The official Justice Department report into the May 24, 2002 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, finds police at fault for “cascading failures” in their response to a gunman who killed 19 children and two adults. The report says police waited far too long to confront the gunman and acted with “no urgency” to deal with him. Moreover, law enforcement officials “repeatedly communicated inaccurate information” to families, trying to spread blame and claim glory.
[the report] catalogs a sweeping array of training, communication, leadership and technology problems that federal officials say contributed to the crisis lasting far longer than necessary. All the while, the report says, terrified students inside the classrooms called 911 and agonized parents begged officers to go in.
“I told the families gathered last night what I hope is clear among the hundreds of pages and thousands of details in this report: Their loved ones deserved better,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference in Uvalde on Thursday after briefing family members on the Justice Department’s findings. …
“An active shooter with access to victims should never be considered and treated as a barricaded subject,” the report says, with the word “never” emphasized in italics.
The police refused to go in because they decided their own safety was more important than the lives of children, and they made unwarranted assumptions (for example that the shooter was barricaded) that let them pretend they were in significant danger. It’s the inevitable dead end of decades of cultlike policing training and policy built around fantasies—and of political priorities that demands that police have no real duties, no real liabilities and no real accountability. There’s not much you can do about it except read this 610-page Uvalde report and go pound sand.
Feds eventually turned up and killed the gunman after 77 minutes of officious cowering by the locals.
