Law Enforcement Callers Give Us Their Take on Uvalde

BUCK: Let’s go with Randy in South Carolina. He’s a retired police officer and hostage negotiator. Randy, thanks for calling in.

CALLER: Thank you for having me on the show.

BUCK: So, what do you think about what happened, Randy?

CALLER: Well, the situation in Texas, you don’t want to point the fingers or call anybody out ’cause you don’t know the level of training these officers had. But it doesn’t seem like there was a — that they had been to any standardized type of training like I had experienced when I was in North Carolina.

BUCK: And, Randy, my understanding was that those officers had just finished active-shooter training earlier this year.

CALLER: See, I don’t understand, then, what happened, having been on both sides of the coin, so to speak, as a negotiator, having taught negotiation tactics — and also, I was subject to active-shooter training — I know that there is a difference. The active-shooter training is basically put in place because when you have a situation unfold you always have officers from different agencies and jurisdictions arrive, and they may not know one another.

CLAY: But the general consensus, Randy, is if there is an active shooter, you go in as aggressively as you possibly can; you draw the fire, you may get hit, but you want the active-shooter-in-a-school situation, especially, focused on you as opposed to focused on the kids, right?

CALLER: Well, I would say that’s partially correct. As I was getting ready to say, the active-shooter training is you have the same type of training almost like a SWAT team does in the close quarter combat drilling. But then say, I’m at the scene and you arrived at the scene and you and I had the same training and we get one or two more — four is the optimum number — then we’re gonna go in. Even though we’ve never trained together, even we don’t know each other, we know the tactics we’re going to employ, we’re going to go in.

CLAY: That’s right. Randy, I want to keep moving as fast as we can. There were dozens of officers eventually on scene before they even went in.

BUCK: We got Jeffrey in Miami, Florida, former Miami cop and also hostage negotiator. Jeffrey, thank you.

CALLER: Yes. I’d like the to point out the Florida Parkland school shooting where they actually arrested the school resource officer for neglect of duty and child neglect. To me he was a scapegoat. He didn’t know exactly where that assailant was. The ones that should have been arrested was the commander showing up on the scene and the other officers that we had knowledge that they stood by and waited to go in. I also want to point out George Floyd.

The officers that stood by while this officer killed George Floyd with his knee on his neck, they were arrested for manslaughter charges and neglect. To me, there’s no difference than these officers standing by while the commanding officer that is not competent is standing by giving these commands to stand down. It wasn’t under a unified command. There was not enough time for that. You had multiple agencies that responded.

Those officers needed to take action and should be held accountable. You look at the female officer that was arrested for pulling her gun out instead of her Taser. To me, the far left needs to get off their ass. The message that they’re sending is if you’re out there doing your job and you screw up, what’s gonna happen is we’re going after you. The message that they need to send is, “If you’re a police officer and you’re not doing your job, we’re gonna go after you.” This was a complete neglect, and these officers should each be held accountable for their actions.

BUCK: All right.BUCK: We actually have, I believe, our first caller from a year ago. What do you call it in comedy when you circle around to the original joke? This isn’t a joke, but we’re going full circle. What you see I’m saying. There’s a name for it. Some of the comedians in the audience know what I’m talking about. John in Savannah, Georgia. Honestly one of my favorite towns to visit; I always say that. What’s up, John? You’re our first caller, and now here you are again.

CALLER: Here I am again, guys! Congratulations on a great first year.

BUCK: Thank you so much.

CLAY: We appreciate it.

BUCK: We appreciate that. You’re a retired law enforcement, 35 years, right? So you have some thoughts on Uvalde.

CALLER: I retired from one and I’m still serving, and I’m pretty much disgusted by everything that’s come out, really. It’s a lot of… I don’t have a lot of words right now. It’s pretty sickening.

BUCK: Yeah, John, we appreciate so much you calling in. Year over year here. We got a call. We get a call again. Thanks, John. I knew this was gonna happen. I was on Tucker’s show talking about this I think two weeks ago, and I said, “The more we find out, effectively the worse and the more ‘unacceptable’ was the word I used, the response will seem.

It’s not to pass blame, not to Monday morning quarterback. Lessons learned, the same way that we all learned after 9/11, “If someone says they’re hijacking the plane, you fight to take back that cockpit. You don’t say, ‘Oh, maybe we’re gonna land somewhere and negotiate.’” Active-shooter situation? Every man, woman capable of wielding a weapon and going after that shooter has to so.

CLAY: When the investigation inside of Texas refers to it as an “abject failure,” when they say that the gunman should have been neutralized within three minutes, that the door was unlocked the entire time? Everyone is imperfect no matter what you do for a living. This appears to have been, as it is described, an abject failure.

You can support police generally while acknowledging that sometimes police do not do their job just like any other profession out there — and in this situation, they totally failed the kids and the teachers inside of those classrooms. I would hope that everyone out there listening across the country will recognize when this situation happens again that you can’t “set up a perimeter.” You can’t set up a barricade. You have to go balls-to-the-wall after the shooter. This should never happen again in American history.

BUCK: I also want to say, we so appreciate the experience, the expertise, the knowledge and just the common sense that this audience brings to us. Not just on the air with the phone calls — which is obviously great, too — but your emails, your Facebook messages.

We’re reading it all the time, the team’s reading it all the time, and you should all feel like you are active participants in this show because the show is done for you, and we learn so much from all of you. Clay and I are so appreciative of each and every one of you listening across the country — and, honestly, we can’t thank you enough.