Dec. 29, 2022 “It didn’t stop me or hold me back. … I was more motivated to go (to the academy),” said one of Uvalde’s 30 police cadets about the shadow cast by May’s mass school shooting.
By Claire Bryan Source Houston Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
UVALDE, TX—It’s a smaller than average class, but the 30 cadets who graduated Dec. 17 from Southwest Texas Junior College’s law enforcement academy are the program’s first since the failed police response at Robb Elementary, four miles away.
And they believe they have something to prove.
The outrage in their community — and nationwide — over the spectacle of hundreds of officers waiting 77 minutes to confront the gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers on May 24 has spurred them to be better professionals and better leaders, cadets said.
Completing the academy qualified them to take the state’s peace officer certification exam and many are heading straight into a regional job market that needs them. In Uvalde itself, they see a long path to rebuilding community trust but are not intimidated by it.
“I know there were over 300 (officers) out there, but I wanted to be one of those people, to be out there to help them,” said one of the graduates, Samantha Diaz, 33, a Uvalde Police Department dispatcher who was working on May 24. “I wish I was already certified at that point, to be out there and do what I needed to do.”
When she thinks about that day, tears stream down Diaz’s face. She struggles to talk about it. For months, her job has required her to field countless phone calls from enraged people all over the country. The experience has only sharpened her goal of becoming a peace officer, which she has had since she was a young child.
“It didn’t scare me. It didn’t stop me or hold me back or give me second thoughts,” Diaz said. “I was more motivated to go (to the academy).”
The 720 hours of training at the community college starts every August and ends in December. The academy started in 1978 and now has four instructors. Many officers in the Uvalde Police Department and other agencies — including many who were at Robb on May 24 — attended it.
This year, the program added Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT), the nationally recognized gold standard for teaching how to deal with an active shooter. More changes might come once multiple ongoing investigations are finished, said Johnny Field, the academy’s coordinator and the Pct. 1 Uvalde County constable.
“I’m eager to find out what we did wrong,” Field said. “Not just law enforcement but also systematic wrongs. … So, we can fix it and teach these cadets what not to do. That is the only way we learn.”
“This is a career I signed up for, this is a profession I chose, and I want to figure this out,” Field said when asked if he had thought about quitting law enforcement.
Some parents and local activists have asked that Field and others step down. The community college official who Field reported to, Uvalde school board member J.J. Suarez, was removed from his oversight of the academy after criticism of Suarez’s own role at Robb on May 24.
“We need to bridge that gap again, between the community and law enforcement, especially here locally,” Field said. “Public trust is down, obviously. We just need to work a day at a time and try to rebuild that trust.”
He hopes to bring more advanced levels of ALERRT training to the academy in the future.
Right now, the program includes discussion about the Columbine High School shooting near Denver and the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, but at some point, it might also incorporate the shooting at Robb as a teachable example, Field said, because “there is stuff that happened here that was unique that we haven’t encountered before.”
Texas requires school police to take active shooter training and the ALERRT basic version qualifies for that. Until this year, academy students wouldn’t receive anything like it until they were hired by a police agency or department — if ever.
Personnel at understaffed departments are less able to take advantage of training opportunities, Field said. It’s why he had not been through ALERRT training himself when he arrived at Robb Elementary on May 24, despite working in law enforcement for 20 years. Nor had Emmanuel Zamora and Beco Diaz, two other academy instructors who were at Robb.
A little more than a week after the cadets received it, Field and Zamora took the training.
“It should’ve been mandated a long time ago,” Diaz said. “It shouldn’t have come to the point that an influx of horrible things have passed for it to be brought up.”
The hands-on training lasted two days. Over and over, cadets interviewed called it an “eye opener.”
“I was scared to death, even with the dummy rounds,” recalled Sean Rodriguez, 22. “My heart was racing, adrenaline kicked in. It’s crazy how even through the simulation you can feel all of that.”
“You have to fight your own instincts, because your mind tells you there is danger, try to stay away,” he said. “You have to fight that and decide to run towards the danger.”
Rodriguez sometimes gets upset thinking of how officers did the opposite at Robb — ordered to wait in a corridor by leaders in a position to know that some of the gunman’s victims in a pair of classrooms were still alive.
“That is the whole reason I am doing this,” he said. “It takes just one person to change things.”
But Rodriguez said he also learned that every police response takes planning and will be second-guessed.
“I had to remind myself that I wasn’t there, and different things go through your mind during the crisis,” he said. “If they had just rushed in and (went) shooting everywhere with no regard to human life, then they would’ve gotten people saying, ‘Oh, why did you respond so quick, why didn’t you take time to think?’
“There’s no perfect timeline,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez now has been through the academy twice. After his first try, he took state exam, but the testing date was May 24. He didn’t do well, knowing something was going very wrong at Robb.
This fall, the shooting at Robb came up a lot, cadets said, and many were quick to voice their opinions about what they would have done if they had been there.
But as they absorbed the training, several said, they were less sure of how they would have acted.
“You can train and train and train on as much as you can, but actually getting there, presented by the problem, that is when you have to decide,” said Auzshia Clevenger, 21, who has wanted to be a police officer since high school. “Are you going to fight? Or are you going to run? It is hard to make that decision as a human who is putting their life on the line. But going into this career, that is what you have to expect. That is what you have to do.”
“It takes a lot of bravery to walk in there and get that done,” Clevenger said.
There’s a mosaic of factors officers have to consider when they arrive on scene — “the people around us, think of what kind of environment we are in, who is around,” Diaz said. “If I start shooting, what if I accidentally shoot someone? Then that could be a criminal charge on you.”
She still breaks down some days — she loves the community but has to relive May 24 every time news media report new aspects of the police response and the calls begin again at the office.
“I don’t want them to lose the trust and faith in its entirety because there are still some of us still here that are willing to try,” Diaz said
Field said instructors don’t shy away from talking about May 24 when students ask about it. He has a lot of questions of his own.
“If someone brings up a conversation (about Robb), there isn’t any tension involved. This is something that is going to be talked about for years to come,” Field said. “Hopefully we are going to get to a point where we have all the facts from every angle, every perspective and we can truly learn what went wrong, what went right, what do we need to change.”