(NewsNation) — The Justice Department’s report on the law enforcement response to the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in 2022 found significant failures.
“A lack of action by adults failed to protect students and their teachers,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta in a press conference. “We cannot look away from what happened here.”
The report found “cascading failures” and said law enforcement responders “demonstrated no urgency,” with surveillance video showing them waiting in hallways while the gunman went back and forth between two classrooms shooting at teachers and students trapped inside.
The report identified various points of failure, including failures from leadership, communications issues, inadequate technology and inadequate training.
There have been multiple investigations into the shooting at Robb Elementary School, where 19 students and two teachers were killed by a shooter while police took 77 minutes to enter the school and fatally shoot the gunman.
The greatest failure, according to the report, was that law enforcement did not recognize the scene as an active shooter situation and should have pushed forward immediately, regardless of the equipment on scene. Since the Columbine shooting in 1999, the standard procedure for an active shooter has been that officers should consider stopping the shooter the first priority over everything else, including officer safety.
The investigation found that while some law enforcement officers arrived on scene three minutes after the shooter entered the school, the focus quickly shifted to treat the situation as one of a barricaded suspect rather than an active shooter despite 911 calls confirming classes were in session and children were present.
Officials who arrived after that received inaccurate information, according to the report, believing the gunman was dead or that school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo was in the room with the suspect.
Investigators noted that communication issues exacerbated the issues and that Arredondo failed to take command and did not follow active shooter guidelines, noting “on multiple occasions, he directed officers intending to gain entry into the classrooms to stop, because he appeared to determine that other victims should first be removed from nearby classrooms to prevent further injury.”
The report also found failures in training and policy, noting many of those first on scene had never received active shooter training and the multiple agencies that responded had never trained together, leading to more confusion.
The report notes that Arredondo took 43 minutes to evacuate other classrooms in the school, delaying attempts to enter classrooms 111 and 112 where the shooting took place, even though there were many things that should have indicated to him that an active shooter situation was happening in those rooms.
Those include gunshots being fired, a notification that classes were in session and a 911 call from a student inside being broadcast over the radio multiple times.
The report also cited law enforcement for failing to take urgent action to establish a command structure, hindering cooperation, and specifically cited Arredondo for failing to provide appropriate leadership as de facto scene commander.
“Chief Arredondo was the on-scene incident commander, but he lacked a radio, having discarded his radios during his arrival thinking they were unnecessary,” the report notes.
The report also investigated what Gupta called continued failures after the shooter was neutralized. The lack of leadership left nobody in charge of triaging the victims, resulting in some deceased victims taken to hospitals on ambulances while those with gunshot wounds were put on school buses for transport.
There was also confusing communication regarding reunification, with families sent to multiple locations, and conflicting information about the status of the situation. Gupta noted that being told of a need for autopsy results was the first indication some families had that their child had died in the shooting.
Even for a mass shooting that has already been the subject of intense scrutiny and in-depth examinations, the nearly 600-page Justice Department report adds to the public understanding of how police in Uvalde failed to stop an attack that killed 19 children and two staff members.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
