Officers had many opportunities as the 2022 school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, was still unfolding to reassess their flawed response to the shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead, the US Justice Department concludes in a damning new report.
Bursts of gunfire, reports a teacher had been shot, then a desperate call from a student trapped with the gunman could – and should – all have prompted a drive to stop the bloodshed far sooner, the Critical Incident Review released Thursday says.
Instead, it took 77 minutes from when the 18-year-old shooter walked into Robb Elementary School until he was stopped. The carnage remains among the deadliest episodes in America’s ongoing scourge of campus shootings.
Critical failures in leadership among specific law enforcement officers who rushed to Robb Elementary are blamed by the Justice Department, whose 575-page report nearly 20 months after the massacre is the fullest official accounting of what happened, though much already was known largely through CNN investigation.
Ample problems also emerged after the gunman was killed, from getting students away from the school and reunited with families to how bereaved parents were told their children were dead, the release of information about what happened, and the provision of therapy services, the federal report finds.
“The response to the May 24, 2022, mass casualty incident at Robb Elementary School was a failure,” the Justice Department report concludes bluntly.
“Their loved ones deserved better,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday of the victims, whose families he met with a day earlier.
“The law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022 – and then the hours and days after – was a failure that should not have happened,” he said in an afternoon news conference.
“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” Garland said.
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The Justice Department report describes the quick arrival of law enforcement officers who ran toward the sound of gunfire, then almost immediately stopped once they got near the classrooms where the gunman was killing fourth graders and educators – a decision that ran counter to widely established active shooter response protocol, which instructs law enforcement to move toward and eliminate any threat.
“Officers on scene should have recognized the incident as an active shooter scenario and moved and pushed forward immediately and continuously toward the threat until the room was entered, and the threat was eliminated. That did not occur,” it says.
Instead, the intensity level dropped as responders began to treat the situation as a “barricaded suspect” operation that did not need immediate action, even as more officers arrived and the signals of ongoing danger multiplied.
That was the “single most critical tactical failure,” the team from the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services finds.
“For the span of more than 1 hour, between 11:37 a.m. and 12:49 p.m., there were at least 10 stimulus events, including at least six separate instances of gunfire totaling approximately 45 rounds in law enforcement officer presence, as well as officer injuries and the presence of victims. Any one of these events should have driven the law enforcement response to take steps to immediately stop the killing,” the report says.
“During that period, no one assumed a leadership role to direct the response toward the active shooter, provide situational status to responding officers, establish some form of incident command, or clearly assume and communicate the role of incident commander. Interviews with responding officers confirmed that there was confusion about who, if anyone, was in charge, what to do, or the status of the incident.
“Some officers were confused about why there was no attempt to confront the active shooter and rescue the children. Without structure, agency leadership was unaware of the facts surrounding the incident and therefore unable to challenge the repeated decisions not to make entry into the classrooms.”
There’s a lot more to the story, and there’s the full report if you really want to get into it. I just want to highlight one small bit from the Trib story:
The Uvalde report’s release comes two months after ProPublica, the Texas Tribune and PBS’ Frontline published an investigation into the response after gaining access to a trove of investigative materials, including more than 150 interviews with officers and dozens of body cameras. The material showed that the children at Robb Elementary followed active shooter protocols, while many of the officers did not. It detailed how officers treated the situation as a barricaded suspect rather than an active threat even as evidence mounted quickly that children and teachers were injured and with the shooter.
Emphasis mine. We already knew that information, from the cited previous reporting. We are not going to do anything in this state to try to prevent mass shootings as long as the current government is in place, so you would think that the very least we could ask them to do is to make sure that all of our thousands of police forces are up to date on active shooter training and protocols. Doesn’t seem to me like much to ask.
We might also want to ask what’s going on with the state and local investigations and why they are taking so goddam long.
Since the massacre, families and the media have fought for transparency and an explanation for why the police response was so delayed and chaotic.
But at least three separate investigations into the massacre have not yet been released, including records from the Texas Department of Public Safety, a criminal investigation from the Uvalde County District Attorney’s office and the City of Uvalde’s independent investigation.
More than a dozen news organizations — including The Texas Tribune — have sued the DPS, alleging that the state police have unlawfully withheld those records, which include body camera footage and emergency communications. A Travis County state district judge ordered last November that the DPS release the records within 20 days. Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an appeal on behalf of the agency on Dec. 8, so that case remains ongoing.
Part of that investigation was a medical analysis to determine whether any of those killed at Robb Elementary might have survived if police and medical assistance arrived sooner. Records obtained by The Washington Post, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica showed that communication lapses among medical responders delayed treatment for victims. Four victims had heartbeats when they were rescued from the school and died later that day.
DPS Chief Medical Officer Mark Escott, who also serves as EMS medical director for the City of Austin, said in a statement that the Uvalde DA’s office informed him last August that they were “moving in a different direction” and no longer wanted the medical analysis.
“At this time, I have no knowledge of what, if any, medical analysis will be included in the (DPS) report,” Escott said.
See here for the most recent update on that. If we had a state government that cared about more than staying in power and covering its ass, perhaps we’d get some answers to these questions. Until then, well, you know what my preferred fix for that problem is. TPR, Stace, and the Chron have more.