Nashville police who took out a school shooter in minutes appeared to call out Uvalde’s officers, saying ‘we will never wait to make entry’ to ‘stop a threat’
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A Nashville police chief appeared to call out cops in Uvalde, Texas, as he praised his officers for quickly taking out a mass shooter at a Christian elementary school in the Tennessee city on Monday.
“As I said before, we will not wait,” Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters after the massacre at The Covenant School, where three 9-year-olds and three adult staffers were slain on Monday morning.
Drake added, “I was hoping this day would never ever come here in the city. But we will never wait to make entry and to go in and to stop a threat especially when it deals with our children.”
The police chief appeared to be referencing how police in the small Texas city of Uvalde handled the May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, which left 19 children and two teachers dead.
Texas authorities have faced immense backlash over their botched response to the shooting and for drastically changing their narrative about what happened before, during, and after the rampage.
In total, it took Uvalde authorities more than an hour to finally confront and shoot dead the 18-year-old gunman at Robb Elementary School.
In the aftermath of the shooting, a top Texas law enforcement official slammed the massacre as an “abject failure.”
Meanwhile, Nashville police on Tuesday released graphic body-camera footage showing how officers took just minutes to find and kill a 28-year-old shooter at The Covenant School.
Drake thanked the first responders on Monday, saying they “immediately went in and addressed the threat of someone that had multiple rounds of ammunition, prepared for a confrontation with law enforcement, prepared to do more harm than what was actually done and were able to stop the threat.”
The body-camera footage of the incident “stands in contrast” to the police response to the Uvalde shooting, retired New York Police Department sergeant Joseph Giacalone told Insider.
“Just watching [this] video alone is evidence enough that the cops were able to neutralize this person before they can do any more damage,” said Giacalone, a 20-year NYPD veteran and adjunct professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“They have been training and preparing for this, and it shows,” Giacalone said of the Nashville officers. “This is where lessons can be learned.”
The Nashville cops who entered the school worked “methodically” as they cleared rooms until they finally found and fatally shot the shooter, said Giacalone.
“They were making sure that they were not at risk of getting ambushed, so to speak, because if something happens to them, this whole situation only gets worse,” he said. “This stands in contrast to what we saw happen in Texas.”
Additionally, Giacalone commended Nashville police for their swift release of “timely” and seemingly “accurate” information, as well as body camera and surveillance footage related to Monday’s mass shooting.
“It’s a sort of textbook kind of response to a terrible situation,” Giacalone said, noting, “We saw what happened in Uvalde about how badly the information was fumbled.”