Uvalde police response elicits host of concerns
DOJ investigation could shed light on time lapse
Since the Columbine High School massacre more than 20 years ago, police have been trained to quickly confront shooters in the horrific attacks that have followed.
But officers in Uvalde, Texas, took more than an hour to kill a shooter who massacred 19 children – a lapse of time that will likely be a key part of a Justice Department probe into the police response.
The rare federal review comes amid growing, agonized questions and shifting information from police. Authorities now say that several officers entered the elementary school just two minutes after alleged gunman Salvador Ramos and exchanged fire with him, but he wasn’t stopped until a tactical team entered a classroom more than an hour later.
That’s a confounding timeline for law enforcement experts such as Jarrod Burguan, who was the police chief in San Bernardino, California, when the city was hit by a terrorist attack that killed 14 people in 2015. Officers entered that facility, a training center for residents with developmental disabilities, within two minutes of arriving.
“Columbine changed everything,” Burguan said Monday. Officers are now trained to form up and enter buildings to confront shooters as quickly as possible to prevent them from killing more people. “This has been drilled into this industry for years now.”
Justice Department officials probing the Texas slayings will examine a host of questions about the police response in
Uvalde. A similar review that largely praised the response to the San Bernardino mass shooting was more than 100 pages long.
In announcing the review, Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said it would be conducted in a fair, impartial and independent manner, and the findings would be made public. It could take months.
One key question for Maria Haberfeld, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, is why a school district police chief had the power to tell more than a dozen officers to wait in a hallway at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary.
“The key question for me is, who designated him to be in charge?” she said.
Officials have said he believed that the suspect was barricaded inside adjoining classrooms and that there was no longer an active threat. But school police officers don’t typically have the most experience with active shooters, and Haberfeld questioned why people with more specialized training didn’t take the reins.
A U.S. Border Patrol tactical team finally used a janitor’s key to unlock the classroom door and kill the gunman, raising more questions about the choice of entry.
“It’s not some fortified castle from the Middle Ages. It’s a door,” she said. “They knew what to do.”
The Justice review won’t investigate the crime itself or directly hold police civilly or criminally liable.
The review will also likely examine how well officers were prepared with gear like weapons and body armor. The shooter wore a tactical vest and was armed with an Ar-15-style rifle.