Mass-shooting report aims to help police elsewhere avoid such errors, especially in rural places; Uvalde still divided - Entrepreneur Generations

Uvalde County (Wikipedia map)

The Justice Department's Thursday report on the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, is designed to help avoid the mistakes police made, but seems unlikely to heal the divisions that remain in the town of 15,000 and same-named county of 25,000.

“They’re recomending stuff that we already knew,” but “In a lot of smaller towns like Uvalde, police chiefs have to be questioning, ‘What’s in this report?’ . . . Let’s make sure I don’t become that person,” said John Miller, CNN's law-enforcment analyst and former spokesman for the FBI and the New York Police Department.

Miller said a gunman's killing of 19 students and two teachers, and the physical injury of 17 others, was “an incident that was just too big in a place that was just too small.” He said the incdent commander, the school police chief, should have ceded authority to better-equipped agencies. The investigation was requested by then-Mayor Don McLaughlin, a Republican.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, in Uvalde, said “The report concludes that had law-enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” rather than letting 77 minutes elapse between their first arrival and their killing of the shooter.

The report was the fullest account yet of the tragedy, but some victims' families said it should have named more names. Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director, said on CNN that the purpose of such a "critical indicdent review is not to hold people accountable, but to make a complete statement of facts and say how law enforcement can learn from mistakes."

Victims' families continued to demand action from local District Attorney Christina Miller Busbee, who has said she would wait for the report before taking any action. But they said many of their neighbors want to move on and not "be known as the place with a mass shooting," said Brett Cross, who was a guardian of a child killed in the shooting. "Maybe these people will start taking us seriously."

Cross told CNN that the Uvalde community remains “very divided,” noting that several officers remain in their positions, some of them elected. “They don’t want to believe that the people grew up with failed our children.” Adam Martinez, father of an injured survivor, told CNN, “If we don’t put pressure, nothing is going to happen. . . . It’s uncomfortable when you have to say people didn’t do their job. . . . You have to go against the grain, and more people have to do that.”

Pedro "Pete" Arredondo, the school police chief, lost his job. In November, "Lt. Mariano Pargas of Uvalde police, who was the acting police chief on the day of the shooting, resigned days before the City Council was set to discuss his termination. He had been placed on leave in July; he stepped down following a CNN report that showed he was told that “eight to nine” children were alive in the classrooms but he failed to coordinate action," the Texas Tribune reported.

The Washington Post reported one year after the May 24, 2022, shooting, "The acting Uvalde police chief the day of the shooting resigned but was reelected to a county office he had held along with his law enforcement post. The first state police officer disciplined after the massacre was given the option to resign and now works for a local sheriff’s office."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/ONnpkBW Mass-shooting report aims to help police elsewhere avoid such errors, especially in rural places; Uvalde still divided - Entrepreneur Generations

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