Pedro Arredondo, the sentient fecal smear who runs the Uvalde Police Department and was secretly sworn into city council yesterday, does not have time for the investigations into his department’s hideous response to the school shooting last week, but does have time to mug for the cameras:
Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, the embattled Uvalde school police chief who led the flawed law enforcement response to last week’s school shooting and has remained out of the public eye since, spoke exclusively to CNN on Wednesday and declined to answer substantive questions about the massacre.
According to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), Arredondo has not responded to a request for a follow-up interview with the Texas Rangers, who are investigating the shooting at Robb Elementary.
Yet outside his home Wednesday, Arredondo told CNN’s Aaron Cooper, “I am in contact with DPS everyday.”
And outside his office minutes later, he told CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz that he’s not going to release any further information while funerals are ongoing.
“We’re going to be respectful to the family,” he said. “We’re going to do that eventually. Whenever this is done and the families quit grieving, then we’ll do that obviously.”
Doing your fucking job last week would have been a real sign of respect, you twat. And if you were wondering just HOW FUCKING BAD the police response was, remember this:
Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, was also waiting outside for her children. She said she was one of numerous parents who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school sooner. After a few minutes, she said, U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation.
Ms. Gomez said she convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free.
A spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service said deputy marshals never placed anyone in handcuffs while securing Robb Elementary’s perimeter. “Our deputy marshals maintained order and peace in the midst of the grief-stricken community that was gathering around the school,” he said.
Ms. Gomez described the scene as frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.
The police are not there to protect and serve and have not been for a long time (if ever for people of color). With that in mind, I am just starting to read Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. I’ll let you know what I think.
Kay
I think it’s a shame. They all should have been formally interviewed and made to give statements when it became clear they were lying. The more time passes, the less likely they are to be held accountable.
If none of that happened the Texas state police are incompetent/corrupt too.
VOR
Clarification: Mr. Arredondo is the chief of the Uvalde School District police, not the Uvalde city police.
Kay
Weeks., months, make sure everyone has time to make their stories match up with the evidence because why should anyone comply with an investigation?
satby
Good to see you posting more again John.
Lots of outside agencies will be looking at this: FBI, DOJ. I doubt the cops will be able to derail those investigations, or any federal charges that come out of them.
Kay
Did the state police even secure any of the information? Why is compliance with the investigation voluntary?
If Texas state police were investigating any of you I assure you it wouldn’t be voluntary.
So, so sick of the rampant, systemic, multi level corruption. Apparently not one person involved in this is capable of doing their job.
J R in WV
John said:
I would have said the ambulatory fecal smear, in the lack of evidence that he is sentient.
greenergood
I am finding this unnerving: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/gop-contest-elections-tapes-00035758
Kay
18, 24, 36 months from now there will be some federal investigation or report that goes nowhere and it will be just another unsolved crime to add to the huge, tottering pile.
I don’t understand the deference, the kowtowing to powerful criminals. I can assure you ordinary people are NOT shown this elaborate deference and “professional courtesy” when they are being investigated.
FridayNext
If you really want to be enraged at police, watch We Own This City on HBO. Watching the last couple episodes as the incompetence and lying unfolded in Uvalde was, well, lets just say I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.
Scout211
@VOR:
Yes, he is the chief of the school district police.
As a member of the city council and also the city police chief, well, that would have been even a bigger legal mess for Uvalde.
Old School
So you’ll give them a day or two to be done grieving?
MisterDancer
David Simon no doubt delivers again.
Everyone remembers how cool Omar in THE WIRE is, and everyone forgets how he stepped out of that narrative.
RSA
Wow. Arredondo needs better pretending-to-care training.
Betty Cracker
@RSA: Right? They’ll never quit grieving.
FridayNext
@MisterDancer: The difference being that this is based on a real story and, stranger still, police went to jail.
MisterDancer
And yeah, this is all of a piece.
Cops are too entrenched, have too many gun-happy members themselves, to actually advocate for the controls they need to keep themselves safe.
GOPers are too invested in using LEOs to enforce fear, to put any controls on them.
Democrats are too pressed by thin margins and media bollicks, to push forward reforms.
And finally: Too many people are programmed to vote for their guns above anything and everything.
