The official response to the mass shooting at an Uvalde elementary school — a response already marred by shifting narratives, finger-pointing and a general lack of timely and accurate information — took a further turn toward dysfunction on Tuesday.
The Texas Department of Public Safety said Uvalde school district’s police chief Pete Arredondo, who made the decision to wait for more resources rather than confront the gunman sooner, has stopped cooperating with state investigators and had not responded to requests for information for over two days. Arredondo contests the claim.
And the agency walked back an assertion that a teacher at Robb Elementary School propped open a back door prior to the shooting, allowing the gunman to enter and kill 19 students and two teachers. Earlier Tuesday the teacher’s lawyer had pushed back on the state’s account.
Texas Rangers investigating the response to the shooting want to continue talking to Arredondo, but he hasn’t answered a request made two days ago for a follow-up interview, according to two DPS spokespeople. The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s police department and the Uvalde Police Department have otherwise been cooperating with the Rangers’ investigation, DPS spokesperson Travis Considine said.
Arredondo did not return a call requesting comment. He told CNN in a brief interview that he is speaking “every day” with DPS investigators but declined to further discuss the shooting.
“I’ve been on the phone with them every day,” Arredondo said.
Amid the turmoil, Texas’ largest police union — the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, or CLEAT — urged its members Tuesday in a statement to “cooperate fully” with investigations into the police response to the Uvalde massacre — though they didn’t name Arredondo.
Both the police chief and the school teacher had been implicated by DPS officials as, in effect, having failed at their jobs. The change in narrative is likely to deepen the mistrust surrounding the investigation. Already, as in other mass shootings, conspiracy theories and misinformation have begun to proliferate online.
While the U.S. Department of Justice has agreed to review the response to the mass shooting, the ultimate responsibility for carrying out a credible, thorough and transparent investigation rests with the state — and so far, state officials have not offered much confidence in their abilities to carry out such a probe.
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CLEAT, the police union, blamed state officials Tuesday for “a great deal of false and misleading information in the aftermath of this tragedy,” some of which “came from the very highest levels of government and law enforcement.”
“Sources that Texans once saw as iron-clad and completely reliable have now been proven false,” the union said in a statement.
Not much confidence indeed. It’s one thing for there to have been confusion and conflicting or missing information in the immediate aftermath of the murders. We’re more than a week out now, and it’s hard to understand why DPS and the locals aren’t on the same page. If they are unable to communicate or don’t trust each other, it speaks poorly of them all.
And where is Greg Abbott in all of this? He expressed anger after hearing about the botched local PD response, of which he had initially been “misinformed”. Does he have anything left in the tank for this? This is his law enforcement agency, and his hand-picked henchman in charge of it, that are out there stepping on rakes. Is that a problem, or is he going to do his usual thing of refusing to answer any questions about it until the press gets tired and moves on to something else? It’s nice that the Justice Department will do a review, but what happens if Uvalde police don’t want to cooperate with that? Who exactly is in charge here? The Chron, Daily Kos, and Reform Austin have more.
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Serious question- can any of the cops who actively stopped understandably frantic parents from going into that school while they refused to do so realistically work in that town again? As small as that town is, they can’t be anonymous. If you recognize a cop as one of those who handcuffed /tasered your friend/ neighbor/ relative/ coworker who was trying to rescue their child, are you going to respect him?
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