Justice Department Uvalde Report Every Bit As Grim As You'd Expect.
If cops had responded as well as fourth-graders did, more victims would have survived.
The US Department of Justice released its 610-page “critical incident report” on the completely bollixed police response to the May 24, 2022, school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and the findings are hardly surprising to anyone who followed the news within just days of the massacre. The DOJ found that officers arriving on the scene failed to use just about every best practice for a mass shooting, leading to a 77-minute delay between the shooter’s arrival at Robb Elementary and the moment when a Border Patrol SWAT team went into one of the classrooms and shot him dead.
Again and again, cops on the scene failed the most basic rules for responding to an active shooter, including commanding officers who failed to take command and a completely uncoordinated response among the multiple law enforcement agencies.
In remarks following the report’s release, Attorney General Merrick Garland — who flew down to Uvalde to meet with parents personally beforehand — said that some victims of the shooting would have survived if the cops had just followed “generally accepted practices.”
As the Texas Tribune and ProPublica report,
Garland called the response “a failure that should not have happened” and said he apologized to the relatives of the 21 killed and the 17 injured in the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.
“Their loved ones deserved better,” Garland said.
The report notes that in Uvalde, police ignored the “fundamental precept” of active shooter response since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999:
[T]he first priority must be to immediately neutralize the subject; everything else, including officer safety, is subordinate to that objective. Accordingly, when a subject has already shot numerous victims and is in a room with additional victims, efforts first must be dedicated to making entry into the room, stopping the subject, and rendering aid to victims. These efforts must be undertaken regardless of the equipment and personnel available to those first on the scene.
Instead, the first cops on the scene headed toward the two adjoining classrooms, rooms 111 and 112, with weapons drawn, but retreated when the suspect fired his AR-15 through the classroom walls, hitting them with shrapnel.
After that, it turned into a deadly farce as more and more cops arrived, only to stand around waiting, because the de facto commander on the scene, Uvalde Schools police chief Pete Arredondo, whose name may someday be a literal synonym for “incompetent cowardly bunglefuck,” had decided based on no evidence that it was no longer an “active shooter” incident but a “barricaded subject” scenario, even though children and a teacher inside the classrooms were still alive and calling 911 to beg police to come and save them from the shooter.
As more law enforcement resources arrived, first responders on the scene, including those with specific leadership responsibilities, did not coordinate immediate entry into the classrooms, running counter to generally accepted practices for active shooter response to immediately engage the subject to further save lives.
The report points out that instead of waiting for even more cops or equipment to arrive, those on the scene should have tried to stop the shooter, and failed to act at another key moment, when they heard more gunshots, “which should have spurred greater urgency to confront the subject but instead set off a renewed search for keys.”
At some points, officers who seemed about to enter rooms 111/112 to confront the shooter were told to stop by Arredondo, who wanted to make sure all nearby classrooms were evacuated first. Arredondo also kept trying, with no success, to talk with the shooter and negotiate.
Even the cops’ training was often inadequate, the report found, including training for the Uvalde school police, held not long before the shooting, which “seemed to suggest, inappropriately, that an active shooter situation can transition into a hostage or barricaded subject situation.” Oops. Many of the officers who arrived first on the scene had no training in dealing with active shootings, or incident command, and the more cops there were milling about, the less there was any coordination. Some officers received garbled reports and believed when they arrived at the school that the shooter was already dead.
As for the report’s recommendations, we’ll hand that responsibility off to the Texas Tribune-ProPublica summary, because we are a blogger, not a cop, and lives are not on the line:
Among its recommendations, the report said that officers should “never” treat an active shooter with access to victims as a barricaded suspect. Law enforcement training academies must ensure active shooter training instructs how officers should distinguish between active threats and barricaded or hostage situations. And officers should be prepared to approach the threat using just the tools they have with them, which is often a standard firearm, the report noted.
But wait, wouldn’t that be dangerous? Well yes, yes it is. It’s kind of the job, even if “To Protect and Serve” is more of an ideal than a legally binding obligation.
PREVIOUSLY:
[DOJ Critical Incident Review / Texas Tribune and ProPublica]
Ug, fucking guns.
I hope that none of those creatures who stood around listening to children and teachers getting murdered ever have a good night's sleep again. I hope they waken from the nightmare of dead children, torn apart by a weapon nobody should own, several times a night. I hope the memory robs them of all joy, forever.
May they rot on hell.