A Tale of Two Doors

 

The Uvalde, Texas mass murder is a tale of two doors: a teachers’ door and a classroom door. Both represent challenges to the best-laid plans, however earnestly advocated and lavishly funded. Any after-action review, any honest assessment leading to future recommendations to protect school children, must incorporate the human elements revealed by the teachers’ door and the classroom door.

The killer gained access through a door designated for teachers. This door was shown, on camera, being propped open by a teacher shortly before the attack began. We may surmise that propping this door open was a fairly routine occurrence. Hands up if you have an explanation for this behavior.

We were immediately treated to calls for hardening schools and strictly enforcing a single point of entry, overwatched by an armed guard. Never mind basic logistics. How do you get the school lunch supplies delivered? How do you get school supplies in and waste out of the school? How about moving between buildings or sports fields or playgrounds for recess? What about basic fire safety? And what about the teachers who need that other door?

Back to that teacher propping open the teacher’s door, do you have an idea why that is entirely normal human behavior? We have been “smoke-free” across the country in public buildings for decades. Teachers cannot go to the teachers’ lounge to take a quick drag between classes. It is perfectly normal for people to lose or forget keys to an outside door, if they get one. So, we have at least one strong motivation for breaking the security protocol of keeping all exit doors, besides the guarded entrance, closed and locked from the outside.

Insisting that this normal human response must be stomped out is not realistic, however loud and morally indignant the protestations to the contrary. The best-laid plans to secure thousands of schools across the nation every single school day must reckon with basic human nature. Does your master plan accommodate Bob the delivery guy and Ms. Smith, the smoking teacher?

The second door, the other half of our tale, is a locked classroom door. Somehow, a simple locked door, a security feature in the hardening schools scheme, confounded police from multiple departments. It took life-losing minutes, the better part of an hour, for someone to figure out that they should get the keys from the janitor.

Was the door really that hard to breach with a common battering ram used by police? Why, if the door did not immediately yield to a shoulder, were the police put into paralysis for want of a passkey?

Was the locked door, the easily overcome obstacle, facilitating the organizational paralysis and group behavior responding to poor decisions by a kindergarten cop chief? We have to dig into the group psychology around this simple locked classroom door to get real answers for future school or other public building attacks.

Any plan, prescription, or policy proposed in the wake of the Uvande school mass murder must take into account human nature. Prescriptions that propose to regiment human nature will fail. Does any current proposal account for the reality of the two doors?

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  1. Al Sparks Coolidge
    Al Sparks
    @AlSparks

    Reading the OP and the comments about the propped open door, I figured that it was propped open because the building was too hot.  I don’t know how effective HVAC was at the school.  But maybe the OP is correct, it was a teacher who went outside to smoke.

    I volunteered with a fire department for a few years, and our training — it was hands-on, and included heavy duty metal doors — included breaking and entering.  A police department should have had similar training.  Yet, fire departments also have access to a business’s locked doors through a Knox Box program.  Basically a box of keys is placed on the external walls of the building allowing a fire department access without having to break things.  It might not be used during an active fire, but if dealing with a automatic fire alarm with no indications of flames or smoke, they’ll take the time to access through a Knox Box.

    The police department was both incompetent and territorial as evidenced with their refusal to allow the elite border patrol unit to access the building.

    Given the facts as I know them (new information could still change things, but I doubt it at this point) I consider the police chief to be criminally negligent, and should spend six months in jail.  I doubt that things will go that far.

    I notice that the police chief isn’t making public appearances.  The front person for the police is the head of Texas’s Department of Public Safety (it’s state police, that they call it that is stupid) who at this point is throwing the Uvalde Police Department under the bus, and rightly so.

    These small town police departments have to make a choice.  Either do the training for SWAT operations, including the physical fitness that is required for it (I’d be interested in how many officers at that police department are out of shape, even obese) or outsource it to another department.  I’ll add that where I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, I happen to know that the local SWAT teams are inter-agency between the state troopers and other local law enforcement agencies.  Generally, SWAT team members are volunteers and do regular training.

    I note that Uvalde County has a Sheriff’s Department.  They don’t seem to have been involved in the incident.  Were they?  Does the Texas DPS have a detachment nearby?

    SWAT operations are a police specialty.  Bigger departments have units soley dedicated to that specialty.  Smaller departments use officers from other specialties (patrol and plain clothes) that do additional training.

