….YOU CANNOT ACHIEVE SUCCESS.<\/p>\n
This is the lesson that Steve McCraw, head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, needs to learn.\u00a0\u00a0 He made the statement that although the DPS “made some mistakes” the agency as a whole “did not fail” the parents of children killed at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde.\u00a0\u00a0 “Did not fail” the community.<\/p>\n
He’s wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 Every single law enforcement officer, and every agency from which that officer came, failed the children, the teachers, the parents, the community of Uvalde and in fact the entire state of Texas.\u00a0 They failed.\u00a0 Steve McCraw is failing now by not recognizing and admitting that failure.\u00a0\u00a0 McCraw says he won’t resign from his position because his department did not fail the community…and he would have resigned if his department had failed.\u00a0 This is also wrong.\u00a0 The person who can admit failure and commit to making changes so that failure does not occur again…should not resign.\u00a0 It’s the person who denies the failure, who excuses it, tries to explain it away as “just some mistakes” and by that denial and minimization ensures that he will NOT commit to making the radical changes needed to ensure that failure is not repeated who needs to resign or be removed by whoever has the authority to do so.<\/p>\n
It’s clear that McCraw is unable or unwilling or both to admit that DPS was wrong from the first minutes it reached the campus.\u00a0 They were.\u00a0 Every LEO there was wrong from the first minutes he or she reached the campus.\u00a0 They ignored the guiding principle taught in mass shooter situations: confront the shooter ASAP.\u00a0 You don’t wait for permission.\u00a0 You don’t wait for assistance.\u00a0 You don’t wait for a bigger caliber weapon, a combat vest, a shield.\u00a0 You don’t wait for “an expert negotiator”.\u00a0 You don’t wait to decide which person or agency should take the lead.\u00a0 You confront the shooter *at once*.\u00a0 That approach, and only that approach, saves lives.\u00a0 Yes, it is dangerous.\u00a0 Yes, at least one and possibly several LEOs are likely to be shot.\u00a0 But that’s the best–the only–workable approach that leaves the most innocents possible alive.\u00a0 Not doing that–not even *trying* to do that–defines FAILURE.<\/p>\n
If you don’t teach that, train for that, prepare for that, ensure that every single officer KNOWS that’s what’s demanded of him or her in a mass shooter situation, and as far as possible weed out those officers unwilling or unable to comply…you are training for FAILURE and not SUCCESS.\u00a0\u00a0 What is success in a mass shooter situation?\u00a0\u00a0 Every law enforcement officer that reaches the scene engages the shooter ASAP.\u00a0 Over and over if necessary.<\/p>\n
Admission of failure is order to achieve success is vital in many, many, MANY more situations than a mass shooter incident, including minor ones.\u00a0 I learned that lesson as a child from my engineer mother.\u00a0 If you pretend an airplane falling out of the sky is “just an accident”…you cannot make airplanes safer.\u00a0 If you treat using bad parts, or failing to follow manufacturing best practices “just a mistake” you cannot prevent more airplanes from falling out of the sky, more cars crashing, more medicines “accidentally” containing toxic materials, more ice cream making people sick.\u00a0 None of those things are “accidents” or “simple mistakes”–they are failures.\u00a0 They are caused by humans being ignorant, selfish, lazy, greedy, etc.<\/p>\n
When my mother was a liaison engineer for the Army Air Corps at Douglas Aircraft during WWII, the factory where she was in charge of “quality control” or adherence to technical instructions\u00a0 was building C-54s,\u00a0 a four-engine aircraft used primarily for cargo transportation and vital to moving people and equipment from place to place.\u00a0 And in one period, these aircraft had a bad habit of suddenly losing the nose of the aircraft, including the cockpit.\u00a0\u00a0 My mother figured out why, and stopped production to tear down a nearly finished airplane to examine the framing member she was certain was at fault.\u00a0\u00a0 Everybody was mad at her, of course.\u00a0 This blew their production schedule to smithereens.\u00a0 How dare she!!<\/p>\n
But she–the engineer–had figured out which part was faulty, and she knew those parts showed no sign of that fault when they arrived at the factory (she had examined them, and at every stage up to the point where they were covered up.)\u00a0 She looked at the nearly-completed plane with that part uncovered…and there it was.\u00a0 A crack in the framing member that, after the stresses of flight, fatigued to failure.\u00a0 The factory that made the part didn’t want to admit they had a problem.\u00a0 The factory she worked in didn’t want to admit it.\u00a0 She admitted it, pursued it, and saved lives by finding and reporting it.<\/p>\n
I grew up with “the first thing you do when you make a mistake is admit it.\u00a0 So you can fix it.\u00a0 So you can prevent it next time.”\u00a0 And from that, on a larger scale: If you fail, admit it..analyze the failure…and what it will take to prevent it.\u00a0\u00a0 This was pounded into my unwilling head from about age three (I kept leaving my glass so close to the edge of the table or counter that it kept getting knocked off, usually by me.)\u00a0 on up.\u00a0 Do I *always* admit and analyze all mistakes and failures?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I’m not perfect.\u00a0 I’m as capable of screwing up as anyone.\u00a0\u00a0 As capable of making excuses and defending myself as anyone…for awhile.\u00a0 But the rules “There are no accidents: they are all caused” and “If you can’t admit failure, you can’t achieve success” are engraved on my mind, heart, and bones.\u00a0 For someone in a position of public trust, such as the head of a major law enforcement agency, to call the slaughter in Uvalde “some mistakes were made” instead of “We failed” is unacceptable.<\/p>\n
If you don’t admit failure…you’re committing to repeating it.\u00a0\u00a0 That approach happens too often, and in both trivial\u00a0 and critically important situations.\u00a0 Steve McCraw must be brought to understand that failure, in this case, cost the lives of twenty-one innocent people, two teachers and nineteen students.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not admitting the failure ensures that similar failures will continue, using the same excuses, the same faulty reasoning.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
….YOU CANNOT ACHIEVE SUCCESS. This is the lesson that Steve McCraw, head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, needs to learn.\u00a0\u00a0 He made the statement that although the DPS “made some mistakes” the agency as a whole “did not fail” the parents of children killed at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde.\u00a0\u00a0 “Did not fail” Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1394"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1399,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394\/revisions\/1399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}