School shooting response slammed
Report lashes cops
UVALDE: The police response to the Texas primary school shooting that killed 21 people has been slammed as being plagued by “systemic failures and poor decision making” and a “lackadaisical approach”.
A report by Texas state legislators criticised law enforcement’s slow response to the shooting in Uvalde, where a crazed gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, saying more decisive action could have saved numerous lives.
A total of 376 officers – border guards, state police, city police, local sheriff department officers and elite forces – responded to the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School, the report states, adding that the situation was “chaotic” due to the officers’ “lackadaisical approach”.
Seventy-three minutes elapsed between the first officers’ arrival and the shooter’s death, an “unacceptably long period of time”, it states. “The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life.”
While the report acknowledges it was likely that most of the victims died immediately after the first shots were fired, some died later while being transferred to the hospital.
“It is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue,” the report states.
According to the report, which does not incriminate certain police teams over others, law enforcement officers “failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritise saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety”.
Texas public safety chief Steve McCraw has previously described the police response to the attack as an “abject failure”, focusing most of his criticism on Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo.
Mr Arredondo, who has been suspended pending the investigation result, “did not assume his preassigned responsibility of incident command” and made analytical errors because he did not have all the necessary information.
But no other officers offered to help or replace him, the report states. “There was an overall lackadaisical approach by law enforcement at the scene.”
After the report was published, local media reported that Uvalde police lieutenant Mariano Pargas had been suspended. He was acting police chief on the day of the attack.
The release of the damning report came as three people were killed and another three injured at a mall in the latest mass shooting in the US.
“We experienced a mass shooting at the Greenwood Park Mall,” Mark Myers, the mayor of Greenwood, Indiana, said in a statement.
“We have three fatalities at this time and three others injured.” Mr Myers said that the gunman had been shot dead by “an armed individual”.