The response from law enforcement officials to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, contained a number of failures on officials’ part, according to a highly-anticipated Justice Department report obtained by a handful of news outlets ahead of its scheduled Thursday afternoon release.
The Justice Department described the overall response from law enforcement officials as “a failure” and said officers should have recognized the incident as an active shooter scenario and responded accordingly, but they did not.
As news investigations have found since, it took law enforcement 77 minutes from when the shooter entered the school to stop him and by that point 19 students and two teachers were killed.
The report said that leadership in law enforcement is “absolutely critical” in challenging moments such as responding to a mass shooting, but the necessary leadership “was absent for too long in the Robb Elementary School law enforcement response.”
The Justice Department report details what happened after law enforcement quickly arrived on the scene on May 24, 2022—they stopped once they got near the classrooms where the 18-year-old gunman was shooting.
The Justice Department said officials should have pushed into the room toward the threat “until the room was entered and the threat was eliminated” but that did not happen and instead the Justice Department said “the intensity level dropped” with time.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
Uvalde School Shooting Response Plagued By ‘Systemic Failures,’ State Report Finds (Forbes)