This time, thankfully, the compliments are sincere. When public officials and news commentators praise the lightning response of police to the shootings at the Aurora theater, they mean every word.
They are awestruck, understandably, at the single-minded bravery of individual officers and how they reacted to the shocking conditions they encountered, as well as their willingness to go the extra mile for injured victims.
Contrast this outpouring of appreciation with the underlying unease toward the police response in the early days after Columbine. True, many politicians and commentators were reluctant at first to question police tactics and some publicly praised the rescue efforts. Emotions were raw, after all, and it seemed out of line to point fingers anywhere except at the killers. But I remember talking to more than one public official at the time who privately wondered, in so many words, “What the heck took them so long?”
What did? After all these years, we still don’t know the full answer.
Part of the contrast between today and 1999 simply has to do with different tactics. As The Post’s Kirk Mitchell explained in a recent report, “Before the April 20, 1999, Columbine attack, police departments across the country wouldn’t allow patrol officers to enter a building where there was an active shooter until SWAT team members, or at least back-up officers, arrived.”
“This law enforcement community and this larger community was shaped by Columbine in a way that I’m not sure people realize around the rest of the country,” Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates told NBC the other day.
Friday morning, needless to say, arriving officers plunged into the theater complex.
But even accounting for differing tactics, the response at Columbine was handled inexplicably, with progress painfully slow to unfold. Although police had many reasons to know with certainty that the library was the seat of horrific events — the gunmen themselves were spotted at the windows at one point — they took nearly four hours to get there.
In a 250,000-square-foot building, authorities secured the library last.
None of the reports and probes that followed the Columbine shootings — and most certainly not the May 2000 official report from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office — ever fully explained how it came to be that the library was the final destination, let alone how such a decision could be defended.
Nor is the police response the only significant contrast between Aurora and Columbine. For example, Chief Oates appears to be a straight shooter who inspires public confidence.
Jeffco sheriff’s officials, on the other hand, tried to cover up the extent to which they had bungled early warning signals regarding Eric Harris — how they’d even set aside an affidavit requesting a search warrant for the Harris residence in 1998.
Official misrepresentations became so numerous that the Rocky Mountain News, where I worked at the time, would eventually conclude in an editorial that “the Jeffco Sheriff’s Office can no longer be trusted to tell the truth.”
To be sure, the news media also seem to have suffered far fewer false starts on the Aurora story than with Columbine, where claims about the Trench Coat Mafia, the “goth” subculture and the targeting of jocks were among many specific reports eventually debunked. The most noteworthy bogus report to come out of Aurora so far was ABC’s Brian Ross’ speculation that James Holmes might be a Tea Party member — and even this boneheaded claim was never accepted as the truth and was soon retracted.
Sadly, however, the similarities between the shootings overwhelm these differences.
This year’s massacre, to begin with, is just as senseless and bewildering as the one 13 years ago.
Its victims are just as blameless, and their terror and pain no less harrowing.
And the alleged killer, like the pair who committed the crimes at Columbine, appears to have suppressed every shred of empathy with his fellow humans — discarding any remnant of a conscience — in his cold, implacable pursuit of what will be his fleeting fame.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP.
