By that point, the 18-year-old perpetrator had already killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers. The decision to wait, state law enforcement officials announced on Friday, was made by the head of the Uvalde school district’s small, six-person police department. Now, as the initial accounting has been retracted and a far more damning narrative has emerged about the officers’ response, they’ve come under fierce criticism for the delay in storming the classroom. 

Squarely in the middle of that is the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department and its chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, now into their handling of the deadly incident. School district police departments, in particular their training, capabilities and readiness to confront lethal threats, are being scrutinized like never before and a long-running debate about the harms and benefits of campus cops has reignited. 

Schools have bolstered the ranks of armed school officers in the last several decades — largely in response to mass school shootings like the one that unfolded in Uvalde. Police now have a presence in about 43 percent of public K-12 schools and the Texas massacre — despite what appears to be disastrous decision-making on their part — could further accelerate the trend. Just hours after the Uvalde gunman was neutralized, Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, argued that campus cops are best positioned to stop mass school shootings, stating that “we know from past experiences that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus.” 

Yet beyond the anecdotes of heroic cops who successfully saved students from being killed and of officers who failed to live up to their sworn duty to protect innocent lives, research on their efficacy remains mixed. Whether they’re helpful when someone shows up to campus with a gun remains elusive. 

As districts nationwide respond to the Uvalde shooting, they should be cautious when adding new officers to schools to prevent future attacks, said Lucy Sorensen, an assistant professor of public administration and policy at the University of Albany, SUNY, who studies school policing. While school shootings are tragic and politically galvanizing, they remain statistically rare. But officers’ daily presence in schools, she said, could carry negative implications for students — particularly Black youth, who are more likely to be thrust into the school-to-prison pipeline.

“We’ve seen this in response to prior shootings — Columbine, Sandy Hook — where there is this push to harden schools, to add more police officers, add more guns, and the efficacy of these investments is not well established at this point,” Sorensen said, adding that the costs of a full-time police presence in schools could outweigh the advantages. School leaders and lawmakers, she said, “need to think hard about whether this is the right investment or whether it’s a reactionary investment.” 

Last year, Sorensen concluded in a report that having an officer on campus “marginally increases the likelihood of a school shooting,” and suggested that officers failed to prevent school shootings and other gun-related incidents. Yet upon further review of the underlying federal data, she backtracked. In an interview Tuesday with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Sorensen said she has now reached a markedly different conclusion. While firearm-related incidents including weapons possession were more frequent in schools with police, the finding could be the result of officers successfully detecting and responding to campus gun incidents. 

“This could be an actual increase in gun violence, but we think it’s more being driven by an increase in the detection and reporting of guns that’s happening from police in schools,” she said. If school-based officers are able to identify and confiscate guns from students that would have otherwise remained in their possession, she said it’s “likely a good thing if it potentially prevents gun violence.” 

Still, a separate report offers caution. Once mass school shootings occur, researchers at the nonprofit Violence Project found that officers may be ineffective at preventing bloodshed. In an analysis of school shootings over four decades — a total 133 incidents —  researchers found that fatalities were three times higher in attacks where an armed guard was present compared to those that unfolded without a security presence. Because the perpetrators of mass shootings are often suicidal, researchers speculate that the perpetrators could even be drawn to places with armed security. 

George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 led some school districts to cut ties with the police before COVID-era student behavioral challenges prompted some to reverse course. Through it all, a , according to a recent Education Week survey. Among them is Jake Heibel, the principal of Great Mills High School in Maryland, which suffered a school shooting in 2018. In that incident, a 17-year-old student shot two classmates, one fatally, before taking his own life. The shooting ended when the gunman fatally shot himself as a school resource officer simultaneously shot him in the hand. 

The school officer’s actions “certainly saved lives that day and we’re eternally grateful,” Heibel said in an interview after the Uvalde shooting. “He did what he needed to do to protect others and he certainly did that day.” 

‘The wrong decision, period’

In the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, the responding officers as “heroic” and “courageous,” but the tenor shifted after more information became publicly known. Turns out a school-based cop did not engage the shooter before he entered the school, but one was there: He responded to the scene but drove past the gunman as he crouched down next to a car in the parking lot, officials said.

On Friday, that Chief Arredondo, of the Uvalde school district police department, was the incident commander who ordered officers to stand back instead of storming the Robb Elementary School classroom where fourth-graders and educators were locked inside with the gunman. Officials said that Arredondo believed erroneously that the shooter was barricaded inside the classroom and that students’ lives were no longer at risk. Ultimately a tactical team of Border Patrol agents , opened the classroom door using a janitor’s keys and fatally shot the gunman. 

“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said during a Friday press conference. “It was the wrong decision, period. There was no excuse for that.” 

