San Antonio School Police Chiefs Rethink Active Shooter Response Plans

Since a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, school district police chiefs in the San Antonio area have been re-examining their plans for how to respond to a mass shooting.

They have a lot to ponder amid the torrent of criticism, second-guessing and investigations triggered by the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School.

Officers from several agencies — including the Uvalde school police force, the Uvalde Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety — waited more than an hour before a Border Patrol tactical unit and two sheriff's deputies broke into the classroom where the killer, Salvador Ramos, 18, was holed up. Within seconds, they'd gunned down the high-school dropout from Uvalde.

Earlier, while as many as 19 officers gathered in the hallway outside the classroom, terrified children inside had placed calls to 911 pleading for help.

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Three days after the worst-ever school shooting in Texas, Texas DPS Director Steven McCraw identified the Uvalde school district's police chief as the on-scene commander during the rampage. And he said holding the officers back in the hallway for so long had been a grave error, one for which there was "no excuse."

Police Chief Pedro "Pete" Arredondo of Uvalde's Consolidated Independent School District told the Texas Tribune that he hadn't considered himself the officer in charge — and that he never told other officers not to breach the classroom door.

Among the many unanswered questions: Why did Arredondo — who'd left his radio in his vehicle before entering the school — remain in control of the situation? Why wasn't a better-prepared, better-equipped agency put in charge?

School-district police chiefs in San Antonio mostly say they aren't ready to publicly discuss the law-enforcement response in Uvalde. They're waiting to see the results of state and federal investigations. But they say they'd readily hand control over to outside agencies in a crisis if the circumstances called for it.

In the event of a school shooting, that decision would be made in the moment. The school district plans assume multiple agencies would arrive at the school — but they don't specify which would oversee the law-enforcement response.

"It is not going to be the responsibility of just one department," said Wally McCampbell, police chief of North East ISD, the second-largest school districts in San Antonio, with nearly 60,000 students. "The first person in command would be the first person who is at the scene. Nine times out of 10, if it happens within a school district, the thought is, it is going to be me because of the proximity."

But he said once other agencies are called in, the person in charge could change, especially if a SWAT team or out-of-district officers with more technical training or better equipment are on hand.

For eight years, McCampbell has served as the chief of North East ISD's 70-member police force, which patrols 70 campuses across the district. He previously was a San Antonio Police Department officer for 24 years.

Other chiefs agreed that responding officers have to be flexible as they establish a command structure on the fly.

"It is case by case," said Charlie Carnes, police chief at Northside ISD, the largest district in the city with more than 102,000 students.

After five minutes or 10 minutes, the command might change, but it's impossible to plan that in advance, he said.

"If (another agency) have their numbers there at the scene and their supervising staff, well, then sure, it wouldn't be a question if we relinquish that to someone like SAPD. Certainly we would," said Carnes, the district's police chief since 2011.

The Northside ISD police force has 103 officers patrolling 125 schools.

It wouldn't be as simple as putting the biggest agency in charge of the response to a school shooter, McCampbell said. It would take working together and deciding quickly who to put in control.

Pete Blair, executive director of the ALERRT Center at Texas State University — which created the program that trains most San Antonio school-district police officers on how to respond to a shooter — agrees. A smaller agency might have better trained people or better information about what's happening at the scene, he said.

ALERRT is an active-shooter training program created in 2002 as a partnership between the Hays County Sheriff's Office, San Marcos Police Department and Texas State. The program has trained more than 200,000 first responders throughout the country.

"You don't know who is going to be there," said Blair when asked why a chain of command isn't designated in advance for active-shooter incidents. "This is a random event happening at a random place at a random time. If you design your response around requiring a certain person to be there, and that person can't get there or is incapacitated, then your response falls apart."

"You are definitely going to have a preferred way," Blair said. "But that doesn't necessarily mean that is how it is going to unfold that day. And if you don't have that flexibility and that adaptability, your whole response can fail."

For McCampbell, working together at the scene of a school shooting makes sense because everyone should be trained to make the same decision.

"I can tell you, if shots are still going inside of a school, it doesn't matter if it is me, the chief, police chief, SAPD, the sheriff — we are all going to make the same choice," he said. "We are going to keep sending officers in to neutralize those gunshots and stop the killing."

"As a human being and as a law enforcement (officer), I couldn't see myself standing there and listening to the screams and the crying and the gunfire going off and not doing anything about it," McCampbell said.

San Antonio schools so far have been spared the carnage of a mass shooting.

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security's K-12 school shooting database lists eight shootings on school campuses in San Antonio, three of which resulted in deaths. None involved a mass shooter.

