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The Texas Inspector General’s Office will investigate five Department of Public Safety officers for their actions during the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two teachers dead on May 24, the Austin-American Statesman reports.
State police announced an internal review of their officers’ actions in July after a special House committee investigating the shooting released an 80-page report that was critical of the law enforcement response.
More than 370 law enforcement officers responded to the shooting, including 91 DPS officers, but it took over 70 minutes for police to breach the classroom and take out the gunman.
A banner hangs at a memorial outside Robb Elementary School, the site of a mass shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers, on Friday, June 3.
(AP/Eric Gay)
Texas DPS Director Steven McCraw primarily blamed former Uvalde School Police Chief Pete Arredondo for the delayed response, naming him as the incident commander and accusing him in June of placing “the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
Arredondo, who was fired by the Uvalde school board last month, has said that he didn’t consider himself the incident commander and wasn’t aware that wounded children were in the classroom with the gunman.
UVALDE SCHOOL YEAR STARTS WITH SECURITY MEASURES STILL UNDERWAY
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin has taken issue with the blame being cast on local police.
“There were no less than eight law enforcement agencies present in the hallway leading up to the breach of the door at Robb Elementary School,” McLaughlin said at a city council meeting a month after the shooting. “Every briefing, [McCraw] leaves out the number of his own officers and rangers that were on scene that day.
Robb Elementary School is cordoned off by police after the shooting on May 24.
(AP/Jae C. Hong)
The Texas House Committee wrote in its report that it “did not find any ‘villains’ in the course of its investigation.”
“There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives,” the lawmakers wrote. “Instead, we found systemic failures and egregiously poor decision-making.”
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Texas DPS also instructed officers in July to treat any person who opens fire at a school as an “active shooter until he is neutralized,” saying that a suspect should never be treated as a “barricaded subject,” according to the Austin-American Statesman.
A spokesperson for Texas DPS did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
