The US Department of Justice concludes in a report released Thursday that there was a “cascade of failures” in the response of law enforcement to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children dead. and two teachers on May 24, 2022.
The department’s team that led the investigation launched in the days following the shooting “identified several critical failures before, during and after the shooting,” according to the report of more than 550 pages, citing in particular the fact that the police officers on scene did not “immediately consider that it was a case of a shooter in action”.
It points to a “cascade of failures in command, decision-making, tactics, policy and training that contributed to these failures and failings.”
“The shooter was only killed approximately 77 minutes after the arrival of the first police officers,” emphasize the authors of the report.
Following the killing which shook this small quiet town in Texas, the delay in police intervention to stop the massacre had caused anger and incomprehension, the 19 officers on site awaiting the attack of a specialized unit.
This was despite law enforcement receiving numerous calls from people in the affected classrooms, including one from a child pleading: “Please send the police now.”
“Trapped in a room”
“The victims and survivors of the Robb Elementary School shooting deserved better,” admitted Justice Minister Merrick Garland in a statement, who is scheduled to hold a press conference in Uvalde at midday about this report. , carried out from 260 interviews and nine visits, i.e. 54 days on site, and the analysis of more than 14,100 documents.
He called the law enforcement response a “failure,” with “the result that 33 students and three of their teachers, many of whom had been shot, were trapped in a room with a shooter in action.” more than an hour while the police remained outside.
The authors of the report specify that they “deliberately do not name the author of the shooting so as not to glorify his actions and out of respect for the families of the victims”.
On the other hand, the names and ages of the 21 killed, aged between 9 and 48, appear there.
In 2022, a Texas parliamentary commission of inquiry identified nearly 400 agents from different police departments who intervened in the establishment on May 24 of this year.
His report denounced a “chaotic” situation, a lack of command and “apathetic” police officers. The police chief of the Uvalde school district was fired in August 2022.