It’s about the guns AND the police AND the GOP as a vicious cycle of blame-shifting and cronyism. So anything that helps unravel that cycle, at any point that works, is welcome in my opinion. I ain’t picky about the leverage, at this stage.
MisterDancer
@FridayNext: Oh, no doubt.
O. Felix Culpa
It makes me both sad and furious that some of those kids might still be alive had the police done their jobs. Fuckers.
Kay
Yes, I’m sure they’re all just shaking in their boots faced with this “review”.
No one in any powerful position will be held accountable. Again. Not one person will even lose their job. You can’t even sue any of them – they’re untouchable.
stinger
When the families quit grieving… that will be NEVER. And that’s about when I expect he’ll release full and accurate information.
Kay
I really thought this time something might happen. Not even in the justice system or with any real accountability, but I thought one or two of them might resign in shame so there would be SOME justice, but no. Carry on, keep their heads down and stall and stonewall until it blows over, which is just the ordinary practice now. No one ever resigns or gets fired, even.
satby
Link goes to a tweet of a Booker ad (he’s running against Rand Paul). Powerful stuff. Hope he wins.
Kay
@stinger:
Why is up to him when he releases information? He’s managing the investigation into himself?
Lunacy. Pure corruption. Is there a godammned grown up around who could do real police/prosecutor work? Can we hire one?
raven
Watch David Simon’s “We Own This City”.
middlelee
@MisterDancer: What is an LEO?
Kay
He’s done a good job. So that’s one. Maybe he should run the investigation.
debbie
@middlelee:
Law enforcement officer.
karen marie
I’m sorry, WHAT?
Sure sounds like a whole of “never” from here
ADD: Also, for the record, Arredondo is chief of the school police, not Uvalde Police. (The town spends 40% of its budget on police but the cost of the school police comes from the school budget.)
The Moar You Know
I am in my mid-fifties, white, male.
This:
Has been the case my entire life and the police here in SoCal do truly treat everyone equally. Equally horribly.
Of course that’s bullshit, anyone who watches the local news can tell you that, minorities get it far worse, but I’ve had the gun at my temple, been smacked around, illegally searched, the whole deal. I tended of all things to be treated somewhat better when I had long hair.
Nobody is safe from a cop. I appreciate that there needs to be law enforcement in some form but what we have now isn’t law enforcement. It’s a shakedown operation run by an organized group of domestic terrorists.
JWR
I listened to a good, maybe 17 minute interview yesterday about the police response in Uvalde. It starts out slowly, lots about what this particular congress could maybe do, but picks up at around the 9 minute mark, when he really starts in on the Uvalde cops, whose lives, he says, have become much more important than ours, like police are a protected sort of upper class, with their incredibly powerful unions and protective leagues which will support or cover up whatever’s in the cop’s best interests. Good stuff.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Moar You Know: Bob Dylan said it well years ago. “The cops don’t need you, and, man, they expect the same.”
Baud
@satby: I would love to have two Bookers in the Senate.
middlelee
@debbie: Oh fuck. Honestly, I’m not normally so flat out dumb. Thanks.
Mike in NC
@FridayNext: We watched the first couple of episodes of “We Own This City” and my wife found it was too much of a bummer to continue. No good guys whatsoever. I might have to give it a second look.
UncleEbeneezer
I’m currently reading the book Cult Of Glory about the history of the Texas Rangers. I’m at the part when the Civil Rights movement and SCOTUS have won school integration but white Texans use violent mobs to block Black students from being enrolled or entering schools, all while the Rangers either stand by doing nothing, or actively help the violent mobs.
Here is a famous photograph (TW: racism) of Jay Banks, lazing by a tree while white students look at an effigy of a Black male, hanged in the front of the entrance to the Mansfield TX school as a warning to Black people. Neither Banks, nor any other Rangers, did anything about it. Meanwhile the Rangers routinely harassed, intimidated and threatened to arrest members of the NAACP and Black clergy who would come out to support integration in scenes like that all over Texas.
The book is filled with countless stories of the Rangers refusing to protect those people (Black people, Native-Americans, Mexicans etc.) and even breaking the law to incur all sorts of violence upon them. And always lying about it, when pressed by media or any Congressional/State investigations. This is our culture of policing in America, sadly.
