such a charge. He didn't. That's about all I can say I know without hearing from everyone at great length. Over and over and over, in public, with cross-examinations and defenses and evidence.
You can’t fix a problem using the same bad reasoning that got us all into the situation in the first place. No one is stepping back far enough to see the wider, larger problem.
Pete Arredondo is the sole eyewitness on the LEO side who answered questions from reporters. And now we've let him go and we’re letting the school board have a pass, too.
What we saw in the aftermath of Robb 24 MAY 2022 was the usual circling of the wagons. We've had NO transparency from authorities, none. They continually lied about how and it all was and they are still stonewalling and engaging in a coverup. Then they picked a lone scapegoat to distract from the SYSTEMIC FAILURE that affected all present or supervising from afar.
Finding a fall guy is what you do when you know the problem calls for new leadership at the top but you’re at the top. I don’t want to say it’s blaming the victim, often the fall guys are corrupt or incompetent or didn’t follow the rules too, but they aren't necessarily the source or solution to the problem.
There were two lookouts on the Titanic scanning for icebergs. Should you fire the one who saw the iceberg first or the one who didn't? That's where I see the school board right now. These lookouts, and Arredondo, they are XO of the watch, or whatever the correct nautical term is. Shift boss on the ship. They aren't the shareholders and CEO of White Star Lines. And whatever you do to the lookouts won't change a thing. But it might be nice to have them at the inquest.
Arredondo was chosen as fall guy by DPS, who had a SUPERVISOR or ranking Special Agent on scene BEFORE or at the same time as Arredondo, it’s not clear because they won't even speak to the issue or tell us his name — THEY LIED ABOUT IT — and what's fascinating is that, six or seven weeks in, as anger and public scrutiny was at a peak, Arredondo got wind of the idea that he was to be made fall guy and gave a CYA interview to the TX Tribune. And absent that, the best and strongest move for the DPS would have been simply to continue to do as they were doing, to lie, spin, obfuscate stall and stonewall for as long as they possibly could hoping that public furor would die down on its own with time or the next catastrophe would alleviate pressure on them. It's Bad Cop 101 playbook, sit on all the evidence and claim the dead shooter loophole, announce ongoing investigations of yourself and wait it all out. Say whatever you want up front and deny it all later. But GIVE UP NOTHING, admit nothing, and do nothing.
Arredondo’s CYA interview to the Texas Trib forced their (DPS) chess piece Queen off of her defensive square. Did it win the game or change the outcome? We don’t know yet. But it stopped it from being stagnant. Pete said things that had to be countered by those who were nominally here to bring us the Official Story. He made them give up a great deal of information they were prepared to leave hidden, I think. And this turf war, this blame game is what led to a leaker sending out the hallway video early, too. And the hallway leak caused, or led to, the body cam footage release. Pete Arredondo started the transparency ball rolling. DPS stops it at every turn. C urrently they are still investigating themselves and releaseing NOTHING in a Open Records state. If someone, somewhere in all this mess needs to be set on a new course, why is it the person who brings (some) clarity and not the agency that ends, thwarts, misdirects and obscures clarity?
We all deserve transparency, clarity and accountability. FIring Pete Areedondo gives us none of these things. It gives us an easy and convenient low-level scapegoat, which is what we already had. And it's a distraction at best, and a diffusion at worst of the energy needed elsewhere to press for clarity, transparency and accountability. People HELD to account GIVE an account. That's what I'd call accountability. We got nothing from Pete, nothing from the school board and less than nothing from the DPS, who is more than happy to see all the blame go elsewhere and for everyone to move on and forget. He was there, we were not. We need to hear everything he has to say about himself and what he saw and did and heard and thought, on May 24th and in the six to twelve weeks after, too. Not let him walk away silent.
People HELD to account GIVE an account. We are owed transparency clarity and accountability and this is a systemic failure. Solutions come from OUTSIDE the system that failed. They come from us.
