On February 14, 2018, 17 people were murdered and 17 others injured at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. As the shooting unfolded, sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson stood outside, pistol drawn and taking cover, but never entered the building to confront the killer. Condemned as the “Coward of Broward,” Peterson was put on trial for his inaction but eventually acquitted of charges that carried a maximum prison sentence of 96.5 years. As we approach the sixth anniversary of the Parkland shooting, and against the backdrop of the Justice Department’s recent finding of “significant failure” in the police response to 2022’s Uvalde school shooting, the journalist Jamie Thompson revisits these events in the March cover story of The Atlantic, “To Stop a Shooter,” which exposes the broad systemic failure by America’s police forces to properly equip and train their officers to confront mass shooters, and indicts a society in denial about what it would really take to stop such tragedies.
Thompson writes: “Over the past few years, the public has witnessed multiple distressing moments of baffling police behavior. All those cops standing, impotent, in the hallways of a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school while children were slaughtered. Cops killing Black motorists after traffic stops escalated needlessly. To policing experts, both problems fall under the same umbrella: improper use of force. Too little force, too much force—both lead to terrible outcomes.” As Thompson notes, we expect police officers in America to do too many different things; without specialization and necessary training, that can mean doing none of them well.
It’s been nearly 25 years since the massacre at Columbine, which should have produced a sea change in how we confront mass shooters. Yet at a moment when schools, malls, supermarkets, synagogues, and churches in America are apt to become war zones at any given moment, the country has yet to refashion its police forces to deal with mass shootings, Thompson reports. In too many cases, a lone officer like Peterson—poorly trained and poorly equipped—is all that stands between a contained incident and rampant carnage. As Sandy Wall, a retired SWAT officer from the Houston Police Department, tells Thompson: “If the public knew how poorly some police officers are trained and, more importantly, how poorly those undertrained officers perform—thank goodness crooks don’t know … The public expects a lot more out of the average cop than they are capable of delivering.”
Solo-officer entry in an active-shooter situation is now widely taught across the country. But based on her extensive reporting, which included dozens of interviews with officers and civilians who have been in active-shooter situations, as well as the most extensive access any journalist has been given to Scot Peterson, Thompson writes that solo-entry training sounds honorable but is inadequate––and allows politicians and police departments to avoid the larger issues that need to be addressed. She writes: “To be good at solo entry, officers need repeated practice entering rooms, hitting moving targets, and performing under extreme stress. SWAT officers, for instance, intentionally and repeatedly enter fear states, to become accustomed to the feeling of adrenaline surging through their body so they can keep their brain online when their heart is racing at 180 beats a minute.”
Thompson also explores the biological––possibly genetically determined––elements that may influence a given officer’s performance under fire. A growing pile of research supports the idea that “biological wiring goes a long way toward determining whether a cop facing an active-shooter situation will respond with heroism or cowardice.”
Thompson concludes: “When I talked with Chris Walsh, the author of Cowardice, a few months ago, he said that the country’s collective contempt for Peterson and the Uvalde officers is telling. In Uvalde, we watched dozens of cops standing around, waiting, doing nothing. We condemn them, and it gives us someone to blame for the failure to protect innocent children. But our judgment of those officers is ironic, Walsh told me. Because as a society, as citizens and legislators, we are those officers: equipped, well meaning—and paralyzed. Standing around, doing nothing, while children are slaughtered.”
“To Stop a Shooter” is published today at The Atlantic. Please reach out with any questions or requests.
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