Arredondo’s decision to wait has faced similar rebukes from proponents of school-based policing, including school security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. Prior to the notorious 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, standard law enforcement procedures called on police to secure the scene’s perimeter and call in the SWAT team. But Columbine “completely changed that,” Trump said, and in recent decades officers are trained to respond to the threat immediately, even if they’re alone on the scene. 

After the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which resulted in 17 deaths, the school resource officer stationed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Scot Peterson, was charged with criminal negligence after he failed to engage the gunman. While Trump said that Peterson became Parkland’s “second-biggest villain,” after the shooter, he said the law enforcement response in Uvalde was far worse.

“Here you have numerous people who, it would appear, did not follow the best practice for the last two decades,” Trump said.  

For Blaine Gaskill, the school resource officer who rushed to stop the armed student at Maryland’s Great Mills High School in 2018, the fear of losing his own life didn’t even cross his mind. In fact, he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, “I didn’t feel anything.” 

“I had a job to do and I did it,” he said in an email Friday.  Though Gaskill declined to comment on the Texas shooting, he expressed support for campus police, saying they “play a big role in preventing any tragedy.” 

“Just our presence alone makes students, parents and staff feel safer,” he said. “We have the ability to respond to any incident very quickly, whether it’s an active threat or a fight in the school. We are seconds away from stopping or intervening in any incident.” 

In fact, instruction on a quick response had been provided to officers at the 4,100-student Uvalde school district, which despite its small size maintains its own police force and an , including “threat assessment” teams, a visitor management system that limits access to school buildings and a digital surveillance tool that sifts through social media posts in search of violent threats. In December, Arredondo completed an active-shooter training course that taught participants how to distinguish an active shooting from “a hostage or barricade crisis.” Just two months ago, on how to respond to an active shooting. The training was based on materials by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, according to The New York Times, which inform officers they may need to put themselves in harm’s way and “display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent.” 

“As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended,” according to the training materials. “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”     

While Arredondo served as the incident commander, Trump questioned whether his small campus police department was equipped for an emergency of this scale. Many school district police departments lack tactical training, he said, and often defer to larger agencies following major incidents.

“When you form an incident command structure, there is nothing that says that the initial incident commander on scene cannot pass that torch to the representative of another agency, a tactical team that may have more expertise, experience and tactical knowledge,” Trump said. “It can be done. You can pass the torch.”

Why that didn’t happen, and which department was responsible for released right after the shooting, remains unclear. 

While Trump maintained support for campus cops, proponents of police-free schools said that police shortcomings in Uvalde speak to the policy arguments they’ve been making for years. Among them is Maria Fernandez, managing director of campaign strategy at the Advancement Project, a racial justice group. A national movement to remove police from schools landed major policy victories after Floyd’s murder, but the political tides shifted back in favor of policing as students returned to schools during the pandemic and educators reported an uptick in classroom disruptions. The Uvalde shooting is proof that the strategy doesn’t work, Fernandez said. 

“The narrative that is so entrenched in our communities is that police equals safety or that they can stop the evil that is moving outside of the school door — and that’s not what happened and they lied about it,” she said. The school district was served by its own police department, “hardened” security measures, a municipal police department that receives about and federal Border Patrol agents. It all failed to save 21 innocent lives. 

“This is our nightmare,” Fernandez said. “We know for a fact that police don’t actually generate safety in the face of incredible violence. It’s just so devastating that this had to happen.”

Shootings bolster school policing

The attack in Uvalde is the deadliest mass school shooting in nearly a decade. In 2012, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six educators. If history tells us anything, the Uvalde shooting will precede a rash of local and federal spending on campus policing. 

In 2013, a noted a limited body of research on the effectiveness of school resource officers, stating flatly that existing reports did “not address whether their presence in schools has deterred mass shootings.” Yet the Sandy Hook tragedy — and the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — led to an infusion of local and federal money for school-based policing. In the last several decades, the federal government has spent roughly $1 billion to station police in schools. Responding to shootings with school policing and beefed-up security reflects the country’s “neoliberal approach to solving social problems,” said Benjamin Fisher, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Florida State University whose research focuses on campus policing. 

“Rather than talking about the one thing that all school shootings have in common — which is the presence of a gun — we are instead focusing on how to make schools different in some way. We’re putting the problem on schools rather than on gun access and availability.”

Since Sandy Hook, researchers have scrutinized the role that police play in schools, and in some cases have found , including an increase in student discipline for low-level offenses and a drop in high school graduation and college enrollment rates. Research has found that the negative outcomes are particularly dire for Black students, who are disproportionately subjected to campus arrests.

In her more recent research, Sorensen of the University of Albany, SUNY, found that placing officers in schools leads to an increase in campus safety, but at a great cost to students — particularly those who are Black. The research, which relies on figures from , found that officers effectively combat some forms of campus violence including fights, but their presence also correlates with an increase in student suspensions, expulsions and arrests. Students, especially those who are disabled, are chronically absent more when campuses are staffed by cops, she found. 

