Here is the latest, and currently most informed journalism regarding the tragic mass shooting in Uvalde, as reported by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in what is being widely called excellent reporting:
To me it is must-read stuff, and includes scathing rebukes of Tx DPS by highly authoritative members of the Law Enforcement community. Read it, and weep once again for the children, parents and survivors of a horrific mass shooting that authorities have failed to provide ANY transparency regarding in the three long months following.
And now school begins for the fall, and stories are re-appearing on the lack of change or small changes that have occurred. So it seems appropriate as a moment to revisit the mainstream narrative of the debacle that we all think we know something about, but do we? The prolonged, pointless and dithering 77 minute wait to confront a shooter inside a classroom with dying children calling 911 for help that didn’t arrive lingers as sickly as the unanswered basic question of why?.
Now, in the wake of a critical legislative report and body camera footage released by local officials, law enforcement experts from across the country are questioning why DPS didn’t take a lead role in the response as it had done before during other mass shootings and public disasters.
The real meat of the article seems to be these two quotes, the first being from a retired top cop. (active duty cops maintain a wall of silence, reflexively lest their own department be visited by scandal that gets recorded on video somehow. )
The state police agency has been “totally intransparent in pointing out their own failures and inadequacies,” said Charles A. McClelland, who served as Houston police chief for six years before retiring in 2016. “I don’t know how the public, even in the state of Texas, would have confidence in the leadership of DPS after this.”
And this one follows from a retired DPS trooper himself. ( I have no specific knowledge to impart here, but these types retire when a new batch of the governor’s cronies are installed in place of an old batch of cronies. The DPS is law enforcement in name only under Abbott, they are instead a political army out to create photo ops for anti-immigrant fund raising propaganda. Google “Operation Lone Star” so I can editorialize less here and get back on topic)
“Here’s what DPS should have done as soon as they got there,” said Patrick O’Burke, a law enforcement consultant and former DPS commander who retired in 2008. “They should have contacted [the school police chief] and said: ‘We’re here. We have people.’ They should have just organized everything, said, ‘What are all of our resources?’ And they should have organized the breach.”
The gist of the article, and you should read it all, is that it’s now patently clear that we are going to get no transparency whatsoever, and that a low level scapegoat (who is unworthy of further discussion) was found to assign blame to. Which people have been saying for two months now, but now some people who have some credibility in the field are saying it, too. And this is a big shift in the mainstream consensus as promoted on all media, corporate and social alike dues to a clever campaign of misdirection that continues apace.
I find this all to be a welcome breath of fresh air and a great jumping off point for public discussion. I hope you do too and look forward to your comments and refections.
But I have a something additional to discuss, below the fold. And that seems to me like an even larger hole in The Official Story, and I’d like to see if anyone cares to discuss that as well.
follow below the break if you care or dare or wish to compare, so there.
You asked for it, you go it. Here is my axe to grind.
The Trib/ProPublica story wends it’s way to a conclusion by saying this, in passing:
About 45 minutes after the gunman began shooting, a U.S. Border Patrol SWAT team, known as BORTAC, arrived at the scene. The unit typically handles dangerous situations involving migrants. Its responsibilities do not include responding to school shootings, but Paul Guerrero, the team’s acting commander, told the House committee that issued the legislative report that he chose to act after arriving and encountering the disorganized scene.
Guerrero requested surveillance through classroom windows, retrieved a door breaching tool from his car, ordered officers to set up a medical triage for victims and organized an assault team that consisted of several agencies. Eventually, he led about a half-dozen officers into the classroom and a Border Patrol agent killed the gunman at 12:50 p.m. No state troopers or school police were on that team.
Guerrero could not be reached for comment, and a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection did not answer questions about the agency’s response, saying it was conducting a review.
It's not very expansive, is it? Granted, the story solidly focused on DPS, and this just the part that completes a narrative on the way to a conclusion regarding DPS, but the fact remains that no one in Texas can seem to say a whole lot more than this, three months and several alleged investigations later.
Who called these hired guns? WHY? Where did they arrive from, how, and why? Who do they answer to in a command and control fashion and who oversees the agency itself? Did they have radios and a dispatcher and where are the transcripts? What weapons and equipment did they bring, what video did they record, what did they write in their report at the end of the day and who did they give that report to? Does BORTAC have an Active Shooter policy? Who wrote it? Did they follow that policy? Shouldn't we know WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE HOW AND WHY, and also what the guys had for breakfast that morning, just to be thorough? And so on.
For a brief time in my long-ago, galaxy far far away college career, I had ONE journalism class. If I learned one thing and one thing only, which is debatable, it was that any story a reporter files story STARTS with "who what when where how and why" and then you work the name of the newspaper into the first sentence too, if you can.
I'd say what we have here rises to level of something like this: "On Nov 22nd, the president visited Dallas accompanied by his lovely wife and he died on his way to lunch. Afterwards, the Secret Service took his body back to Washington DC for further review. Merry Christmas and shut the hell up, kids or else no soup for you."
Call me greedy, but it's just.... a little thin, is it not?
The idea that Border Patrol was "conducting a review" is something that would make my cat laugh, and my cat is not prone to fits of laughter. One wonders what sort of "review conducting" takes three months to conduct, and if "an investigation" (which seems called for to me) was one step above a review, how may years would that take to produce a result that the taxpayers had a chance to review?
But this sort of "we will allow this blather for an anonymous, media-coached spox because we have to put something into the paragraph," is very frustrating to me. I note that this CBP "spokesperson" isn't even named.
Again I will note that this story is about DPS, not BP or "ad-hoc BORTAC," and is a MUST READ article but I hope the next ProPublica deep dive focuses on the federal response to Uvalde, because in actual point of fact the national level authorities have all said just about nothing at all, ever to the public, up to and including Joe Biden.
Since May 24th we've learned that ICE, BP, the DEA and US Marshalls were involved, along with whatever in god's name is "Ad-hoc BORTAC," which to me sounds like a gang of secret prions flying squad goons who answer to no one and train to subdue unarmed teenage boys who are put into cages and resent it.
I won't be surpised to learn next that the US Postal Inspectors were in the hallway too, collecting and trading commemorative stamps. And they they are "conducting a review" of which flavor stamp backing is the most minty fresh. But, presently, "no comment."
It's possible the entire dithering debacle in the hallways regarded a foolish and prolonged wait for the rifle-ready ballistic shield delivered by the US Marshalls. The shield is seen arriving at 12:20, a full-half hour before this supposed "Assault Team" got lucky by catching the dastardly shooter cowering in a closet and shot him full of bullets. Or so we have heard.
I'm just a person with my own opinions here but how did we arrive at this juncture? Where is the transparency? And where is the demand for transparency to be properly directed? And by who, and when and where and how and why? And what.... the F?