The overhaul comes as a damning new 80-page report released over the weekend by the Texas House exposed major failures by all levels of law enforcement. The findings put more than 90 state troopers at Robb Elementary School during the May 24 tragedy. It’s the first time Texas DPS has said it will review the actions of its own officers in the two months since the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. Texas DPS said in a statement that the review will “determine whether violations of policy, law or doctrine occurred” in the response to the attack that killed 19 children and two teachers in a fourth-grade classroom. He said the review began last week. Texas DPS Director Steve McCraw previously called law enforcement’s response to the shooting “a major failure.” He placed much of the blame on the school district’s police chief for not disrupting the classroom sooner. The findings of an investigative panel released Sunday were the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement and not just local authorities in the South Texas city for the bumbling inaction of heavily armed officers as a gunman opened fire inside two adjacent fourth grade classrooms. Footage from the city’s police body cameras released hours later further highlighted the failures – and fueled anger and frustration among the victims’ relatives. “It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting,” said Michael Brown, whose 9-year-old son was in the school cafeteria the day of the shooting and survived. “They’re cowards.” Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to the school, but “extremely poor decision-making” led to more than an hour of chaos before the gunman was finally confronted and killed, according to the report authored by a House of Representatives investigative committee. Texas. Together, the report and more than three hours of newly released body camera footage from the May 24 tragedy was the most complete account to date of one of the worst school shootings in US history. “At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training and failed to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety,” the report said. The gunman fired about 142 rounds into the building — and it is “almost certain” that at least 100 shots came before an officer entered, according to the report, which pointed to multiple misses. Between them: — No one took command despite the fact that many officers were on the scene. — The commander of a Border Patrol tactical team expected a bulletproof shield and working master key for a door to classrooms he might not even need before entering. — An Uvalde police officer said he heard 911 calls coming from inside the rooms and understood that officers on one side of the building knew there were victims trapped inside. However, no one tried to break the order. The panel did not “receive medical evidence” that police entering the classrooms earlier would have saved lives, but concluded that “it is plausible that some victims could have survived had they not had to wait an additional 73 minutes for rescue . “ The findings had at least one immediate effect: Lt. Mariano Pargas, a Uvalde police officer who was the city’s acting police chief at the time of the massacre, was placed on administrative leave. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said an investigation would be launched to determine whether Pargas should have taken over the scene. He also revealed for the first time that some officers had left the force after the shooting, but did not give an exact number, saying it was up to three. Hours after the report was released, Uvalde officials separately released for the first time body camera photos from city police officers who responded to the attack. It included video of several officers responding to a tip from a dispatcher about 30 minutes after the shooting started that a child in the room had called 911. “The room is full of victims. Kid called 911,” an officer said. Another body camera video from Uvalde Staff Sgt. Eduardo Canales, the head of the city’s SWAT team, showed the officer approaching the classrooms when shots rang out at 11:37 a.m. A minute later, Canales said, “Man, we gotta get in there. We have to get in there, he just keeps shooting. We have to get in there.” Another officer was heard saying “DPS is sending their people.” It was 72 minutes later, at 12:50 p.m., when officers finally breached the ranks and killed the assailant. Calls for police accountability have grown in Uvalde since the shooting. “It’s a joke. It’s a joke. They have no business wearing a badge. None of them do,” Vincent Salazar, the grandfather of 11-year-old Laila Salazar, who was among the dead, said Sunday. Anger flared in Uvalde even over how the report was released: Tina Quintanilla-Taylor, whose daughter survived the shooting, yelled at the three-member Texas panel as they left a news conference after the findings were released. Commission members had invited the victims’ families to discuss the report privately, but Quintanilla-Taylor said the commission should have taken questions from the community, not just the media. “I am angry. They need to come back and give us their undivided attention,” he said later. “These leaders are not leaders,” he said. According to the report, 376 law enforcement officers converged on the school. The vast majority of respondents were federal and state law enforcement agencies. That included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials. “Apart from the perpetrator, the Commission did not find any ‘bad guys’ during its investigation,” the report said. “There is no one to whom we can ascribe malice or evil motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and extremely poor decision-making.” The report noted that many of the hundreds of law enforcement responders who rushed to the school were better trained and equipped than school district police — who the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state’s police force, had previously accused of not entered. the room earlier. Investigators said it was not their job to determine whether the officers should be held accountable, saying those decisions are up to each law enforcement agency. Before Sunday, only one of the hundreds of officers on the scene — Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief — was known to be on leave. “Everybody who came on the scene talked about this being chaotic,” said Texas state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican who led the investigation. Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety and the US Border Patrol did not immediately return requests for comment Sunday. The report followed weeks of closed-door interviews with more than 40 people, including witnesses and law enforcement at the scene of the shooting. No officer has come under as much scrutiny since the shooting as Arredondo, who also resigned from his newly appointed position on the City Council after the shooting. Arredondo told the panel he treated the shooter as a “blocked subject,” according to the report, and defended never treating the scene as an active shooter situation because he did not have eye contact with the gunman. Arredondo also tried to find a key to the classrooms, but no one ever checked to see if the doors were locked, according to the report. The report criticized the approach of the hundreds of officers who surrounded the school as “deficient” and said they should have recognized that Arredondo’s stay at the school without reliable communication was “inconsistent” with the scene commander. The report concluded that some officers waited because they were relying on bad information, while others “had enough information to know better”. The report was the result of one of several investigations into the shooting, including one led by the Justice Department. Brown, the father of the 9-year-old who was in the cafeteria the day of the shooting, came to the committee’s news conference Sunday holding signs that read: “We want accountability” and “Condemn Pete Arredondo.” Brown said he has yet to read the report, but already knew enough to say police “have blood on their hands.”
Weber reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press writer Jamie Stengle contributed from Dallas.
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