DOJ Releases Scathing Report On Uvalde Shooting

From the Austin American-Statesman: "'Failure': DOJ's scathing Uvalde school shooting report criticizes law enforcement response."

    The report described a chaotic, unorganized scene in which there was no command and control by officers — during a period when children were calling 911 for help — and it put blame on the school's police chief who tried negotiating with a killer who had already shot his way into the classroom while having his officers search for keys to unlock the rooms. The report laid bare that, immediately after the tragedy, government leaders provided misleading and inaccurate information and in the months that followed, the Uvalde families were left to suffer by a lack of resources for trauma care and by those in charge of answering questions not providing a full accounting. 

    To compile the nearly 500-page report released Thursday — just blocks from the mass shooting site at Robb Elementary — the Justice Department’s team collected and reviewed more than 14,000 pieces of data and documentation, including training logs, audio, video, photographs, personal records and investigative records. On the ground, federal investigators conducted more than 260 interviews of people involved or affected, including police officers, elected officials, hospital workers and survivors. 

And:

    According to the report:

• Eleven officers from the Uvalde school district and Uvalde Police Department arrived on the scene within three minutes of the shooter’s entry into the school. Five advanced initially and two were hit by shrapnel. Police made three attempts to enter the classrooms, which are adjoined by an interior door.
• Pete Arredondo, then the chief of the Uvalde school district's police department, "directed officers at several points to delay making entry into classrooms in favor of searching for keys and clearing other classrooms,” the report found. He also tried to negotiate with the shooter and treated him as a barricaded subject instead of a continuing threat to children and school staff, the report says.
• Victims who had died were put on ambulances and sent to hospitals, while injured students were evacuated in buses. One adult victim was placed on the ground on a walkway to be attended to. She died there. 

"The report concludes that had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived," Garland said. 

You can download a copy of the report from the DOJ website. 

More:

• "Uvalde parents call on DA to bring CRIMINAL charges against cowardly cops - as grandfather of victim, 11, slams officers for being 'paid to do nothing'"--Daily Mail. 
• ""Uvalde teacher was left to die on walkway as students with bullet wounds were hurried on to buses before receiving medical aid, scathing DOJ report into mass school shooting reveals - as AG says police response was 'a failure that should not have happened'"--Daily Mail.
• "These are the key takeaways from the US Justice Department’s review of the Uvalde school shooting response"--CNN.
• "US justice department says 'lack of urgency' led to failed response to Uvalde shooting"--BBC.
• "Uvalde report: 376 officers but ‘egregiously poor’ decisions"--AP.
• "Uvalde school massacre could have been stopped sooner, DOJ report finds"--CNN.
• "The police response to the Uvalde shooting was riddled with failures, a new DOJ report says"--AP.