On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice released its comprehensive review of the deadly mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. Just as those elementary students were looking ahead to their summer break, 19 of them and two teachers were slaughtered. Thursday, more than 19 months later, the DOJ has concluded, in 600 pages of gut-wrenching detail, what many of us already knew. There was a “cascade of failures” before, during and after the tragedy.
I’ve never seen a DOJ shooting report with such emphatically scathing language.
For part of my FBI career, I led all internal shooting inquiries, compiled and presented the reports and provided training for such inquiries. I’ve never seen a DOJ shooting report with such emphatically scathing language nor so many clear, unambiguous conclusions about the incompetence of law enforcement leadership as the report released Thursday.
In fact, if I were to devise a tabletop exercise for law enforcement to identify gaps in their school shooting response plans and I included the kinds of multiple points of failure in Uvalde, the exercise would be rejected as implausible. “No one,” I would be told, “could possibly make that many mistakes.” But they would be wrong. The officers at Robb Elementary — and there were over 300 of them from various agencies — not only failed repeatedly, the report finds, but their inaction can be linked to the fatalities.
As summarized by NBC News, the DOJ report included disturbing findings that:
- Poor coordination, training and execution of active shooter protocol contributed to a failure in law enforcement response.
- Police officers were erroneously taught that “an active shooter event can easily morph into a hostage crisis.”
- A lack of leadership led to a failure to recognize an active shooter situation and waiting too long to engage the gunman.
- At least six separate instances of gunfire, as well as officer injuries and the presence of victims,…
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