Scathing Justice Department report details ‘critical failures’ in Texas school massacre response
- US Justice Department releases report of its probe into police handling of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting
- Hundreds of police officers and first responders failed to act quickly to confront gunman who killed 21
A damning Justice Department report cited “critical failures” by Texas law enforcement who waited until 21 people had been killed by a mass shooter at a school before finally intervening.
Nineteen young children and two teachers were killed when a teenage gunman went on a rampage at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School in May 2022 in America’s worst school shooting in a decade. Police eventually shot and killed the attacker.
Investigators “identified several critical failures,” the report said, and “the most significant failure was that the responding officers should have immediately recognised the incident as an active shooter situation”.
“In summary, the response to the May 24, 2022, mass casualty incident at Robb Elementary School was a failure,” said the critical incident review which is more than 550 pages long. “The painful lessons detailed in this report are not meant to exacerbate an already tragic situation.”
Police in Uvalde as well as local political leadership have been under intense scrutiny since it emerged that more than a dozen officers waited for over an hour outside classrooms where the shooting was taking place and did nothing as children lay dead or dying inside.