Media Today

[Rick Plant]

Texas TV station cuts away from Jimmy Kimmel's emotional monologue on school shooting -- but why?

A Dallas/Fort Worth television station cut away from Jimmy Kimmel's emotional monologue about the Robb Elementary school massacre that left 19 children and two adults dead.

ABC affiliate WFAA-TV interrupted the six-minute, comedy-free monologue with a string of commercials, starting with an in-house news spot, before airing the end of Kimmel's opener, which he used for a three-minute ad for the gun violence prevention organization Everytown.org, reported the Star-Telegram.

“To my friends in Dallas who are asking: I do not know whether our @ABCNetwork affiliate @wfaa cut away from my monologue tonight intentionally or inadvertently but I will find out,” Kimmel tweeted. “In the meantime, here’s what you didn’t get to see.”

Watch here:

A source at the TV station said the commercials were aired and part of the monologue was cut because the 10 p.m. newscast ran long, and an interview with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane was also chopped up into segments that aired between commercial breaks.

Kimmel called out elected officials, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Cornyn (R-TX), and urged them to take action to prevent another mass shooting.

“Once again we grieve for the little boys and girls,” Kimmel said, fighting back tears. “Whose lives have been ended and whose families have been destroyed. While our leaders on the right, the Americans in Congress and at Fox News and these other outlets warn us not to politicize this. They immediately criticize our president for even speaking about doing something to stop it, because they don’t want to speak about it because they know what they’ve done and they know what they haven’t done, and they know it’s indefensible, so they’d rather sweep this under the rug."

“The reason they call them common-sense gun laws is because that’s what they are,” he added. “Eighty-nine percent of Americans want background checks before a gun can be purchased, which is the very least we can do.”

https://www.star-telegram.com/entertainment/arts-culture/article261811562.html

[Rick Plant]

Watch: Shocking timeline of changing claims from Texas law enforcement

Ali Velshi held up a dark front page of the Uvalde Leader-News as he began anchoring MSNBC "Prime" from Texas on the dramatically shifting official accounts of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday.

"In the aftermath of any horrific event, information is spotty. our understanding of what happens evolves over time, but even by those standards of breaking, and developing news, the inability of officials to give a consistent, and coherent account of a key portion of the timeline of attack is, frankly, confounding," Velshi reported.

He noted multiple official statements on whether an armed school resource officer engaged the gunman. And played two videos purported to show officers clashing with parents outside the school.

Velshi explained why examining law enforcement's response is important.

"Look, the point in raising all these questions about the law enforcement response is certainly not to pick on officers who may well have been very brave and doing their best in an unbelievably stressful and highly threatening situation," he said.

"But, law enforcement — more and more law enforcement — is really the only response to school shootings that have been proposed or allowed by the Republican officials who run the state of Texas," he noted. "After the Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas in 2018, the state passed multiple bills to, 'harden schools'. The Uvalde school district doubled its security budget, it created its own police force and threat assessment teams at each school. "

If that is the only answer that Texas has to the scourge of school shootings, — not to prevent them, but to guard and respond to schools better when they happen — well, they've got to show that plan works," Velshi said. "And tonight the people of Uvalde have a lot of questions about how well it worked."

Watch the clip below:

[Rick Plant]

Authorities took an hour to stop Uvalde gunman, raising questions about law enforcement response



A gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at a South Texas elementary school walked unopposed onto school grounds, state law enforcement officials said Thursday — and once he was inside, it took police an hour to stop him.
In the days after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety said the shooter encountered a police officer employed by the school district before charging through a back door — and gave conflicting accounts about whether the officer fired at the gunman.

Agency officials now say there was no police officer on campus when the shooter first arrived — but did not explain why they first believed there was.

The gunman crashed a truck in a ditch near the school at 11:28 a.m., fired at two passersby on the street, then entered the school 12 minutes later through a back door before police arrived, DPS officials said Thursday.

“He was not confronted by anybody,” Victor Escalon, a DPS official, said during a press conference Thursday. The agency is leading the investigation into the shooting along with Uvalde police.

