The US Department of Justice concludes in a report published Thursday, January 18, that there was a “series of critical failures” for the response of law enforcement to the shooting at a school in Uvalde (Texas), which caused the death of nineteen children and two teachers on May 24, 2022.
The rapporteurs, who wrote a document of more than 550 pages, cite in particular the fact that the police officers on site did not “immediately consider that it was a case of a shooter in action”. They point to a “cascade of failures in command, decision-making, tactics, policy and training that contributed to these failures and failings.”
Following the killing which shook this small town in Texas, the delay in police intervention to stop the massacre had caused anger and incomprehension, the nineteen officers on site awaiting the onslaught of a specialized unit.
Still, law enforcement had received numerous calls from people in affected classrooms, including one from a child pleading: “Please send the police now. »
“The shooter was only killed approximately seventy-seven minutes after the arrival of the first police officers,” underline the authors of the report, produced from 260 interviews and nine visits, or fifty-four days on site. , according to the document.
