At the request of the Newtown Police Department, the chiefs association analyzed the police response and issued a nine-page report Thursday, a day after police released recordings of 911 calls from the morning of the shootings.
READ THE FULL REPORT HERE.
The chiefs report said the first Newtown officers were on the scene less than three minutes after the initial 911 call, which came from a woman inside the building.
The report said officers followed the department’s procedure in parking far enough away from the building to allow officers to survey the scene surrounding the school and react to incidents as necessary.
Almost six minutes lapsed between the first officers’ arrival and the time officers entered the building, but shooter Adam Lanza killed himself just more than a minute after the officers arrived, the report said.
The police, when they arrived at the school, were told that shots were heard at the front of the building, but they also heard reports of a person running along the exterior.
They had to take time to confront and handcuff an individual outside the school, later identified as a parent, before they could enter the building, which was 8 minutes and 38 seconds after they were dispatched.
“We concluded that the Newtown officers responded to the scene rapidly, positioned themselves appropriately, and followed their department policy. Since the shooter is believed to have committed suicide at 09:40:03 hours, Newtown officers were on the scene a total of 1 minute and 10 seconds before the shooter (Adam Lanza) committed suicide,” the report said.
The association said this timeframe “unfortunately ... was not enough time to assess the situation, confront the exterior threats, and tactically enter the locked building, and engage the shooter.”
The subcommittee of the association that did the analysis consisted of police chiefs with no connections to Newtown. It reviewed the audio recordings, officer statements, a timeline and Newtown police policies and also made a site visit.
A number of officers from Newtown entered the building 5 minutes and 57 seconds after the first unit arrived at the rear of the school and in less than 2 minutes were joined by state troopers.
“What entry teams discovered inside defies description,” the report said. As is well known, they encountered the 26 victims, 20 of them 6- and 7-year-old 1st-graders, as well as Lanza, who appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
The report said police “quickly triaged any victims they discovered,” but because emergency medical service personnel were not cleared to approach the building, one officer took a critically injured child and sprinted toward the EMS staging area at 09:56:16.
Adults and children found in the immediate vicinity of Lanza were then led out of the building, starting at 09:58:39 hours onward until it was emptied.
The report points out that since the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado in 1999, law enforcement’s policy of “contain and wait” outside a building where there has been a shooting is not sufficient. Numerous analyses have said that waiting for a tactical team just allows the shooter to kill more people.
The new goal is to confront the shooter as quickly as possible and the Newtown Police Department policy on “active shooter incidents,” adopted in 2003, uses this approach, according to the report.
The chiefs found that Newtown’s officers “navigated the chaos created in the first few minutes of such a call, managed to piece together what was occurring, but were unable to intervene before the shooter took his own life. While we cannot prove the shooter killed himself due to the police arrival, the history of like incidents suggests this may be the case.”
The chiefs offered their condolences to the family and friends of the victims and saluted the efforts of the first responders “who will relive this nightmare for the rest of their lives.”
(c) 2013 McClatchy News Service