Early Riser
It’s really weird that people think that they will be protected from gunfire or other violence by calling 911.
Kay
We’ve spent 900 million since 2019 “hardening” schools. Some Florida schools are effectively detention centers, where students are escorted to the bathroom by a security guard.
And we got nothing out of it. Not an educational expense, not something that makes kids lives richer or better, just turning their schools into detention facilities and paying and paying for “security”.
So when conservatives say that children and teenagers are “more depressed” ask yourself if you were permitted to change classes in a crowded hallway, or go to the bathroom alone, or stay after with a teacher. We’re making them miserable.
lgerard
@greenergood:
I found that article to absolutely bizarre, particularly this
The idea that election workers would be contacting outside parties for instruction is a nonstarter. Poll workers follow the procedures that they have been trained to do. Observers are there to observe, period, They cannot participate in the process in any way.
These wingnuts think they can just show up on election day and decide who is worthy of voting and who isn’t.
Leto
Three court cases established police have no legal obligations to protect people, just “the law”.
Kay
@UncleEbeneezer:
Rough and tough Texas Rangers are begging the school security officer to sit for an interview with them. He tells them to fuck off and they scurry away to whine to CNN. Turn in the cowboy hat, buddy. It’s a costume.
Kattails
@MisterDancer: Just read across this link from Stonekettle to a John Pavlovitz thread about school shootings. No, I did not know there were so many.
But if you scroll down, you’ll run into a link to a very righteous rant by a former Marine rifle/pistol coach about FUCKING WELL-REGULATED which I will watch enough times to memorize and recite to any asshole who talks about the Second Amendment again. The T-shirt I talked about the other evening. (hoping two links won’t land me in jail here)
germy
Paper bag test?
RaflW
That “quit grieving” comment is just stunningly inappropriate. And WTF is this thing where he’s secretly sworn into the Council? Is this to get him under the city’s umbrella insurance policy in a different way than he would as chief?
It stinks. All of it. To high hell.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Town I live in back in the ’60s the Cops were like these Uvalde clowns; thugs to keep the Hispanics from getting uppity. Then the whole Civil Rights thing and the Other was getting uppity, there was a big meeting between the police and the hispanic community at the Catholic Church down the street and someone shot the the police chief dead threw a window. At that point police reform got serious.
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Through!!! FFS
GoBlueInOak
@lgerard: Of course they do. GOP is officially now the party of Jim Crow. And a return to Jim Crow era election systems is exactly what they want.
Omnes Omnibus
@GoBlueInOak: And you, nevertheless, suggest we give up on the midterms. How odd.
Kay
@lgerard:
They all complain about fraud now. We had a county commissioner primary candidate who lost by 20 and went to make a big scene at the Bd of Elections. His wife was reading from a script she had prepared and she still made no sense. A Trumpist, of course.
Even the GOP pollworkers hate them.
Scout211
@RaflW:
It was supposed to be a public swearing-in ceremony on Friday, I think. But he was sworn in behind closed doors, likely to protect him from public scrutiny.
ETA: He is currently an employee of the school district. Now he will also be a city council member.
GoBlueInOak
@Omnes Omnibus: And you are a see you next Tuesday. How odd.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
At this point I just assume everyone is using “voice to text” on their phone and not proofreading. Led, the past tense of lead, has just about disappeared. “The indictments lead to several convictions last year.” And misuse of it’s has skyrocketed, I assume for similar reasons.
robmassing
“the embattled Uvalde school police chief who led the flawed law enforcement response”
The failed, unqualified, cowardly Uvalde school police chief who “led” the catastrophic, deadly failure of a law enforcement response.”
FIFY, CNN
karen marie
@RaflW:
He was supposed to have been sworn in the day after or a couple days after the shooting but it was postponed and then held in secret because “optics.”
Professor Bigfoot
The culture of American policing, born in antebellum slave patrols and passed down through police union halls, is one of bullies and cowards.
Their one real job is to make sure the lower castes are kept in their place, so they will happily hassle, beat, tase, kneel, and shoot a brown “suspect.” They are the bullies who beat on people who cannot respond in any substantive way.
