Two years before the massacre at Rob Elementary School, in which 19 fourth-graders and two of their teachers were killed, Uwalde Police Department boasted online that it had its own SWAT team.
The department posted a Facebook photo of nine heavily armed officers with the caption “Meet our SWAT team.”
The unit was visiting the whole community that day, “to get acquainted with the layout of our local schools and businesses,” according to a February 2020 publication.
But when the terror came to a small town in Texas, it is unclear whether the tactical unit, which appears to be trained for just such a moment, has responded, a law enforcement source said.
“There were so many officers, so many agencies,” the source said.
The state department of public safety, which is investigating the reaction to the shooting, is still trying to determine which agencies were on the scene and what the role of each was. In Texas, it is not uncommon for law enforcement officials from different agencies to react together to an incident.
Uvalde CISD Police Department hosted training for “active school law shooter” in 2020. Facebook / Uvalde CISD Police Department Uvalde CISD Police Department published the training for school shooters in 2020 on Facebook. Facebook / Uvalde CISD Police Department
“When you have so many agencies in an active situation, you have employees inside, those employees are responsible for managing the threat,” the source said. “And you have officers outside guarding the perimeter.”
The last of the shootings at a school in Texas
Parents of students at the school complained that cops outside during the incident prevented them from entering the building. A frantic mother was even handcuffed as she begged cops to enter the building to remove 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos.
The Uwalde Police Department hosted the training two years before the mass shooting. Facebook / Uvalde CISD Police Department
The first to erroneously believe that the situation had shifted from an “active shooter” to a “barricaded” scenario and waited more than an hour after the shooting began before entering the classroom and shooting the shooter.
The source said Uwalde’s police were among the makeshift group that broke into the classroom with a heroic agent of the US Customs and Border Protection. Some of the Uvalde SWAT team may have been with them, but investigators are still putting the pieces together.
Residents of Uwalde are also asking questions.
“I may be wrong, but I haven’t seen or heard from our Uwalde police at all?” “I really hope that our police department in Uwalde will come out and just talk to us. To everyone. Help our community heal. “
On Friday afternoon, Hidalgo shared the department’s February 2020 post, asking, “Do we have a SWAT team?”
Uwalde, a city of about 16,000 people, is spending $ 4.4 million, or 38% of its $ 11.5 million budget for 2021-2022, for its 40-member police force.
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