From a reader of this article -
"Aren't you being too harsh on the police?"
First:
Noted firearms instructor Greg Ellifritz had this to say:
This is looking worse and worse.
They let the guy go for up to 90 minutes because they said they didn't have a key to the classroom door that the killer locked.
This is the prime example why I no longer train police agencies or write articles about best practices in police response. The cops don't care and refuse to learn lessons from past tragedies.
We've long known that cops responding to school shootings need breaching gear. This became apparent after the 2006 Nickel Mines school shooting (link in comments).
I wrote about cops needing breaching tools in the first month I started my website. That article (linked in comments) was in 2012. Since then I have written 18 different articles on my site about the importance of breaching capability for responding cops.
We've known since Columbine (1999) that cops need to make immediate entry to stop the killing. Yet these cops waited for swat.
20+ years of death and tragedy has taught us nothing because most are too lazy to seek understanding.
The problems these cops faced are not new. Ample information is freely available to the officers who want to learn how to best handle these incidents. But cops remain ignorant and their bosses are never held accountable.
You are on your own.
Firearms Instructor Extraordinaire, Tom Givens, had this to say:Well, it happened again.
In Columbine, at Sandy Hook, at Marjorie Stoneman in Broward County, now at Uvalde, Texas, police officers stood by outside for up to an hour while a madman slaughtered helpless children. There were men outside with body armor, handguns plus a long gun, and a hatful of ammunition, but they stood there listening to gunshots and screams rather than enter and do their jobs.
(Emphasis mine)
My experience -
Exactly ONE police officer ever took martial arts classes from me while an officer. Another man actually stopped taking the classes once he became an officer!
Exactly TWO active duty law enforcement officers have taken a firearms class from me ever. One of whom was a file clerk and also an avid sport shooter... definitely an outlier. The other was a theif.
Summary
Nobody is coming to save you.
Police want to do the bare minimum they need to do in order to keep their jobs. And given how difficult it usually is to fire a cop, that threshold is very low.
The vast majority of law enforcement persons absolutely REFUSE to become professionals in their field.