Meanwhile they love to say, “no matter what, I’m going home to my family at the end of my shift.” Translation: “I’m not undertaking any kind of risk for anyone other than myself.” They are cowards who only protect and serve only themselves.
Ohio Mom
@Steeplejack: I have a running argument with spellcheck. It’s always sticking an apostrophe in “its.” Which it just did again — though it seems to have accepted my correction. Now to post this before it sneaks another one in.
Roger Moore
@Leto:
Even withink the confines of upholding the law, the police have a lot of discretion. They are allowed to prioritize their activities, so they can ignore the law being flagrantly broken in front of them without any consequences. As long as their supervisors are OK with the job they’re doing, there’s very little that can be done about them unless they break the law flagrantly enough that the DA feels compelled to prosecute.
lgerard
@Kay:
In 30 years of election work I only had one guy who attempted to challenge a voter. When I asked for his ID, he got all indignant, wanting to know why I wanted it, i explained that the board of Elections needed his contact information so they could inform him when the hearing where he would present his evidence would take place, he suddenly changed his mind, He just assumed he could randomly disqualify voters because.
That was the thinking behind many of the suburban recruiters the republicans brought to Detroit to “observe”as well. When they were claiming they couldn’t get close enough to the process to study the ballots they assumed that they could have some sort of up or down input on each ballot.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Kay: a sixteen year old girl was stabbed to death by her stalker, in my local high school about six years ago. The school had a resource officer. It made no difference. Kid used a steak knife he brought from home. Sandy Hook school had locked doors but apparently the staff knew Adam Lanza and opened the door. The resource officer at Stoneman high school/Parkland hid. The one at Uvalde was not at the school. Not sure whether having a cop at a school ever helps… the security guard off duty cop in Buffalo was a hero though…I don’t know. Semi auto guns and high capacity magazines need to be outlawed. Actual background checks, waiting periods and no online sales of weapons. Ammo purchase limits. Mandatory registration and training if you own any guns. Automatic confiscation for domestic violence.
Scout211
Deleted.
UncleEbeneezer
@Roger Moore: And our laws are written to protect police in almost every circumstance, so bringing charges against them is incredibly difficult. Even fairly blue states like CA have things like Police Officers Bill of Rights that makes holding them accountable a pipe-dream, most of the time. This along with the strength of police unions make it hard fire them, even when a police chief/mayor wants to.
Tazj
@RaflW: That statement is vile. I guess we can never expect the police to come clean then because the parents will never stop grieving. To suggest that parents will ever do that is so awful.
Of course, the police are implying that parents are too emotional and irrational now to understand the mistakes that were made.
debbie
@Leto:
Harrumph. I want my taxes back then.
Betty Cracker
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: No one opened the door for Lanza; he shot his way into Sandy Hook. Went through a window next to a locked security door, IIRC.
JWR
@lgerard:
That whole article is full of whacked conspiracy theories, about ballots secreted in in the middle of the night and how they’re going to righteously root out voter fraud from the inside and, it’s just too ridiculous. At “best” all they’re going to manage is slow the process to a crawl, if they’re allowed to do everything they say they’re going to do. It’s the old throw sh*t at the wall to see what throws the election strategery.
J R in WV
@UncleEbeneezer:
A good friend of ours visited the Alamo with her father, who was at the time a full-bird colonel in the Air Force, and in uniform. This means he was required to wear his uniform hat while outdoors, as in visiting the Alamo.
But a Texas Ranger on site to guard the holy Alamo (scene of a violent uprising against the government of Mexico, at the time the legitimate government of the Mexican state of Texas) ordered the Col. to remove his uniform hat to “show respect to the Alamo” regardless of his obligation to wear a uniform in accordance to military regs.
Obviously they left the Alamo unvisited due to the arrogance and ignorance of the Texas Ranger.
So your description of the Texas Rangers as enforcers of Jim Crow segregation and bigotry is absolutely no surprise to me at all.
Although I must say I have mostly been treated pretty well by most LEO staff I have encountered, with the bizarre exception of the Border Patrol, being an older bearded long haired white guy myself.