The law enforcement response to the active shooter call has drawn mounting scrutiny in the days since the massacre. State law enforcement officials have given vague and conflicting answers on what exactly happened after the gunman arrived at the school, and parents have criticized police for not acting quickly enough to stop the shooter.

At a Wednesday press conference in Uvalde, DPS Director Steve McCraw said that a school police officer “engaged” with the gunman before he entered the school but did not exchange gunfire with the gunman. Other DPS officials were quoted in media reports saying there was an exchange of gunfire at that moment.

After a chaotic and confusing press conference Thursday in 90-degree heat, the state’s top law enforcement agency still has not answered key questions, including why it took so long for officers to stop the 18-year-old gunman and why an entrance to the school appeared to be unlocked, allowing him to enter the building in the middle of the school day.

Escalon declined to answer several questions from reporters and to clarify discrepancies in previous statements by agency officials, saying authorities “will circle back.”

He offered new details about the timeline of the law enforcement response Thursday, saying local police officers were the first to arrive at the school — about four minutes after the gunman entered — but had to fall back after taking gunfire. Officers tried to negotiate with the shooter, he said, but the man “did not respond.”

Escalon said most of the gunfire from the shooter occurred when he first entered the school but added that he continued to fire shots — some at police — as officers attempted to make contact.

It took officers an hour to kill the gunman once he was inside as law enforcement officers called "everyone that's in the area" to help, then waited for "specialty equipment" and body armor and organized a tactical team to reenter the school, Escalon said.

Asked whether officers should have gone in sooner, Escalon said, “That’s a tough question. … I don’t have enough information to answer that question yet.”

Uvalde police received the first call about the gunman around 11:20 a.m., when his grandmother called 911 after he shot her in the face at their home about two minutes from the school. The gunman then fled in her pickup truck, crashing it in a nearby ditch — prompting a 911 call from a neighbor, a DPS spokesperson told The Washington Post.

At 1:06 p.m. Tuesday, the Uvalde Police Department posted on its Facebook page that the shooter was in police custody. Authorities later reported that the shooter was shot to death by a Border Patrol agent who responded to the scene.

“The bottom line is that law enforcement was there, they did engage immediately, they did contain him in the classroom,” McCraw said at the Wednesday press conference. At the same press conference, Gov. Greg Abbott praised the officers at the scene and said “it could have been worse” without their intervention.

Videos have circulated on social media showing frustrated parents confronting police officers outside the school while the gunman was inside — and debating whether to charge into the school themselves.

Onlookers shouted, “Go in there! Go in there!” at officers outside of the school after the attack began, but officers did not, according to a resident who spoke with The Associated Press. At one point, federal marshals handcuffed a parent who encouraged officers to enter the premises, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Amid the confusion, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro called on the FBI on Thursday to “use their maximum authority to investigate and provide a full report on the timeline, the law enforcement response and how 21 Texans were killed.”

Kenneth Trump, a Cleveland-based school safety consultant, said Thursday’s press conference left key questions unanswered — starting with why a school door may have been left unlocked.

Trump said the long gap between the time police arrived on the scene and the time the gunman was taken down is concerning, but there are still lots of unknowns, including how equipped local law enforcement was to handle a gunman at a school.

“The frustration for parents is real when they hear not only that [police] got in but they couldn’t breach — or did not breach — that classroom,” he said. “The question is not only did they have the adequate manpower, but did they have the equipment to handle that and did they have prior training, joint partnership, exercises?”

Trump said that after the mass shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School in 1999 — when two students fatally shot 12 classmates and a teacher and injured 21 others before killing themselves — law enforcement has moved away from the tactics employed at the time of waiting and setting a perimeter during an active shooter situation.

Instead, police are now trained to immediately enter and try to subdue the shooter, even if they’re alone on the scene, he said.

“Columbine changed the entire landscape of enforcement tactical response to active shooters because it became clear that these incidents unfold in minutes,” he said. “You have mass loss of life, the longer you go on.”

Former Austin and Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo tweeted Thursday, “We don’t have all of the particulars right now, but when gunfire is ringing out with, police are trained, expected, and required to engage, engage, engage. This is a moral and ethical obligation.”

