Columbine Shootings



Columbine Shootings

Introduction

The handling of situation by law enforcement officers at the Columbine Shootings has received criticism. When the shooting was in progress, rather than going inside the school t search for Dylan Klebold and Harris, the formed a boundary and remained there to wait for the assault to finish. During this time, fifteen people died which included the gunmen who were teenagers also committed suicide. The procedure currently for this type of shooting is that the duty of law enforcement to find, contain and confine the people that are shooting. This was not done in Columbine Shootings.

Discussion

Ignorance of Clues

The shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris worked for almost a year on their conspiracy to kill as many people as possible at the Columbine High School. The authorities were ignoring the clues which included a website that was developed by Harris which had threats of killing a classmate named Brooks Brown. Both Klebold and Harris accumulated arsenal large number of bombs and weapons before the assault in which twelve students and one teacher was killed (edition.cnn.com).

SWAT Teams

The siege that took place at Columbine High School showed the officers of police department a new type of domestic terror which has testes the limits of their tactics and training. The SWAT teams were not trained for setting bombs and killing people indiscriminately. The SWAT teams were mainly used for hostage and drug raid situations despite of it being an acronym for special weapons and tactics.

During the Columbine Shooting, SWAT team followed the standard procedures in which they moved very carefully which seemed very slow on line television. This resulted in the criticism that the team should have saved more lives by moving quickly.

This contention has been greatly disputed by Colorado Police. Some of these teams had altered their planning and the students having weaponry were considered to be a more intense threat as compared to the outside terrorist. According to the Colorado police, the confusion at the scene due to water from sprinklers, bombs, gunfire, wounded victims, students screaming and going off of fire alarms, the police officers that reached their at first weren't able to decide immediately the way they should proceed (Egan, 1999).

These police officers were not trained for what happened at Columbine High School. Two of the police officers had exchanged fire with one of the gunmen outside the school door and then they ...