# 50 Years After the University of Texas Tower Shooting



## mariomike (29 Jul 2016)

August 1, 1966.

Out Of The Blue
50 Years After the UT Tower Shooting

A few excerpts I found of interest,

"Changes in Police Response: After the UT Tower Shooting
The attack on campus was unlike anything U.S. law enforcement had seen at the time. And because of this, protocol was forced to change.
That same decade, police departments started building special teams in reaction to race riots and mass shootings. Los Angeles was the first. They called it Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT.
An active shooter situation would become the problem of a tactical team or a SWAT team – people who are specifically trained and their primary job is to deal with those kind of situations.
But 30 years later, this backfired in a big way.
In 1999, two Colorado high school students killed 12 of their classmates and one teacher during a 50-minute shooting spree. Even though police showed up three minutes after shooting began, SWAT officers didn’t enter the school until nearly two hours later.
The protocol was for patrol to secure the scene, call in SWAT and then wait for these specialized officers to handle it. Victims might have been saved if police hadn’t depended on SWAT.
It’s still protocol for SWAT teams to be called. But because it’s now common for patrol officers to have active shooter training, they can act immediately."
http://towerhistory.org/


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