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/26/uvalde-school-shooting-police-response/


‘Unfathomable’: NBC reporter breaks down the 2 key gaps in Uvalde police response



MSNBC's "Deadline: White House" on Friday covered shocking reporting on failures by law enforcement responding to the Uvalde mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.

Two days after the massacre, Victor Escalon, the regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, refused to answer questions about the long gap in the shooting timeline.

For analysis, MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace interviewed NBC News reporter Ken Dilanian about the two gaps in time.

"The ten-minute gap raises the question of why those police didn't arrive sooner when the station where [reporter Kerry Sanders] is standing is about a mile from the school," Dilanian said. "So there's a huge question there."

He said there were "so many questions" about the second, 60-minute gap.

"Where was that [Uvalde Police Department] S.W.A.T. team in the hour while they were waiting for the Border Patrol tactical team to come?" he asked. "It's really just unfathomable, and law enforcement officials who are watching this across the country, as Tom Winter said earlier on the air, are aghast at what happened here."

Wallace then read breaking news on how law enforcement may have been spending its time during the hour-gap, with the Wall Street Journal reporting a woman claims she was detained by a U.S. marshal.

"Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, said that she was one of numerous parents who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school. After a few minutes, she said, federal marshals approached her and put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation," the newspaper reported. "Ms. Gomez convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free. Around her, the scene was frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them."

Former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi blasted the changing stories from law enforcement, who also initially claimed the gunman had been engaged by an armed school resource officer, which authorities have admitted was a lie.

"The facts are so in conflict with each other right now that the only thing I can tell you with certainty is that the communications coming out of law enforcement right now are horribly broken. We're all familiar with the physician's Hippocratic Oath, do no harm. That press conference today by that regional DPS director did harm."

He noted we don't even know for sure which federal agency's tactical team reported.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Authorities investigating if retired federal agent knew of Buffalo mass shooting plans in advance



Law enforcement officers are investigating whether a retired federal agent had about 30 minutes advance notice of a white supremacist's plans to murder Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, two law enforcement officials told The Buffalo News.

Authorities believe the former agent – believed to be from Texas – was one of at least six individuals who regularly communicated with accused gunman Payton Gendron in an online chat room where racist hatred was discussed, the two officials said.

The two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the investigation stated these individuals were invited by Gendron to read about his mass shooting plans and the target location about 30 minutes before Gendron killed 10 people at Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue on May 14.

The News could not determine if the retired agent accepted the invitation.

“These were like-minded people who used this chat group to talk about their shared interests in racial hatred, replacement theory and hatred of anyone who is Jewish, a person of color or not of European ancestry,” said one of the two law enforcement officials with close knowledge of the investigation. “What is especially upsetting is that these six people received advanced notice of the Buffalo shooting, about 30 minutes before it happened.

“The FBI has verified that none of these people called law enforcement to warn them about the shooting. The FBI database shows no advance tips from anyone that this shooting was about to happen.”

Agents from the FBI are in the process of tracking down and interviewing the six people, including the retired agent, and attempting to determine if any of them should be charged as accomplices, the two sources with close knowledge of the probe told The Buffalo News.

The two sources did not identify the agent by name and could not confirm what federal agency he worked for.

The Buffalo FBI Office declined to comment on the investigation. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Buffalo declined through a spokeswoman to comment.

Buffalo civil rights attorney John V. Elmore said it will be outrageous if it turns out that a former law enforcement officer had advance notice of the shooting and did nothing to prevent it.

“If he had advance notice, he had a moral obligation to get on the phone and try to notify someone about it,” said Elmore, who represents the family of Andre Mackniel, who was shot dead when he went to Tops to buy a birthday cake for his 3-year-old son.

Attorney Terrence M. Connors, who is representing several families who lost loved ones in the shooting, said: “As outrageous as this may sound, based upon what we are finding in our investigation, it is not surprising.” He declined to reveal the evidence his law firm has collected.

