Just how much of this new report from the Department of Justice is new — or news? The Texas legislature issued a devastating report on the mass shooting in Uvalde back in July 2022, which finall.
Just how much of this new report from the Department of Justice is new — or news? The Texas legislature issued a devastating report on the mass shooting in Uvalde back in July 2022, which finally forced some people out of their jobs, although clearly not enough of them. That report, although relatively brief at 77 pages (apart from the table of contents), clearly laid the blame on the school for not taking its active-shooter security seriously and failing to maintain its security hardware and processes. The report tore into the responders even more for cowering in the hallways rather than acting to stop the shooting and ignoring their active-shooter training.
Eighteen months later, the DoJ has a 600-page report that reaches essentially the same conclusions:
A scathing Justice Department report into the 2022 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, described “cascading failures of leadership” and directs blame at responding officers for failing to confront the shooter sooner.
The review team “identified several critical failures and other breakdowns prior to, during, and after the Robb Elementary School response,” the report found. …
The Justice Department assessment builds on a report issued in July 2022 by a special committee of the Texas state legislature which described a series of “shortcomings and failures” in the law enforcement response.
Members of the review team visited Uvalde nine times, spending a total of 54 days on site and conducting more than 260 interviews with individuals from more than 30 organizations with knowledge of the response.
This seems rather … unimpressive. Investigators spent in total less than two months conducting interviews in Uvalde, and it took twenty months to complete the report? That’s eighteen months after the Texas legislative report, which should have accelerated the DoJ effort to produce their own assessment.