The research isn’t yet peer-reviewed. In fact, it was during the peer-review process that researchers identified a problem, Sorensen said. The Civil Rights Data Collection relies on every school in the U.S. to self-report data on a range of student outcomes and has long been criticized for including inaccuracies. For example, districts have been accused of underreporting campus arrests and instances of sexual misconduct. 

When researchers triangulated the federal data on school shootings against news reports, they found that the rate of school shootings appeared to have been overreported, which Sorensen said could be the result of an administrative data error. As a result of unreliable data, she said it remains unclear whether campus cops have any effect on the likelihood of a school shooting. 

Still, Sorensen said that the negative outcomes of school policing, like the student suspensions, “aren’t costless.” 

“Every child who gets killed in a school shooting is too much, it’s too many kids,” she said, yet such tragedies remain statistically rare and most communities will never have to experience what Uvalde just endured. “I do think it’s important to weigh more heavily the day-to-day impacts of having police officers in schools and what those costs and benefits are.”

The risk of ‘cherry-picking’ anecdotes 

As the apparent police failures in Uvalde and officers’ delayed response are dissected, Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said in this situation, the officers may have simply been outgunned. 

School resource officers are generally equipped with handguns, while the gunman reportedly carried out the attack with an AR-15-style assault rifle. Campus police should have the same equipment as cops assigned to patrol the streets, Canady said, but added that his group is “not involved in politics around the gun debate.” 

“Here’s what I know: If gun sales stopped today, there are still millions of guns out in our society, that’s just a fact” he said. “So we have to continue to prepare to defend our communities, which for us is our schools, against the potential for these types of attacks and the potential for us to be outgunned.” 

Even as some districts have equipped campuses with rifles and gun safes, he questioned whether that was an effective solution. 

“Here’s the thing, unless you’re sitting in that office or right next to it, you’re not going to waste precious seconds to go get the long gun when there’s someone killing babies,” he said. “That is a dynamic that is very difficult to resolve.” 

To bolster his argument, Canady pointed to multiple tragedies where the responses by school-based police were credited with saving lives. In March, for example, administrators at a Kansas high school called an officer to help them search a . When the officer arrived, the student removed a gun from his bag and shot both the officer and a school administrator. The officer, who has since been described as a hero, returned fire and struck the student. All three survived. 

Meanwhile Trump, the school security expert, said it’s important to consider school shootings that may have been prevented due to a police presence on campus. Despite a lack of research, he pointed to anecdotes where officers identified students with weapons and uncovered concrete plans to kill. Yet anecdotes also exist of officers failing to uphold their duties. 

Fisher, the criminal justice researcher, said there’s reason to be cautious of anecdotal evidence in place of scientific research because it “risks cherry-picking.”

“Anecdotes allow us to craft a narrative because we don’t have to subject our beliefs to systematic and reproducible inquiry,” he said. “We can pick the pieces of evidence that we want — and that’s on both sides of the argument.”

This time, the conversation has centered on an armed Long Beach Unified School District safety officer accused of fatally shooting an unarmed 18-year-old girl as she fled in a car near the high school where he worked. The safety officer was once a police officer, but at the time of the shooting, he was working directly for the school district handling security and did not have the status of a sworn school resource officer employed by the police department and assigned to Long Beach schools. School policing proponents were quick to highlight the distinction and advise educators against arming school staff who lack badges.

But civil rights advocates said said the difference is meaningless and the case reinforces a need to eliminate school security officers who serve police-like functions and carry guns.

After the shooting, the National Association of School Resource Officers sought to set apart school-based police from safety officers, noting in a statement that the trade group “strongly recommends that armed personnel on school campuses” be sworn law enforcement officers who are “carefully selected and specifically trained in school-based policing.” The group, which offers a training course for school resource officers, has advocated for armed officers but opposes policies that allow teachers and other school staff to carry guns — a scenario that is often put forth after mass school shootings.

Mac Hardy, the association’s director of operations and a former school-based officer in Alabama, said the stress of carrying a gun inside a school “took years off of my life.”

“Every day, I put on that gun belt to wear inside the school and knew I was going to be in a school with 3,000 adolescent children and another 200 staff members. It was a lot of pressure,” he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, explaining that he underwent regular firearms training. “It’s a huge responsibility to carry a weapon and we just believe it’s best that a trained law enforcement officer carries the weapon.”

The since-fired Long Beach safety officer, 51-year-old Eddie F. Gonzalez, and charged with murder in the shooting of Manuela “Mona” Rodriguez near Millikan High School a month earlier. Gonzalez was reportedly patrolling an area near the school when he observed a fight between Rodriguez, who was not a student, and a 15-year-old girl. Gonzalez, on the job for less than a year, shot Rodriguez in the head as she rode in the passenger seat of a fleeing car, authorities said. The incident was captured on video and went viral online. The shooting left Rodriguez, the mother of a 6-month-old boy, brain dead and she died Oct. 5. 