The New York Times reported May 17 that Gendron invited a small group of people into a private chat room on the messaging platform Discord to review his plan about 30 minutes before the massacre at Tops. The Washington Post reported two days later that 15 people accepted Gendron's invitation into the Discord chat room and were able to review his plan and watch his live stream video as he committed the killings.

Federal authorities are investigating if the retired agent provided information to Gendron before he went on his shooting spree, the two law enforcement officials told The News.

In addition to law enforcement sources, two other individuals with knowledge of the mass shooting investigation have also confirmed that federal authorities are looking into the former agent’s relationship to the shooter.

The Sandman

FBI agents are also trying to determine the identity of an individual Gendron calls “Sandman,” and “Saint Sandman” in his lengthy social media diary that appeared on Discord 30 minutes before the attack, the sources said.

In the diary, Gendron indicates Sandman counseled him on manufacturers of AR-15 semi-automatic rifles and their quality. The shooter purchased and allegedly used that type of assault rifle in the rampage, which local authorities have said was fueled by his racial hatred.

In the document Gendron posted on Discord just prior to the shooting, he references Sandman three times.

In a passage dated May 2, he quoted Saint Sandman as saying: "When the time finally comes to deal decisively with a whole host of society's problems, and not go to prison for it, you'll know. Just be ready. You have spent your entire life, from the day you were born, right up to this very moment, reading this sentence, coming to where you are right now. Look around you. Are you content with where you are right now? Are you where you want to be? If so, continue to march. If not, what are you going to do? What's your plan? Get and keep your mind, body, and spirit right. Pray. Lift. Run. Read. Shoot. And teach your kids to do those things.”

A third law enforcement source told The News they are aware of Gendron’s writings involving the quality of different rifles. The shooter ended up using a Bushmaster X-15, a version of the AR-15 rifle, police have reported.

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/authorities-investigating-if-retired-federal-agent-knew-of-buffalo-mass-shooting-plans-in-advance/article_bd408f18-dd39-11ec-be53-df8fdd095d6f.html

[Rick Plant]

‘Font of misinformation’: Reporter explains ‘major discrepancies’ in Texas police account of Uvalde shooting



MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Friday examined the "major discrepancies" in the police account of the roughly one hour that a teenage gunman spent at the Texas elementary school where he killed at least 19 children and two teachers.

The Texas Department of Public Safety defended the response by Uvalde police, but "Morning Joe" co-host Willie Geist said the changing narrative of what happened and how officers reacted was jaw-dropping, and he asked NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian to explain what was so troubling about the law enforcement account.

"It's really astonishing," Dilanian said. "Let's remember, the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is conducting the briefings, they did not respond to this incident. Their whole job here was to investigate and find out what happened and tell the public. They've really been a font of misinformation, including from the head of the agency, who sat next to the governor of the state and told the world in a very confident voice that there was a school resource officer who encountered the subject as he came into the school. Then yesterday, we learned that that person didn't exist. There was no such school resource officer."

"Then we learn other, new information, that the shooter actually exited his grandmother's truck, which he crashed outside the school, then fired shots at onlookers across the street, and then essentially was lingering outside the school for 12 minutes, firing shots, before he entered through an unlocked door, also new information, unimpeded, unobstructed, nobody confronted him," Dilanian continued. "Then we learned in this new -- and, again, all this information is coming from the same agency that has provided misinformation. We should take it all with a grain of salt. But according to the latest account, some local police officers, Uvalde police officers, immediately rushed in, which is what the doctrine of mass shooting says they should do. They were met with a hail of gunfire from the 18-year-old with an assault rifle, AR-15, a weapon of war. They were armed, presumably, with handguns. A couple were shot and wounded, the police are saying."

"Victor Escalon said they made entry, didn't make entry, retreated," Dilanian added. "Bottom line, they were out-gunned, treated, then we have this mystery. We have this decision by the police to wait 60 minutes for a Border Patrol tactical team. There's a lot we don't know and don't understand about that, so we should be a little careful. There were police inside the school, we were told, evacuating children, in other parts of the school. But the account is, somehow, the gunman had barricaded himself. They use the word 'barricade.' It was two adjoining classrooms."

