responses submitted by his attorney to the texas tribune. he said he didn t consider himself the person in charge and he had no radio communications during the massacre when he ran into the school. that mass shooting at robb elementary left 19 children and two teachers dead. cnn s camilla bernal is in uvalde with more on the chief s comments. and what he s saying is creating controversy. what did he say. w walk us through it. reporter: not only did he say he did not consider himself the incident commander, he assumed someone else had taken on that role. he also said that he assumed that he was a frontline responder. just like the other officers that were there. he also told the tribune that he did not issue any orders that day. although the tribune is also reporting that he did tell officers to go to other classrooms and start breaking windows in order to evacuate the children and the teachers. i want to read a direct quote
barksdale, a cnn law enforcement analyst and the former acting police commissioner for baltimore. so much to talk about, anthony. i just want to start with the comments that arredondo made to the texas tribune that he never considered himself the scene incident commander saying i wasn t in charge and he assumed another official had taken control of the larger response and he took on the role as a frontline responder and that makes me wonder well did he do his job as a frontline responder then. who do you make of these comments. does it make any sense to you? it makes no sense to me. his excuses are sickening. it makes no sense. so if he assumed that someone else was incident commander, and he wants to say that he went inside with the teams and he stepped up, then why didn t he give the green light to do other things to get into that room and eliminate the active shooter. so if he wants to well
you noted in some of your findings that urgent action was required in terms of the rates of homicide, saying enacting needed police reforms will be essential. specifically, what type of reforms do you think are essential here? i think two types are essential. one is to increase the acc accountability of police officers who ve been shown to engage in serious misconduct, accountability before their own agencies and the law. secondly is to move from police departments activities that are better handled by other agencies, being the frontline responder to drug overdose, for example, in most cases that s not, it seems to me, what we want our police departments to be addressing right now. other agencies trained in medical emergency services are better able to handle those calls. responding to the day-to-day problems of the homeless is
shooting. the day after the shooting we arrested five just in our local area. that s just here not the whole united states. let me ask you this. we had a test case of this, did we not at parkland. because there was an armed school research, resource officer, sor as we know, trained uniformed guard, who didn t do anything. and listen i don t want to attack this one person too much. i spoke to a u.s. retired u.s. general tonight who commanded troops in iraq and said that reaction to violence is not uncommon. i mean, if the armed trained uniformed security guard at parkland didn t do it, why would we expect teachers like sarah or others to be that frontline responder? i wouldn t expect sarah to be a frontline responder. i would expect, when you have people like the officer there, just imagine if we had some teachers in the school that were certified and trained, we would at least have somebody in that school with a weapon.