Steeplejack
@Ohio Mom:
Yeah, there seem to be a lot of cases where spell-check or voice-to-text just defaults to one of the options no matter what.
debbie
@Kattails:
I was sure that vet was going to come through the screen at some point.
I wish we could get the Senate to debate the meaning of “well-regulated militia” in the Second Amendment. It’s become so twisted and misunderstood.
J R in WV
@GoBlueInOak:
And you are a small pastry, kept in the pie safe, fool !!!
trollhattan
@Kay:
They’re not paying one bit of attention to the president when he notes a parent never stops grieving. A man who has lost two children knows something about this topic.
I suppose that means “Never, never sounds like the right time to conduct our review.”
jnfr
@greenergood:
It is unnerving, acutely so.
J R in WV
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
As a hobby target shooter and gun owner, I support all these improvements to our gun laws. IIRC the 2nd amendment starts out talking about “well regulated” — which the Republicans have ignored for a long time now.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Betty Cracker: you are most likely right. I stepped away from any news after Sandy Hook for a bit. I had to put the Cartoon Network on to get away from it… sorry for the bad info
lgerard
@JWR:
Well they won’t be able to do any of this stuff. First time poll workers will be drones who basically provide markers and direct people to the scanner. They are not going to have any decision making responsibilities. It is a routine job and a very long, long day.
The idea that they will be in contact with the outside world is very strange. i wouldn’t let any observer or worker use their cellphone in the voting area. I bounced a few observers for not following that instruction.
I recall Mitt Romney had some type of nationwide system for volunteer observers and a big data center in Boston to serve them on election day. It crashed 10 minutes after the polls opened and was never heard from again
Soprano2
@Kay: They have to be shitting us, because those families will NEVER STOP GRIEVING! The police are morons…..
RSA
@Steeplejack:
I think it’s at least partly the insane complexity of English spelling, pronunciation, and grammar. (As a side note, spelling bees are mostly though not solely an English language thing.) About “lead” there’s a natural analogy to “read”, spelled the same in present and past tense but pronounced differently. Ugh.
I recently discovered that “shrunk” (as in “Honey, I shrunk the kids”) is acceptable as the past tense of “shrink.” You know: drink/drank/drunk, sink/sank/sunk, shrink/shrunk/shrunk, think/thought/thought, blink/blinked/blinked…
Jay
So, still on super secret double probation, ( paid),
fighting depression,
brand new HR has the “case”, knows nothing, extension #412 goes to a “dead letter” box for the “old” HR AssMan,
gonna drink some more.
Anotherlurker
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: I’d also like to add that gun owners should be required to carry insurance on all their weapons.
Another Scott
@RSA: “Snuck” got me in English class in high school, while I was reading out loud something I wrote. I knew as soon as I said the word that it wasn’t going to end well.
;-)
English is a mean beasty!
Cheers,
Scott.
Paranoid Factoid
GOP got exactly what they wanted out of this crisis. Not only will nothing happen gun control wise, but like in Ohio they get to push laws to arm teachers – which will only add more guns to the school mix. Meaning, it will be even more dangerous for teachers and students because guns are dangerous duh.
This sells guns, a big plus for the NRA lobby. But it also creates more chaos. So it not only delegitimizes the safety and sanctity of public schools – big plus if you’re into privatization – but it also helps destabilize society as a whole.
GOP are a revolutionary movement. They don’t care about kids, they only care about permanent dictatorial power.
columbusqueen
@FridayNext: David Simon has always known where all the bodies are buried when it comes to big city corruption.
TriassicSands
Uvalde Police Motto:
To Protect and Serve — Ourselves
A friend sent me two photos of the Uvalde police. The first obscene photo was of a bunch of officers posing in their shiny new body armor. The second was of the Uvalde SWAT team, which had way more members than were shown in body armor photograph.
I imagine the police didn’t want to enter the school building if there was any chance they would scuff their spiffy body armor.
This mass shooting seemed to make it clear that the primary concern of the police was for their own safety. The children and teachers were on their own.
The whole department should be cited for cowardice.
Paul in KY
@Kay: They don’t think they did anything wrong. They made a tactical decision to let the shooter hopefully run out of ammo (from murdering the kids) and then they could move in.