UVALDE — In a blistering criticism 20 months after the Uvalde elementary school shooting, the U.S. Justice Department on Thursday identified “cascading failures” in responding officers’ delayed confrontation of the gunman, which the nation’s top law enforcement official said contributed to the number of casualties.
“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active-shooter situation, and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said during a Thursday morning press conference about a federal review of the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.
Garland did not directly answer whether any officers responding to Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022, should be criminally charged, saying he would leave that to the local district attorney because the Justice Department only has jurisdiction over federal crimes. It took 77 minutes for any of the hundreds of responding officers to confront the shooter, who killed 19 children and two teachers and wounded 17 others.
Garland said law enforcement agencies across the country should immediately ensure they practice active-shooter training that prioritizes stopping a shooter as soon as possible. All agencies in a region should undergo tactical training together, he said. The report also recommended that officers have a minimum of eight hours of active-shooter training every year.
The Justice Department’s long-anticipated 575-page report about the shooting found failures in “leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training,” much of which mirrored findings revealed last month by The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and PBS’ FRONTLINE in an investigation that showed the children of Uvalde followed their training, while many officers did not. It also found that states require far more training to prepare students and teachers for a mass shooting than they do for the police who are expected to protect them.
During a news conference in Uvalde to discuss the findings, Garland called the response “a failure that should not have happened” and said he apologized to the relatives of the 19 children and teachers who were killed and to families whose relatives were injured.
“Their loved ones deserved better,” Garland said.
After his remarks, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, mother of 10-year-old Lexi who was killed, said she hopes “the failures end today and that local officials do what wasn’t done that day, do right by the victims and survivors of Robb Elementary: terminations, criminal prosecutions and that our state and federal government enacts sensible gun laws.”
Since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, law enforcement officers have been trained to prioritize stopping the shooter. The report stated that everything else, including officer safety, is secondary, adding that efforts to engage the shooter “must be undertaken regardless of the equipment and personnel available.”
“This did not occur during the Robb Elementary shooting response,” the report said.
Among the most significant failures was that officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded suspect incident, even as children and teachers pleaded for help with 911 operators. The report noted “multiple stimuli indicating that there was an active threat,” including a dispatcher’s announcement minutes after officers arrived that students were likely in the classroom the shooter entered and that an Uvalde school police officer early on told other law enforcement in the hallway that his wife, a teacher in that classroom, was shot. Still, it took officers more than an hour to go inside.
The report also found failures in leadership, command and coordination, noting that as more officers, including supervisors from other agencies, arrived at the school, no one set up an incident command structure or took charge of the scene.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta also condemned the medical response, saying that after police breached the classroom and killed the gunman, dead victims were placed on ambulances and children with bullet wounds were put on school buses. Some of those findings in the report were also revealed in a 2022 investigation by the Tribune, ProPublica and the Washington Post that determined medical responders did not know who was in charge and that two students and a teacher still had a pulse when they were rescued from the school.
Thursday’s report revealed one victim, only identified as a teacher, was treated on the floor “for an unknown reason” and died on the walkway before being covered and moved into an ambulance.
Gupta also criticized misinformation and conflicting accounts that officials, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas Department of Public Safety, initially shared with Uvalde residents and reporters after the shooting.
The report noted that the “misguided and misleading narratives, leaks, and lack of communication about what happened on May 24 is unprecedented and has had an extensive, negative impact on the mental health and recovery of the family members and other victims, as well as the entire community of Uvalde.”
In a statement Thursday afternoon, Abbott did not directly respond to several of the criticisms in the report, but did thank federal officials for the review.
“We will continue to evaluate all possible means of making our schools safer, and we will carefully review all other recommendations the Department has offered to prevent future tragedies across our state,” he said.
In its scathing criticism of responding officers, the report said that 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.
UCISD Chief Pete Arredondo, who was listed as the incident commander in the district’s active-shooter plan, had the “necessary authority, training and tools,” but did not provide “appropriate leadership, command and control,” the report found.
