MASS SHOOTINGS“Cascading Failures”: DOJ Blasts Law Enforcement’s Botched Response to Uvalde School Shooting
“Cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training”: A long-anticipated 575-page report details the catastrophic leadership and training errors that led to delays in confronting a gunman who killed 21 people. The most significant failure was that officers should have immediately recognized that it was an active shooter situation and confronted the gunman, who was with victims in two adjoining classrooms.
The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday released a withering report into the hundreds of Texas law enforcement officers’ fumbled response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, finding “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training.”
The long-anticipated 575-page report detailed the many failures of the May 24, 2022 response, but concluded the most significant was that officers should have immediately recognized that it was an active shooter situation and confronted the gunman, who was with victims in two adjoining classrooms.
It noted that since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, American law enforcement officers have been trained to prioritize stopping the shooter while everything else, including officer safety, is secondary.
“These efforts must be undertaken regardless of the equipment and personnel available,” the report found. “This did not occur during the Robb Elementary shooting response.”
Instead, officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded suspect, even as children and teachers pleaded for help with 911 operators. The report noted “multiple stimuli indicating that there was an active threat,” including that an Uvalde school police officer early on told other law enforcement that his wife, a teacher in Room 112, was shot. It took 77 minutes for officers to confront the shooter. Nineteen students and two teachers died that day and 17 others were injured in one of the country’s worst school shootings.
The report also found failures in leadership, command and coordination, noting that as more officers, including supervisors from other agencies, descended on the school, no one set up an incident command structure or took charge of the scene.
Supervisors from the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, the Uvalde Police Department, the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office, and the Texas Department of Public Safety “demonstrated no urgency” in taking control of the incident, which exacerbated the communication problems and overall confusion.
Some failures may have been partly a result of policy and training deficiencies, the report found, noting that the school district police department suggested wrongly in prior training that active shooter situations can transition into hostage or barricaded incidents. DPS lacked an active shooter policy, as did the county sheriff’s office and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the 149 Border Patrol agents who responded.
The report also found that key officers, including Uvalde Police Department Acting Chief Mariano Pargas who arrived within minutes of the shooting, had no active shooter or incident command training.
