DOJ Report Calls Botched Uvalde School Shooting Response A Series Of ‘Cascading Failures’

Any school shooting is horrific. But the Uvalde school shooting went far beyond the usual nightmarish levels of something that happens so often in the United States, we can actually use the modifier “usual.”

Police officers entered the school three minutes after the shooter did. But they did not actually end the terror until more than an hour later.

The problem wasn’t numbers. An earlier report on the shooting — compiled by Texas state officials — made it clear there were plenty of law enforcement officers on hand.

According to the report, 376 law enforcement officers massed at the school. The overwhelming majority of those who responded were federal and state law enforcement. That included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials.

It took 376 officers 77 minutes to finally enter the classroom and kill the shooter. For most of an hour, officers continued to arrive at Robb Elementary, but no one made a move for the classroom. The first officers on the scene, which included then-police chief Pete Arredondo, made one move towards the classroom but retreated when the gunman opened fire. No one took command of the situation, even though both the chief and deputy chief of the Uvalde PD were on the scene.

It didn’t end until federal officers opened the door and killed the shooter, walking through a door officers had assumed was locked. Rather than try the handle, more than 20 minutes was wasted trying to find keys.

Footage from body cameras and the school’s own surveillance cameras showed the horrific truth of the situation. For most of the recordings’ run time, officers are doing little more than standing at the end of the hall. What’s observed on body cam recordings is a bunch of officers searching for someone in command of the situation, only to come up empty handed.

Twenty minutes into the ordeal, the Uvalde PD — thanks to its chief — decided to treat this as a “barricaded suspect” situation rather than what it actually was: two adjoined classrooms full of teachers and students, some of them still alive.

The DOJ report [PDF] is a difficult read. It runs more than 600 pages, detailing every misstep, and recommending changes to better handle future school shootings. But what comes through clearest is the fact that this response was a failure on every level.

Police officials who responded to the deadly Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting waited far too long to confront the gunman, acted with “no urgency” in establishing a command post and communicated inaccurate information to grieving families, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday that identifies “cascading failures” in law enforcement’s handling of the massacre.

The report, the most comprehensive federal accounting of the maligned police response to the May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School, 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.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the response was how much time passed between the first attempt to enter the classrooms and the eventual killing of the shooter. What’s seen in recordings, heard in interviews, and detailed in this report is the abdication of duty performed by hundreds of officers.

These same officers were praised by Governor Gregg Abbott shortly after the shooting, with the governor saying these “brave” officers had “run towards the sound of gunfire.” That’s not what the recordings showed. Those recordings — which both the Uvalde PD and Texas Department of Safety fought to keep out of the hands of public records requesters — showed the opposite. They showed a bunch of officers milling about ineffectively in the general area of recent gunfire. It showed officers allowing students and teachers to remain in mortal danger while they tried to rustle up some suitable body armor.

The DOJ’s report directly addresses this aspect of the botched response by reiterating the base expectations for officers responding to school shootings (emphasis in the original):

Officers responding to an active shooter incident must continually seek to eliminate the threat and enable victim response. The shooter’s immediate past actions and likely future actions serve as “triggering points” that indicate the appropriate response should be in line with active shooter response protocols. An active shooter with access to victims should never be considered and treated as a barricaded subject.

That point is driven home a couple of paragraphs later.

Officers responding to an active shooter incident must first and foremost drive toward the threat to eliminate it.

This is what people expect. The public believes law enforcement officers will place themselves in harm’s way to stop a killer from killing more people. Cops believe this too. They talk up the “thin blue line” and hold themselves out as selfless heroes. That façade collapsed in Uvalde. These officers felt they did not need to “drive toward the threat” until they were a bit more protected from the threat. And that’s a hard thing to stomach: officers prioritizing their safety over the lives of children.

The entire report is worth reading, but it’s a lot to handle all at once. Every page details another failure, ranging from the school security protocols not being observed (leading to unlocked exterior doors) to officers feeling so at ease at being in a school with an active shooter they did things like avail themselves of hand sanitizer pumps and offering each other fist bumps while waiting for something to happen. And the horror didn’t end there. Tons of miscommunications resulted in parents being misinformed about their children, leading some parents of murdered children to believe they were still alive and leading others to falsely believe their children had been killed.

There will rarely be a perfect response to mass shooting. But this one went so far outside the acceptable margin for error, a grand jury has been convened to see if any of the responding officers should face criminal charges for doing their jobs this poorly.

Hopefully, this report will force law enforcement agencies to take a long, hard look at their mass shooting response training to ensure it actually prepares officers to run towards gunfire and, for those in leadership, create some semblance of order from chaos. The saddest thing about this is that we even need this to be an essential part of law enforcement training. But since we, as a country, are pretty much unwilling to take the steps needed to reduce the number of shootings, we’re forced to perfect our responses to this inevitability of American life.