2024-01-18 23:45:27
The population is still recovering from the trauma of the murder of 19 children and two teachers.
Police officers responding to the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting acted “without the slightest urgency” in setting up a command post and did not properly respond to an active shooter situation, according to a Department of Police report. Justice published on Thursday.
The report highlights the “cascading failures” in police action in the face of one of the worst school massacres in American history.
The report on the haphazard police response to the May 24, 2022, massacre at Robb Elementary School identifies a wide range of problems, from communication and leadership failures to poor technology and training, which federal authorities say helped prolong the crisis far beyond what it should have.
And meanwhile, terrified students inside the classrooms called the emergency number 911 and distraught parents begged the agents to enter.
“I told families last night what I hope was clear from the hundreds of pages and thousands of details in the report: Their loved ones deserved better,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference in Uvalde. Thursday.
The massacre has already been the subject of in-depth investigations, but the almost 600-page report from the Department of Justice allows us to better understand how the Uvalde police failed to stop an attack in which 19 children and two teachers died.
The report highlights the terrible mistake by the police in assuming that the attacker was barricaded, either contained or dead, when he continued shooting.
That “mentality predominated during much of the response to the incident,” when the police, instead of forcibly entering the classrooms to put an end to the carnage, waited for almost an hour to confront the attacker, a fact that the report described as of “lack of urgency.”
The attacker, Salvador Ramos, was killed 77 minutes following the police arrived, when a tactical team led by the Border Patrol finally burst into a classroom to kill him.
“An active shooter with access to victims should never be considered or treated as an entrenched subject,” the report says, with the word “never” in italics.
Other errors, the report says, are that police acted “without the slightest urgency” to set up a command post at the scene, causing confusion among officers regarding who was in command.
The officers themselves hindered the actions, and the then school district police chief, Pete Arredondo, put aside their radios as he considered them unnecessary.
Although he tried to contact officers by phone in other parts of the school hallway, Attedondo told them not to enter the classrooms “because he apparently decided that other victims should be removed from neighboring classrooms first to prevent further injuries.”
Uvalde, with a population of 15,000, continues to struggle with the trauma of so many deaths, and remains divided over the assignment of responsibilities for police action and inaction.
The carnage has been picked apart in legislative hearings, news reports and a report from the Texas legislature, which blamed police at all levels for failing to “prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety.”
In the 20 months since the Justice Department announced its investigation, videos showing officers waiting in the hallway outside the fourth-grade classrooms where the man carried out the massacre have made Uvalde police the subject of national ridicule. .
Garland was in Uvalde on Wednesday before the report was released. He visited the painted murals in the city center and, in the evening, held meetings with the victims’ families before publishing the findings.
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