‘Words Like Shame, Things I Can’t Say On Air’: Former FBI Active Shooter Chief Says Law Enforcement Rocked By ‘Astonishing’ Uvalde Police Failures
Former head of the FBI’s active shooter program Katherine Schweit gave MSNBC’s José Díaz-Balart a brutal assessment of the actions taken by officers on the scene of the Uvalde school shooting, describing the outrage shared by law enforcement professionals across the country.
The actions taken and decisions made were “astonishing,” said Schweit, and showed a lack of courage on the part of the responding officers.
New surveillance videos released this week show what took place in the hallway for 77 minutes while 19 children and two adults were being slaughtered just yards away, some bleeding out on the floor as the cops waited. One of these victims was the wife of an officer; he was prohibited from going to her, forcibly removed from the scene and his gun taken from him.
After playing some of the footage, Diaz-Balart asked Schweit, author of the book Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis, about what took place. “What do you see?” he asked of the disturbing scenes.
“So, sadly, I also had an opportunity to see the video,” said Schweit, adding that it made her even “more horrified” at what took place that day.
Earlier in the show MSNBC, aired a clip of a ten-year-old Uvalde victim talking about that horror, and Schweit compared his courage to that of the police who were supposed to protect him.
“I think about the courage of that ten-year-old you just spoke to and his community and how they’re going to have to pull together and have the courage to go on,” she said. “And then I think about the courage of the officers who ran into that hallway, and they did follow that shooter into the hallway, they were there before there were rounds sent back to them.”
“But they didn’t move forward,” she noted.
“So those first officers who went in there, for whatever reason they — even though I think many would say they had a moral duty to get in there, they didn’t have the courage or the mindset that really applies to the training that we’ve given them,” said Schweit, referring to the long-established police training to engage with active shooters. “All of law enforcement has been trained that you go to the threat and when the shooting is underway, your first priority is to get there, and then your first priority is to proceed forward.”
Schweit said that members of the law enforcement community are offended by what they saw, and have shared other reactions she couldn’t repeat on TV.
“The language that I have heard from my friends in the law enforcement community over the last few days and since that shooting involve words like ‘shame,’ and things that I can’t really say on-air,” Schweit said. “They’re just so offended by — they’re so offended by what we saw.”
After Diaz-Balart asked her about the basic procedures as the footage was shown on screen, Schweit went into detail.
All of this is wrong. I hate to say it that way, but all of this is wrong. The initial officers who went to the door didn’t do what they were trained to do. And then they stayed there. And then they didn’t do it even after they were shot at. But the officers who we see in the hallways milling around and, you know, cleaning their hands with hand sanitizer, and chatting back and forth, and checking their cell phones, all I could think of was people bleeding out in a room down the hallway, and that’s all they should have been thinking about is how they could get in there.
There isn’t a question that they had the firepower. They had it when they had a handful of officers who could have gone in, one, two, three officers who could have gone in at that moment when the shooting was underway. We know that we heard at least four rounds after those officers got to the doorway. There were at least four rounds after that.
“It’s astonishing,” said Schweit. “It’s astonishing that they had all that equipment and all that time to think about what to do.”
It is beyond astonishing.
Watch the clip above, via MSNBC.