    One of the changes that Texas could make for smaller jurisdictions is to create inter-agency SWAT teams that include a higher level of physical fitness requirements.

    It looks like Uvalde’s police department did not work well with others. 

    • #31
  2. Goldwaterwoman Thatcher
    Goldwaterwoman
    @goldwaterwoman

    Clifford A. Brown: We may surmise that propping this door open was a fairly routine occurrence. Hands up if you have an explanation for this behavior.

    This is particularly odd considering that the temperature was in the 90’s outside, and the school was air conditioned inside. 

    • #32
  3. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Goldwaterwoman (View Comment):

    Clifford A. Brown: We may surmise that propping this door open was a fairly routine occurrence. Hands up if you have an explanation for this behavior.

    This is particularly odd considering that the temperature was in the 90’s outside, and the school was air conditioned inside.

    I’ve heard of situations where A/C is reduced or turned off near the end of a school year to save money if they overspent on other things.  It’s also possible that the cooling for a particular building wasn’t operating properly, and may have not been repaired near the end of the school year for the same reason.

    • #33
  4. Tex929rr Coolidge
    Tex929rr
    @Tex929rr

    San Antonio paper just posted this:

    “An employee at Robb Elementary School had propped open a door to carry food from a car to the classroom last Tuesday, but closed it shut after realizing that a gunman was loose and heading toward the school, her San Antonio lawyer said.“

    “McCraw told reporters on Friday that the employee propped open the door about the time the gunman crashed the truck, and that the employee called 911. But Flanary said he wants to make clear that the door was not left propped open.”

    “She kicked the rock away when she went back in. She remembers pulling the door closed while telling 911 that he was shooting. She thought the door would lock because that door is always supposed to be locked.”

    Article

    The longer this goes on the more it appears that this whole thing is on the local community.  It sounds like there were doors that didn’t lock and employees knew it, which means the kids probably knew it.  The community hired the school staff to include their police force as well as the town police department.  People in the community would know about this psychotic kid better than anyone, and the family appears to be a multi-generational train wreck.  My heart breaks for how the community was let down by some of their own. 

     

    • #34
  5. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Tex929rr (View Comment):

    San Antonio paper just posted this:

    “An employee at Robb Elementary School had propped open a door to carry food from a car to the classroom last Tuesday, but closed it shut after realizing that a gunman was loose and heading toward the school, her San Antonio lawyer said.“

    “McCraw told reporters on Friday that the employee propped open the door about the time the gunman crashed the truck, and that the employee called 911. But Flanary said he wants to make clear that the door was not left propped open.”

    “She kicked the rock away when she went back in. She remembers pulling the door closed while telling 911 that he was shooting. She thought the door would lock because that door is always supposed to be locked.”

    Article

    The longer this goes on the more it appears that this whole thing is on the local community. It sounds like there were doors that didn’t lock and employees knew it, which means the kids probably knew it. The community hired the school staff to include their police force as well as the town police department. People in the community would know about this psychotic kid better than anyone, and the family appears to be a multi-generational train wreck. My heart breaks for how the community was let down by some of their own.

     

    When I lived in Arizona, I remember something of a scandal about prison cell doors that didn’t lock because the locks were broken/defective.  Nobody did anything about it for far too long.

    • #35
  6. DaveSchmidt Coolidge
    DaveSchmidt
    @DaveSchmidt

    Goldwaterwoman (View Comment):

    Clifford A. Brown: We may surmise that propping this door open was a fairly routine occurrence. Hands up if you have an explanation for this behavior.

    This is particularly odd considering that the temperature was in the 90’s outside, and the school was air conditioned inside.

    Given human nature, one might prop open a door when someone else is paying the bill but quickly shut it at home. 

    • #36
  7. Quietpi Member
    Quietpi
    @Quietpi

    Using a key or removing a hinge pin have a huge disadvantage – it tells the person where you are and what you’re doing, and gives him time to prepare.   In a local situation a few years ago, a locksmith was working on an apartment door, because the tenant was being evicted.  The locksmith and a deputy sheriff were killed through the door.  However it’s done, entry should be swift and catastrophic.  

    OTOH, don’t we wish we all lived in a perfect world where every patrol car carried  a means of “removing” a lock?

    • #37
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