when it comes to yuvaldi so pete
arredondo he is the chief of police of
the uvalde public school district and he
is the one who
really people are
blaming for you know the response for
the the tragic school shooting and
obviously we've gone over before the
school shooting was problematic the
response was just awful from police so
pete arredondo he hasn't done any media
interviews until around june 9th he
actually did a phone interview with the
texas tribune and on june 9th the texas
tribune they published an article
basically documenting that and in it i
read that article and pete arredondo he
said three main things three main
takeaways
that i have from this that he said about
why this why this happened and kind of
how his actions were so the first one
that i just find extremely strange is
that pete arredondo said that he was one
of the first officers to arrive on scene
which makes sense the uvalde public
school district police is a police
department of six officers and then him
as the the chief so he was one of the
first to respond and this is the crazy
thing he said he said that he purposely
left his radio
in the car he said he didn't want the
radio
to slow him down or get the radio to
slow him down he also made some comments
about not being able to manipulate both
his gun and his radio so
anyone in law enforcement or who follows
law enforcement this is an absolutely
insane thing to say so just first of all
you don't have a radio clip there's no
proper way to carry a radio and a gun
this seems
extremely poor planning
if that's the case
he he also
when you're in an emergency besides a
gun one of the most important things
that a police officer can have is their
radio this is how officers can not only
distribute information that they're
seeing to dispatch to relay to other
resources and to coordinate but also
this is how officers receive information
so you know maybe one of the reasons
that pete arredondo said he didn't know
that there were school children and
teachers who were alive and possibly
needing medical aid in the room with the
shooter he said he said he just didn't
know that was the case well maybe it's
because he didn't have a radio so this
is one of the reasons why this is just
very very basic and another thing that
he said that i find infuriating is he
said that well it wouldn't have mattered
if i brought a radio because radios
don't work in the school anyways
radios don't work in the school well
during a school shooting seems like a
strange time to bring that up who's the
chief of police who's in charge so has
pete arredondo before this happen has he
brought this up to the city council that
he's now sitting on has he brought this
up to the city council to members of the
government to members of the public like
hey just so you know our police radios
do not work inside the schools it just
seems a very strange time to bring that
up
when there's an active school shooting
so i think so that was one of the the
main things that he said that i found
that i found to be very strange and
frankly frustrating um he also said that
he
one of the things that prevented
officers when they were in the hallway
to getting into the classroom is they
couldn't breach that door now the
yuvaldi public school district police
again it's a small department of six
offers i wouldn't expect them to have
the most advanced breaching tools like i
think it's reasonable that they wouldn't
but
what about a key so he said that
he had to have multiple different
janitors come by with these giant key
rings he said the key ring weighed like
10 pounds and he's trying different keys
almost like this is like a bad a bad
sitcom episode from the 90s that you
know he's trying different keys and he's
not able to get in so the keys aren't
labeled neither the janitors or
the police department knows which key
opens which door again the time to find
that out during a school shooting is
absolutely insane so even if we're
absolutely going to criticize the police
officers how they acted and what they
did in the moment but there should be a
lot of criticism also when it comes to
planning radios don't work and you don't
know how to get into a classroom the
keys aren't labeled there's no master
key that's absolutely insane um
also one of the other things he said is
that he said that he was surprised that
he was the incident commander he didn't
know that he was the incident commander
so he's the chief of police
and he's one of the first on scene and
he didn't know that he was the incident
commander all these media
interviews and and the news calling him
the incident commander he said that's
the first time he's heard of it well if
you're the chief of police and the first
one on scene
who else would be the incident commander
and you know i guess it's one of those
things where
you know i guess if you don't have a
working radio to communicate with the
five other police
law enforcement agencies who are
arriving on scene so if you don't have a
radio to communicate with them yeah i
guess it would make it difficult to know
who is the incident commander but the
assumption that he is the incident
commander that would be the assumption
there's not a hundred schools in this
school district there's a couple
different schools i think that there's
six schools so again the idea of not
knowing
how the idea of not knowing
how to get into classrooms is extremely
crazy and one of the things that not
only we have been working on but a lot
of other media agencies have also been
working on is obviously trying to get
the body cam footage of what happened
that day so we want the body cam footage
and not only the body cam footage but
also the cell phone footage so pete
arredondo said that when he was in that
hallway the only way he was
communicating with dispatch was on his
cell phone well i think i'm not the only
one who wants to know what was said on
that cell phone if he was calling
dispatch or emergency communications
that should be recorded that should be
public information as well even if it's
a personal phone um so one of the
problems with when it comes to ipro laws
and these are the types of laws
essentially public information laws
where you know police where news
agencies and the media can get copies of
body camera footage and different things
that are public information that our
public servants do so every state has
different ipr laws
texas is notorious for not having
journalists or media friendly ipper laws
so we're already operating in a venue
that isn't friendly to media when it
comes to this and we have this situation
where
it's going to make a lot of people look
bad and
they're going to be apprehensive to let
it go to not
let it out anyways so they're
essentially what the attorney general of
texas believe his name is ken paxton
what the attorney general of texas is
saying when it comes to the release of
the body cam videos is he's saying no
and he's citing an ongoing investigation
now a couple things on that so let's say
the shooter was alive and the shooter
was going to go to trial and they said
because of trial purposes there's a lot
of body cam footage that we're going to
use in prosecution so we're not going to
put it out publicly because we have
witnesses we don't they could list all
these reasons i would
almost have sympathy not for all the
video but i would have sympathy for that
i would at least understand the line of
thinking but there is no trial
there is no offender who's going to be
at least when it comes to the to the
school shooter he's dead
so there's there's no ongoing criminal
action against the shooter so to me that
excuse is just baffling of why they
would not want to release i know that i
don't want to release it but that's the
public excuse that they're giving so
like i said our cop watch tv as well as
i'm sure hundreds of other media
organizations are trying to get the body
camera footage and believe it as soon as
the body camera footage is available it
is going to be on cop watch tv
immediately and we're going to come in
here and do a breakdown of it as soon as
possible