"Now we're learning ... that dead children were found in four separate classrooms," he said. "That's a thing we don't understand but, as you know, the doctrine for police response to mass shootings really changed after Columbine. The rule now is go in with whatever force you can. This is a policy from the Texas Police Chief Association, a manual says the first two to four officers should form a team and immediately enter the building. That's what they did initially. Then, for whatever reason, they didn't follow up with that. They waited for essentially federal agents, a group of Border Patrol and other police who formed a team, a stack as they put it, went in with a ballistic shield in front, took fire from the shooter -- incredible act of bravery -- and killed the shooter. There were local police officers involved in that, we're told. These videos we're seeing and the accounts of parents screaming for the police to go in while they were standing outside, that has to be explained. There is just no good explanation for why they waited 60 minutes when the doctrine calls for them to go in while they were standing outside, that has to be explained. There is just no good explanation for why they waited 60 minutes when the doctrine calls for them to go in immediately."

Watch the video below:

[Rick Plant]

Watch: Former FBI official baffled that school police 'chief' was in charge in Uvalde



Former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi voiced his disbelief on MSNBC that Uvalde Independent Schools Chief of Police Pete Arredondo was the on-scene commander who bungled the response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday.

Figluizzi was interviewed by MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace after more stunning revelations about law enforcement's response to the shooting.

"I can't make sense of this in any way, shape or form," Figliuzzi said. "It goes against all of our training, all of our instincts. I was hoping — and I have to tell you and maybe people will accuse me of a law enforcement bias and I was hoping that there was something that would show us that there were legitimate reasons for what happened, but there are none."

"This boils down to a decision by an on-scene commander, and I want to talk about that also because the on-scene commander here was allegedly the ISD, the school chief of police. Let's put this in perspective," he said. "He or she commands six officers total. Period. That's it."

"That's really not a chief, that's maybe a squad supervisor in most other departments, and yet in a mass casualty active shooter shooter event, he was the on-scene commander and i have a litany of things that could be done better and studied by every chief of police in every city in America right now."

"Really? You're going to put the ISD chief in charge? Really, of a mass casualty active shooter? Is that the best qualified person? Does he have tactical training? Does he have extensive command experience and training? I don't know, but maybe the county sheriff and maybe the local chief of police, I don't know, but this obviously went horribly wrong."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

SF Giants manager won’t take the field for national anthem out of shame for America



The manager of the San Francisco Giants announced on Friday his deep disappointment in America.

"Moving forward, Kapler told reporters on Friday that he doesn't plan on taking the field for the national anthem 'until I feel better about the direction of our country' and that he needs more time to consider specific actions he might suggest be taken to prevent more tragedies of this type, such as stronger gun control laws," ABC 7 reported.

The Giants were on the road in Cincinnati for a Friday evening game, which was delayed due to rain.

"When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the pledge of allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn’t. I don’t believe it is representing us well right now," he wrote on his blog.

"We elect our politicians to represent our interests. Immediately following this shooting, we were told we needed locked doors and armed teachers. We were given thoughts and prayers," he wrote.

"I’m often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents. We stand in honor of a country where we elect representatives to serve us, to thoughtfully consider and enact legislation that protects the interests of all the people in this country and to move this country forward towards the vision of the “shining city on the hill.” But instead, we thoughtlessly link our moment of silence and grief with the equally thoughtless display of celebration for a country that refuses to take up the concept of controlling the sale of weapons used nearly exclusively for the mass slaughter of human beings. We have our moment (over and over), and then we move on without demanding real change from the people we empower to make these changes," he explained.

He said protest is the correct response.

"I wish I hadn’t let my discomfort compromise my integrity. I wish that I could have demonstrated what I learned from my dad, that when you’re dissatisfied with your country, you let it be known through protest. The home of the brave should encourage this," he wrote.

SF Giants on NBCS @NBCSGiants

“I don’t plan on coming out for the anthem going forward until I feel better about the direction of our country” – Gabe Kapler

Watch: https://twitter.com/i/status/1530305203223904258