UVALDE, Texas (AP) — An investigation Uvalde city leaders ordered into the Robb Elementary School shooting cleared local police officers of wrongdoing Thursday, despite acknowledging a series of rippling failures during the fumbled response to the 2022 classroom attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
Several family members of victims walked out in anger midway though a presentation that portrayed Uvalde Police Department officers of acting swiftly and appropriately, in contrast to scathing and sweeping past reports that faulted police at every level.
“You said they did it in good faith. You call that good faith? They stood there 77 minutes,” said Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was among those killed in the attack, after the presentation ended.
Another person in the crowd screamed, “Cowards!”
Jesse Prado, an Austin-based investigator and former police detective who made the report for the Uvalde City Council on Thursday, described several failures by responding local, state and federal officers at the scene that day: communication problems, poor training for live shooter situations, lack of available equipment and delays on breaching the classroom.
“There were problems all day long with communication and lack of it. The officers had no way of knowing what was being planned, what was being said,” Prado said. “If they would have had a ballistic shield, it would have been enough to get them to the door.”
“The officers didn’t actually shoot any of the children themselves, so therefor they did nothing wrong.”
Did they ever release the body cam footage to confirm that they didn’t?
That footage will never, and I mean, NEVER see the light of day. It will have to be leaked to get out.
If they did no wrong, then they would release it. Since they haven’t released it and never will, wrong has definitely been done.
If it hasn’t been destroyed, it would take burglary of a police station to get it released.
I could have sworn they did release it. I remember people saying that it was graphic because you should see dead children on the floor as the police, nonchalantly, walked around the building.
There have been a few mass shootings with released footage, but Uvalde isn’t one of them. The prevailing theory is that a cop (or multiple cops) accidentally shot a kid (or multiple kids) in the classroom so the footage has been buried. IIRC, at least one kid in the classroom had gunshot wounds that weren’t consistent with the caliber of gun the shooter was using, but matched standard police issue.
Holy fuck, really? I didn’t keep up with it at all, but that seems like a pretty significant indictment of the department and the officers there, way beyond even just the extremely laggardly response time and very poor tactical decision making. That’s also what I would say is pretty definitive evidence, caliber mismatch isn’t something you can really handwave away. Do you got any sources on deck for this?
At this point, I’m starting to think that the officers delaying so long might have actually prevented more children and bystanders from getting killed … if they had gone in earlier with guns blazing at everything that moved, they probably would have killed a lot of innocent bystanders before realizing who they were actually supposed to shoot in the first place.