In 1990, two gangs began fighting at Sam Houston High School and shots were fired during lunch, injuring three students. In 2015, a 22-year-old shot at a principal's car at Wagner High School; no one was injuried. In 2022, a Harlandale ISD police officer shot and killed a man who was attempting to break into Morrill Elementary School when it was closed for the day.

Deep ties

Area school police departments have long-standing relationships with the San Antonio police and fire departments, the Bexar County Sheriff's Office, and police and fire departments in suburban cities such as Alamo Heights and Leon Valley.

"We've taken a lot of strides locally here in Bexar County to be able to do that and communicate. We've had the basic training to work together," McCampbell said.

In 2018, his officers and other police departments trained for mass casualty incidents. Multiple agencies learned how to administer emergency medical care.

That kind of training is crucial. Whoever gets to a shooting scene can work together right away instead of waiting for others officers to show up, McCampbell said.

The Uvalde tragedy hasn't prompted immediate changes in active-shooter plans, but school-district police leaders plan to meet this summer to review and possibly modify them.

At North East, a top-to-bottom reworking of the plan is unlikely.

"I don't think there is any one thing that North East does that we are looking at changing as far as our response," McCampbell said. "The response is going to be the same: get the most officers you can get to the scene and neutralize or stop the killing. That is the No. 1 objective."

In San Antonio, 10 of the 16 school districts have their own police departments. The six districts without their own officers rely on municipal police departments.

For example, the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD has memorandums of understanding with the cities of Schertz and Cibolo to provide officers to patrol schools.

The city of Cibolo has three full-time officers dedicated to the seven schools in the city.

The police department works with other agencies frequently but doesn't hand off command easily.

"I don't see another agency coming in and taking control of a critical incident within our city," said Richard Mireles, spokesman for the Cibolo Police Department. "It would have to be something beyond the scope of the Cibolo Police Department to handle for us to give up control, and I'm thinking of something on the national level. Like a 9/11-type incident."

Edgewood ISD Police Chief Jesse Quiroga has Bexar County Sheriff's Office and other law enforcement agencies train in Edgewood school buildings whenever possible.

"I do that so when incidents like this happen, I want to have as much help available to us and the people that are coming to help to be familiar with our buildings," Quiroga said. "In critical incidents, seconds matter."

Threats on the rise

Police chiefs say threats of violence directed at schools have increased with the ubiquity of smartphones and students' obsession with TikTok and other social media platforms.

"Someone might be looking for a little bit of attention or is having a bad day — they put something out on social media and it gets seen immediately by a couple thousand people, and those people share it and share it and share it," Quiroga said.

"The key is to never take any threat lightly," he said. "You always want to look into it as best as you can until you deem it unfounded. We have to always be on every threat."

This spring, a student posted pictures of weapons along with threatening comments directed at students and administrators on an Edgewood ISD campus. Some students told their parents, who called the district's police department, which began investigating. Within hours, the teen was identified and the threat was determined to be not credible.

When a threat is made, school police often work with the FUSION Center, which is operated by SAPD. It specializes in tracking online threats involving weapons by sharing information between agencies.

Police chiefs usually send school police officers right away to the campus under threat, whether or not the threat is deemed credible. Once the person threatening violence is identified, police officers visit the student's home.

"It depends on what the threat is," McCampbell said. "If we get a threat during the school day and our kids are at school, we would absolutely send officers over to the campus, inform the administration what the threat is, and then depending on what the threat is, we would make a decision to put the school into a lockout."

Students can face felony charges for making terroristic threats.

Hard lessons

School police chiefs agree on the need for more awareness of, communication about and help for students who are in distress and could possibly turn violent.

"We need to identify potential... I hate to say it but... a potential school shooter before it even gets to that point," McCampbell said. "Get him the help that he needs to figure out why he is having these thoughts and to help try to stop it."

Carnes, the Northside ISD police chief, said preventing violence starts with parents.

"We get a lot of calls after school, and it is because a parent has sat down with their child and asked how was their day," Carnes said. He encourages parents to call the police department, which also has an anonymous phone line, to alert the department to any red flags.

The Cibolo Police Department offers a course titled "Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events," which offers guidance for surviving an active-shooter event. In the aftermath of the Uvalde massacre, the department is trying to give the training a higher profile.

"Police can only do so much," Mireles said. "We are reaching out to our citizens and telling them, 'Hey, if a critical incident happens, this is what you should do.'"

"We need to arm our populace with education and knowledge so that they know what to do because most people don't know what to do," he said. "They have 'it could never happen to me'-type mentality. Until it does."

"Most people in Uvalde didn't think it would happen to them until it did."

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