Yet no leader from any of the several other responding agencies “effectively questioned the decisions and lack of urgency” demonstrated by Arredondo and Uvalde Police Department Acting Chief Mariano Pargas, who both arrived within minutes of the shooting. The report specifically listed Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco, Uvalde County Constables Emmanuel Zamora and Johnny Field, and an unidentified Texas Ranger as examples of such leaders.
“Responding officers here in Uvalde, who also lost loved ones and who still bear the emotional scars of that day, deserved the kind of leadership and training that would have prepared them to do the work that was required,” Garland said.
Nonetheless, among agencies with the most responders at the scene, most have not completed administrative investigations into their officers’ actions that day, the report noted.
At least three separate investigations into the massacre have not yet been fully released, including records from Texas DPS, a criminal investigation from the Uvalde County District Attorney’s office and the city of Uvalde’s independent investigation.
The report concluded that some failures may have been partly a result of policy and training deficiencies, noting that the school district police department wrongly suggested 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 Pargas, had no active shooter or incident command training despite in some instances having decades worth of law enforcement experience.
“No law enforcement agency or community can assume that what happened here — or in Newtown or in Parkland or in Columbine — can’t happen in their community,” Gupta said. “That is our reality.”
The vast majority of 380 officers from more than a dozen local, state and federal agencies who responded to the school had also never trained together, “contributing to difficulties in coordination and communication.” The report said the “lack of pre-planning hampered even well-prepared agencies from functioning at their best.”
The report suggests that agencies within a county or region should develop memorandums of understanding that provide “clarity on who is in command, taking into consideration an agency’s training, experience, equipment, and capacity to take the lead during a multiagency response to a critical incident.”
Among its recommendations, the report said that officers should “never” treat an active shooter with access to victims as a barricaded suspect — especially in a school, where there is a high probability of potential victims and innocent civilians being present. 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. The Tribune reported early last year that some officers were afraid to confront the gunman because he had a deadly AR-15 rifle.
While the report itself did not address gun control, Garland nodded to the country’s lax firearms laws.
“Our children deserve better than to grow up in a country where an 18-year-old has easy access to a weapon that belongs on the battlefield, not in a classroom,” he said.
That was echoed by Mata Rubio, who said the failures at Robb Elementary “began the day an 18-year-old was allowed to purchase an AR-15.”
The federal review by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services was announced just five days after the 2022 shooting. It was led in part by Orange County Sheriff John Mina, the incident commander during the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando.
In that incident, officers waited three hours to take down the shooter who had barricaded himself with victims in a bathroom. A Justice Department and National Policing Institute review of that Florida law enforcement response was far less critical than the Uvalde report. It found that Florida officers mostly followed best practices, although it stated the law enforcement agencies in Orlando should update their training and policies.
The Pulse report was one of several after-action analyses in which authors did not criticize significant law enforcement delays during mass shootings, according to a review by ProPublica, the Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE of more than three dozen publicly available after-action reports.
In the Uvalde inquiry, the federal team reviewed more than 14,100 pieces of data and documentation, including policies, training logs, body camera footage, audio recordings, interview transcripts and photographs. The team visited Uvalde nine times, spending 54 days there, and conducted more than 260 interviews with people from more than 30 organizations and agencies, including law enforcement officers, school staff, medical personnel, survivors and victims’ families.
The Uvalde report’s release comes two months after ProPublica, the Tribune and FRONTLINE’S investigation into the response after gaining access to a trove of investigative materials, including more than 150 interviews with officers and dozens of body cameras. The material showed how officers treated the situation as a barricaded suspect rather than an active threat even as evidence mounted quickly that children and teachers were injured and with the shooter.
The investigation also analyzed the active-shooter training of the local and state police officers who responded prior to the gunman being stopped, finding some had not taken any active shooter training based on their state records. Of those who had, they most commonly only received the training once during their careers and hadn’t taken it in four years or longer.
The newsrooms analyzed active-shooter requirements across the country, finding that they varied widely. At least 37 states have laws mandating that schools conduct active shooter-related drills. All but four of those states require them at least annually. In contrast, only Texas and Michigan have laws requiring training for all officers after they graduate from police academies. Texas’ law is the strongest in the country, mandating that officers train for 16 hours every two years.
But that requirement came about only after the Uvalde massacre.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy.
