Judging Freedom - Uvalde School Board fires Chief Pete Arredondo over Shooting

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Uvalde school board fires Chief Pete Arredondo over shooting response, after he calls vote a “public lynching” https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/... #uvalde #texas #TX #policeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, August 25th, 2022. It's about 2.45 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Late yesterday evening, Pete Arradondo was fired. If that name rings a bell, former Chief Pete Arredondo, there he is, the chief of the Uvalde, Texas School District Police Department, was fired by the Board of Education. The stated reasons were his incompetent handling of being in command of nearly 400 law enforcement personnel at the scene of the slaughter of 19 school children and two teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The chief has claimed he did not know he was in charge. The chief allegation against him is consistent with that because he says,

because the allegations against him were that he didn't take command of this incident and that he was trained to take command and told he was in charge. His lawyers say, you know, he had a contract with the school district and he's entitled to a hearing before he's fired. That may very well be the case under Texas law. There may very well be litigation over this and we may find out that higher ups were the fault of this. I don't know. It appears to those of us who watch this that the chief's behavior was utterly incompetent, profoundly incompetent. Just think of the strongest adverb you can to define incompetent, and it would apply to him. He allowed the slaughter to go on. He didn't take charge. He actually held back the 384, 96, I forget the number, slightly under 400 officers that were there. It wasn't until some of the

border patrol officers who are federal officers just pushed their way through and said, the heck with this, and blew away the killer. Of course, by that time, the children and the two teachers were dead. Some of them could have survived had they been brought to a hospital sooner. All of them might have lived had the chief and the Arredondo, or his name is Arredondo, forgive me, and the Uvalde School District Police Department done the right thing. This is one of the great tragedies of law enforcement in modern times in America. It also points out the need for personal weapons. The police can't always be there. And even when they are there, one killer, one killer against

nearly 400 cops and the cops did nothing. Even when they are there, they can't always do what needs to be done. If either of the school teachers had been armed, if the police had behaved properly, if a janitor had been armed, if a gym teacher had been armed, if the principal had been armed, we might not be talking about this, but we are talking about it. Texas is a shell carry case. You're over 18, buy a handgun, you get a permit to carry it as long as it's visible, except in a school. This school actually had a sign outside of it that said you're entering a gun-free school zone, whereas other school districts in Texas have signs outside of them that say, don't even think of bringing a gun here. We have armed guards

to protect our children. There it is. Staff members are armed and trained, and any attempt to harm children will be met with deadly force. That was not outside the Uvalde school district grammar school. That's outside other more rational school districts in the state of Texas. So I don't think we've heard the last of this. I am not a fan of Beto O'Rourke, but when he interrupted the press conference that was being given by the governor, by the state police officials, by the mayor, by the Board of Education,

everybody involved in Uvalde was there, and he said, you the Board of Education. Everybody involved in Uvalde was there, and he said, you failed to protect children. He was right. He was right. And I think we're going to find that there were more failures than just the chief. I'm not saying he's the scapegoat. His behavior was fill in the blank, the most incompetent imaginable. But I do believe there is more blame here, and we will soon find out at whom it will be aimed. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.