Officers who have not worked together, he said, cannot anticipate each other's moves or communicate with practiced hand signals and gestures. But police commander Joe Pelle, who was at Columbine as head of the Boulder SWAT team, argues that textbook rules did not apply. You're basically deciding somebody on your team is likely to get shot. In most situations you wouldn't do that. However, when you have evil people killing children, all the other stuff goes out the window.
Somebody has to get in there and stop it.
That was Manwaring's goal. Once inside the building, the officers found themselves in an unimaginable environment blaring fire alarms, glaring security strobe lights, halls filled with water from the sprinkler system. We have no idea where the shooters are. Every time we rounded a corner, we didn't know whether it was a good guy or a bad guy. . . . I didn't know how sophisticated they were.