The district’s unsworn but armed safety officers are required to complete a 664-hour basic peace officer training academy that includes firearms instruction, district spokesman Chris Eftychiou said. They’re also required to complete a firearms course through the Long Beach Police Department twice per year. Gonzalez was up to date on those requirements at the time of the shooting, Eftychiou said in an email. Officers also receive training in de-escalation techniques, how to work with adolescents and suicide prevention, he said.

Though the school safety officers , they can detain suspects pending a police investigation. Following the shooting, the Long Beach Board of Education voted unanimously to fire Gonzalez for violating the district use-of-force policy. His attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

School policing has been a topic of national discussion since Floyd was murdered in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, which caused a reckoning on police brutality and led dozens of districts to cut their longstanding ties with police departments. Some districts, including Minneapolis, replaced the officers with unarmed security staff. Some critics have worried, however, that the approach swaps campus police for district officers who serve a similar policing function.

The Long Beach district its school resource officer program in 2020 but local activists have to cut ties with all armed security staff and redirect funding to student support services like counselors.

One Long Beach activist, Najee Ali, told a local newspaper the shooting is a deadly example of the harms of armed safety officers “who are one step above a security guard and don’t have the training of a police officer.” 

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” Ali . “Unfortunately, Mona Rodriguez paid for it with her life. Until Long Beach Unified takes a second look at these flawed policies, we believe there will be another shooting.” 

Eftychiou, the district spokesman, said the school system continually examines its school safety practices and the criminal case against Gonzalez may spur reforms. 

“We have also heard from many community members about what school safety should look like going forward,” he said. “We have, and will continue to provide opportunities to listen and engage in critical discussions with our local community and national experts about safety and well-being.” 

As districts across the country examine police presence in schools, armed security must be part of the discussion, said Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU of Pennsylvania whose advocacy focuses on campus cops. The national resource officer group’s efforts to draw a line between Gonzalez and campus cops is “patently absurd” because school resource officers and school safety officers are “a distinction without a difference.” Both are required to complete peace officer training, carry guns and have law enforcement duties. 

“The central element of what led to this young woman’s death exists no matter what his job title is,” Jordan said. “He’s able to carry a firearm because he is a school safety officer with probably the most serious power that an officer — sworn or unsworn — can have: That is the power to carry a firearm and discharge a firearm.”

Jordan said that armed officers — whether they work for school districts or as sworn police — shouldn’t be stationed in school full time and should only be called to campuses during rare emergency situations.

“It creates an inherently threatening environment,” he said. “It sends the message that the kids are the problem there and it increases the expectation that something may go wrong in a school.”

Prior to becoming a district safety officer earlier this year, Gonzalez served as a cop with two nearby police departments between January 2019 and July 2020. Details about his departure from those departments remain unclear, but Eftychiou said he passed a district background check that explored issues such as previous excessive use of force, consistently poor judgment and dishonesty.  

Floyd’s murder resulted in some districts cutting ties with police, but another recent tragedy — the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — led some to bolster the presence of armed security. In Florida, a law required school districts to station at least one armed official, including civilians, on every K-12 campus. Some districts created their own police departments and others hired armed “guardians” without law enforcement backgrounds. Several of them have gotten into trouble involving their official duties. In 2020, was arrested and charged with stashing cocaine inside his vehicle on a high school campus. A year earlier, police accused of pawning his service pistol and body armor for gas money. The allegations came to light following the guardian’s arrest on domestic battery and false imprisonment charges. 

After the Long Beach shooting, retired emergency management specialist Ted Zocco-Hochhalter was among those who sought to distinguish Gonzalez from school resource officers. To him, the issue comes down to mentality. Zocco-Hochhalter’s two children survived the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, but his daughter was left paralyzed after being shot during the rampage. 

Gonzalez previously worked as a police officer, but it’s important not to lump in school resource officers with “rank-and-file police officers,” Zocco-Hochhalter said in an interview. Simply having law enforcement experience shouldn’t be enough to get a job inside a school, he said. Though there are no national training requirements for campus police officers, he said it’s critical that officers receive specialized instruction before working inside schools and must approach the job with a mentality that places mentoring and relationships first. Gonzalez’s decision to fire at the fleeing vehicle, he said, suggests he lacked “the proper mentality going into that job.”

“If his first reaction on a fleeing vehicle like that from the scene of a fight was to fire his weapon, that tells me that he was a rank-and-file law enforcement officer before he became this safety officer,” Zocco-Hochhalter said. “That’s what kicked in instead of trying to de-escalate or call for help.”