Former CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan defended the actions by Uvalde police after Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told reporters he believed, in hindsight, that the incident commander made the wrong decisions.
“It was an active shooter [situation],” Colonel McCraw said in a Friday press conference in Uvalde, Texas. “Keep in mind in the doctrine of active shooters, you can transition from an alert to an active shooter situation, to a barricaded subject, or a barricaded-with-hostage subject.”
He added that if the shooting continues after the subject is barricaded and you have any reason to believe there are individuals alive inside, you should go back to an active shooter posture.
“A decision was made that this is a barricaded subject situation,” McCraw explained. He said the incident commander believed “there was time to retrieve the keys and wait for a tactical team with the equipment to go ahead and breech the door and take on the subject at that time.”
McCraw later said this was the wrong decision. However, he did not explain how the officers in the hallway might have breeched the locked steel door without a tactical team equipped with breeching tools or a key to the doors.
A 2018 Active Shooter Paper from the International Association of Chiefs of Police states:
Active shooting scenarios are generally quite different in that they develop quickly into a deadly situation and are often concluded in a relatively short period of time. These situations are often highly fluid, as the shooters move through the location, searching for victims, and possibly planting explosive devices. A substantial ongoing risk of danger continues to persons accessible to the shooters. A substantial ongoing risk of danger continues to persons accessible to the shooters. However, officers must be prepared to transition from an active shooter response to a barricade incident, such as what occurred at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016.
In this case, the shooter was not moving from place to place in search of additional victims. He locked himself in a room constructed from concrete block with what appears to be an impenetrable door.
“Both doors [classrooms 111 and 112] were locked from the inside by the subject,” the director stated. “When he went in, he locked the door. He came out one time into the hallway and went back in and locked the door.”
Former CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan, who is also a former FBI agent and Chief of the Border Patrol, addressed the active shooter doctrine during a Friday night appearance on Newsmax.
“The protocols actually say that when there’s a change in circumstances, i.e. an active shooter has barricaded himself or there’s been a lull, they’re supposed to reassess,” Morgan explained. “Those officers, they had soft body armor. They had no tools to do mechanical breaching.”
“They also had no way, no way to return fire through that door because they don’t know if that scumbag on the other side had a kid in front of him as a shield.”
Morgan described the physical conditions that prevented the officers from quickly breaching the doorway and making entry into the classroom. These conditions gave a tactical advantage to the shooter locked behind the very doors that were designed to keep him out, Breitbart Texas reported.
“I know these doorways,” the former law enforcement chief stated. “They are reinforced steel casings where the hinges are not on the exterior. They’re on the interior making it more difficult for mechanical breaching. They had no tools to be able to do it.”
“In my experience,” Morgan said. “Had those officers with soft body armor, with no ballistic shields, no mechanical tools to be able to breach, if they would have went up to that door they would have received gunfire and the only thing that would have resulted in is dead cops at the door.”
Morgan, who served with McCraw in the FBI and is friends with him took issue with the Texas DPS director’s conclusions.
“He obviously knows more details than any of us, but I’m going to revert back to what I said,” he concluded. “I think — based on what we know right now, and there’s still stuff we don’t know — but if those cops that initially made entry, had they broached that door they would not have been able to enter that door. They would have failed and they had no way to protect themselves and they would have died making that entry.”
McCraw said officers eventually obtained a key to the doors from a janitor and made entry — killing the suspect. He did not disclose at what point the key was obtained.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.
Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Prior to his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on Twitter @RandyClarkBBTX.