Police Response To Ovalde S Shooting Was Great Failure Says Steven Mccrow

In his remarks to a special State Senate committee in Austin, Steven McCrow, director of the Department of Public Safety, provided the most complete public report to date on his agency’s investigation a month ago and a strong argument they could have police officers at the scene – and should – confront the gunman without delay upon arrival. Minutes after a gunman opened fire on children on May 24, he said, police at the scene had enough firepower and protective equipment to invade the ranks. “The only thing that prevented a corridor of dedicated officers from entering Halls 111 and 112 was the on-site commander,” McCrow said. But the commander “decided to put the lives of the officers above the lives of the children,” he said, delaying the clash with the gunman for more than an hour while “waiting for a key he never needed.” Most of the victims appear to have been shot in the first minutes of the shooting. But Mr McCraw’s testimony was a central and painful question that still hung over the massacre and the late police response, a question that investigators sought to answer through police interviews and video reviews: Doors were locked. classes, preventing police officers from entering in time to rescue others? “I do not believe, based on the information we have at the moment, that this door was ever secured,” Mr McCrow said of the classroom door the gunman entered. “The door was uncovered.” He said the classroom doors at the school would normally have been set with a key to lock automatically when closed. But the gunman was able to enter the classroom, he noted, implying that either the door was not set to lock or it was not completely closed. A teacher had asked for the lock to be repaired before the shooting, he said, adding that the lock was not broken but the so-called impact plate was “malfunctioning”, requiring someone to pull it to close it. In any case, he said, “There is no way to lock the door from the inside. And there is no way for the issue to lock the door from the inside. “ Mr McCraw focused his responsibility on the commander-in-chief, whom he identified as the head of the Uvalde School District Police Department, Pete Arendo, who said he was the high-ranking official at the scene. The leader said he did not consider himself responsible, but Mr McCraw disputed that. “If you are going to issue orders, if you are going to direct action,” he said, “you are the commander on the scene.” The belated clash with the gunman, Mr McCrow said, was “contrary to everything we have learned in the last two decades since the Columbine massacre” in 1999. Several of the senators reacted with shock and anger. “Every shot is a death knell,” said Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from the Houston suburbs. “And yet this incident commander finds every reason to do nothing.” “I urge this leader to testify in public,” Mr. Betancourt said loudly at one point, referring to Chief Arendodo. The leader was also in the State Capitol on Tuesday, testifying before a closed-door hearing by a Texas investigative committee. He did not speak to the media before or after. A Chief Arredondo’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment and the chief said he did not want to discuss the case further until the investigation was completed. Mr. McCraw has been director of the Department of Public Safety since 2009 and oversees both the State Police and the Texas Rangers, the organization investigating the Ovalde shooting. Hailing from El Paso, Mr. McCraw began serving as a Texas soldier in the 1970s and later joined the FBI before returning to Texas law enforcement as director of state security under Governor Rick Perry. His testimony, for more than four hours, was unusually charged because it followed weeks of little to no formal information about the investigation and came after a hiatus and troubled initial attempt by top government officials to provide details about the shooting and police. answer. On Tuesday, Mr McCraw brought up posters showing a timeline of the shootings and police response to the school, photos of the school doors and two maps showing how the gunman and police entered the school and then the two connected classrooms. . He walked among them as he presented the findings of the investigators to the assembled senators of the state. She also had a section of a classroom door, which she took from Robb Elementary, and showed her locking mechanism. The senators asked immediate questions about the answer, but also referred to the wider political debate over school safety and gun control that erupted in the aftermath of the Uvalde shootings. “You do not need a gun,” said Sen. Bob Hall, an East Texas Republican. “This man had enough time to do it with his hands. Or a baseball bat. “ Jon Rosenthal, a Democrat in the Texas House of Representatives who watched the hearing from afar, took the opposite lesson. “Tell me again how arming our teachers is your solution to the problem of gun violence,” he wrote on Twitter. “The problem is the weapons.” The outline presented by Mr McCraw confirmed details first reported by the New York Times in a series of articles last month, including that police officers who first arrived at the school – two minutes after the gunman – were AR -15 rifles and that the shields that could have been used to protect the officers entering the classroom had arrived before 12pm, almost an hour before the officers finally arrived. Mr McCraw also provided new details, such as the exact time Arredondo arrived at the school at 11:36 a.m., three minutes after the gunman entered the classroom and started firing. The timetable also noted that, at 11:54 a.m., a Texas Ranger was inside the school, one of at least 12 members of the state police who responded between the time the gunman started firing on the classrooms at 11:33 p.m. .μ. and when police killed him at 12:50 p.m. The presentation is in stark contrast to the version of events presented by Chief Arredondo in an interview with The Texas Tribune. The Times reported that Mr. Arredondo had arrived at the school without his police radio and focused on finding the keys to the classrooms, although it was not apparent in the videos that someone had checked the classroom door to see if it was locked. Chief Arredondo said the classrooms were locked and he knew this because he and another officer had checked both doors. He said he then focused on finding keys, trying dozens of them, he said, in an effort to find one that would work on the doors. Eventually one was located, he said, and used by the group that entered the classroom and killed the gunman. But Mr McCraw said there was no indication, either from videos or interviews, that anyone had actually checked the doors. “In addition, you do not need a key,” he said, pointing to the availability of intrusion tools and the ability to enter through windows. Tuesday’s hearing was the first public comment on the investigation for several weeks. The Department of Public Safety stopped making public announcements within a week of the shooting after several of the details released by officials, including Mr. McCraw and Governor Greg Abbott, turned out to be incorrect. The information corrected included the time it took police officers to fire the first shots at the gunman (not immediately, but an hour and 17 minutes after he started firing inside the school) and how he had access to the building (not through a door that was open, but from one that was unlocked.) Instead of providing briefings, State Police began referring media investigations to local attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee, who declined requests for interviews and did not conduct press conferences. The changing narrative surrounding the massacre, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, quickly undermined confidence in official shooting reports and sparked tensions between government officials and those in Uvalde, most of whom gathered around the police station. their city and the leader Arredondo. who recently took a seat in the City Council. The tensions only escalated when Mr McCroy gave a press conference three days after the shooting and said that Chief Arendodo was responsible for the police response and had made the “wrong decision” by not trying to deal with the gunman immediately. Shortly after that May 27 press conference, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin asked the federal Department of Justice to conduct its own investigation, independent of that of the Texas Rangers. The State House is also conducting its own investigation, which means that there are now at least three inquiries into what happened. Without official information, details emerged through other means, including investigative documents, video surveillance and transcripts of the police body’s camera recordings examined by the Times. The Times revealed that police officers had said that there were people alive but injured in the classrooms. that an officer had a telephone call with his wife, a teacher, after he had been shot but before he died, and that he had told other officers at 11:48 a.m., giving them a clear indication that people in the classroom were in urgent need of assistance; and that an Ovalde policeman missed the opportunity to shoot the gunman outside the school, fearing that he might hit …