Can you give me the Clif Bar Notes?
Basically slow-ass or no-ass response times. Hard to say at this point how much the “resource officer” (school security guard) on site added to the confusion by what he did or didn’t communicate to the other officers, but clearly there was a bit of “Wait outside because nobody knows WTF is happening” going on there. The sheriff in this case seems to be IMO overly reluctant to call any fault other than on the resource officer until the investigation is complete. It’s pretty clear the initial officers on the scene weren’t following any sort of plan, and that’s a problem. Whether anyone other than the resource officer had the capability to actually reduce the fatalities is unknown and probably unlikely, but slow response times even beyond the point at which they could have prevented anything really do not help paint a picture of a healthy law enforcement presence.
As for the red flag angle, the police are very limited in what they can do when no crime has actually been committed, and the Sheriff manages to explain that really quite badly. “Imminent” is a high legal hurdle – involuntary commitment is probably the only way the existing legal system could have realistically stopped this, and while I’d be easily persuaded that Nazism alone is a dangerous mental illness, I’m not the one that would need to be convinced for involuntary commitment to work (this is also a high legal hurdle). I don’t know if the existing legal system could have stopped this particular attack, but it’s very clear that it did not. Which is why people are so interested in changing laws as a result.
Agree on your impressions. The slow response times might have mattered if not for stopping the shooter then in getting medical care to the people who needed it (as Tapper suggested). Along with other questions/answers, it helped paint a picture of a police department that is not engaged and proactive as it should be.
The Sheriff did make a mess of trying to explain the legal standard. Still “imminent” action is not necessarily required. There is a Florida statute (that the sheriff seems to have had in mind) that states:
“Credible threat” means a verbal or nonverbal threat, or a combination of the two, including threats delivered by electronic communication or implied by a pattern of conduct, which places the person who is the target of the threat in reasonable fear for his or her safety or the safety of his or her family members or individuals closely associated with the person, and which is made with the apparent ability to carry out the threat to cause such harm. It is not necessary to prove that the person making the threat had the intent to actually carry out the threat. The present incarceration of the person making the threat is not a bar to prosecution under this section.