The prospect of numerous trapped Uvalde, Texas, students calling 911 pleading for police action should have spurred a full-throated response from district officers, a former FBI official told Fox News on Friday.
Former assistant bureau director Chris Swecker said the school district authorities should have shifted their tactics immediately upon hearing of the 911 calls.
He underlined that the blame should not fall on the Texas Department of Public Safety, which was not the responding agency, adding he personally knows its commanding officer, Col. Steve McCraw.
“A lot of things went wrong here. Right from the very beginning, the security at the school — all kinds of different security flaws there. If they had their procedures in place, they certainly didn’t practice them,” he told “The Ingraham Angle.”
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Kymber Guzman, 8, signs a memorial for the victims of a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
He cited McCraw’s news conference explanation, that two Uvalde CISD officers went inside the building while 19 others gathered outside, before a decision came down to wait to engage the shooter.
“What we don’t know is whether they were in touch with dispatch; the 911 center, because if they were aware that… the children were calling from inside that room, then there is absolutely no excuse,” he said.
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Chris Swecker, former LAPD sgt, ex-FBI assistant director.
(Fox News)
“That should have been the Charge of the Light Brigade,” Swecker said, referring to the famed insurgency by British forces during the Crimean War.
“They should have just kept on going until they neutralized that shooter because, you know, there are survivors inside and [the shooter] is still in there.”
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Swecker said McCraw “laid it on the line today” when he clarified conflicting reports that led to criticism of UCISD police actions.
“A lot of things went wrong here, but clearly they should have gone in,” he said.
