‘Cascading failures’ in police response to Uvalde school shooting, DoJ report finds

Families of the 19 children and two teachers murdered in the elementary school shooting in Uvalde were failed by a haphazard response from authorities who took no action to stop the 2022 mass killing, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said on Thursday as the federal government’s official report into the campus massacre was released.

“Their loved ones deserved better,” Garland said at an emotional lunchtime press conference in the Texas town that was devastated on 24 May 2022 when a lone shooter rampaged through classrooms as heavily armed and well-equipped officers waited outside.

“The law enforcement response at Robb elementary school … and then the hours and days after, was a failure that should not have happened.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved, and people would have survived.”

The US justice department report details “cascading failures” on the afternoon of the killings and beyond, including a “haphazard” initial response, delays in setting up a command post, and not immediately treating the attack as an active shooter situation.

Authorities had “demonstrated no urgency”, it said.

Additionally, the report identified a vast array of problems from failed communication and leadership to inadequate technology and training that federal officials say contributed to the crisis lasting far longer than it should.

Also on Thursday, Joe Biden issued a statement of condolence, and expressed a desire that lessons would be learned from the tragedy.

“There were multiple points of failure that hold lessons for the future, and my team will work with the justice department and Department of Education to implement policy changes necessary to help communities respond more effectively in the future,” the president said.

“No community should ever have to go through what the Uvalde community suffered. Congress must now pass commonsense gun safety laws to ensure that mass shootings like this one don’t happen in the first place.

“We need universal background checks, we need a national red flag law and we must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The families of Uvalde – and all American communities – deserve nothing less.”

Even for a mass shooting that had already been the subject of intense scrutiny and in-depth examinations, the nearly 600-page report adds to the public understanding of how police in Uvalde failed to stop the attack.

The community of more than 15,000 continues to struggle with the trauma left by the killings, and remains divided on questions of accountability for officers’ actions and inaction.

The shooting has already been picked over in legislative hearings, news reports and a damning report by Texas lawmakers who faulted law enforcement at every level with failing “to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety”.

In the 20 months since the justice department announced its review, footage showing police waiting in a hallway outside the fourth-grade classrooms where the gunman opened fire has become the target of national ridicule.

Garland was in Uvalde on Wednesday ahead of the release of the report, visiting murals of the victims that have been painted around the center of the town. Later that night, justice department officials privately briefed family members at a community center in Uvalde before the findings were made public.

Berlinda Arreola, whose granddaughter was killed in the shooting, said after Wednesday night’s meeting that accountability remained in the hands of local prosecutors who are separately conducting a criminal investigation into the police response.

“I have a lot of emotions right now. I don’t have a lot of words to say,” Arreola said.

The review by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services was launched just days after the shooting, and local prosecutors are still evaluating a separate criminal investigation by the Texas Rangers. Several of the officers involved have lost their jobs.

The Uvalde county district attorney, Christina Mitchell, said in a statement on Wednesday that she had not been given an advance copy of the justice department’s report but had been informed it does not address any potential criminal charges.

How police respond to mass shootings around the country has been scrutinized since the tragedy in Uvalde, about 85 miles (140km) south-west of San Antonio.

In Texas, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, initially praised the courage of officers’ response, and blame was later cast heavily on local authorities in Uvalde. But an 80-page report from a panel of state lawmakers and investigations by journalists laid bare how over the course of more than 70 minutes, a mass of officers went in and out of the school with weapons drawn but did not go inside the classroom where the shooting was taking place. The 376 officers at the scene included state police, Uvalde police, school officers and US border patrol agents.

The delayed response countered training that emphasizes confronting the gunman, a standard established more than two decades ago after the mass shooting at Columbine High School showed that waiting cost lives. As what happened during the shooting has become clear, the families of some victims have blasted police as cowards and demanded resignations.

At least five officers have lost their jobs, including two Department of Public Safety officers and Uvalde’s school police chief, Pete Arredondo, who was the on-site commander during the attack.