The city school board may decide if Police Chief Pete Arredondo is going to be shown the door at a special meeting Saturday. Arredondo may have made a number of critical mistakes May 24 when the shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School. The public slammed officials for inadequate security so authorities have been forced to reconsider firing the police chief after two teachers and 19 students were killed.
Police under fire
A lawyer maybe consulted about firing Arredondo. The police chief is a contract employee that cannot be fired at will.
So the Saturday meeting agenda includes legal discussion around that. Parents have been furious about the lack of transparency and threatening officers’ jobs over it.
It’s official… Uvalde School Board could terminate Police Chief Pete Arredondo this weekend. This will be discussed in a special meeting on Saturday during closed session. @KHOU pic.twitter.com/SZYI5CTOtr
— Anayeli Ruiz KHOU (@AnayeliNews) July 20, 2022
Police chief on leave
Arredondo has been on leave since June 22. The criticism has been blistering, being more concerned about the safety of the officers than saving children’s lives.
If he’s fired he’ll become the first one to have faced that outcome following a deadly school shooting in history. Arredondo didn’t consider himself the on scene commander for this though.
Many police officers
Almost 400 officers were involved in the response that took over an hour to kill the attacker but only one or two officers have faced discipline. Arredondo’s attorney isn’t answering questions.
A Texas House committee released a devastating report on the response rate for all levels of law enforcement. Several hundred law enforcement officers gathered at the school but “failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety.”
Police ineptitude
Body camera footage didn’t do the officers and Arredondo any favors. It showed them trying keys to multiple doors but not the one where the massacre took place.
That door couldn’t be locked from the inside but nobody was making any effort to go in where the gunman was. Arredondo told the committee, “Our thought was: ‘If he comes out, you know, you eliminate the threat,’ correct? And just the thought of other children being in other classrooms, my thought was: ‘We can’t let him come back out. If he comes back out, we take him out, or we eliminate the threat.’”
