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.”
“Missteps” implies that the police did things.
They failed to act and instead they let children get murdered. I know the SC said that cops don’t have to protect you whatsoever, but this is beyond the pale. You have a duty to the American people given that they pay your salary, you fat fucking worthless pitiful excuses for law “enforcement”.
The precedent is that an individual officer has no duty to protect any given individual on the basis that the collective police have a responsibility to the public as a whole that outweighs an individual. That argument doesn’t work when the entire department stood by and actively prevented any action against the shooter.