His Department The justice is recommending the adoption of “national standards” for dealing with active shooters – with the goal of empowering local law enforcement to “quickly stop the killing and the death.”
This “critical” recommendation is a highlight of the federal government's news incident review, which was released Thursday morning. It details the horrific May 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which was likely made deadlier by what the report describes as “sequential failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training.”
The Uvalde shooter killed 19 students, two teachers and left more than a dozen others with serious injuries. The 610-page government report recounts, in harrowing detail, how officers arrived on the scene within three minutes of the attack. But instead of mounting an effective response to the shooter with the resources available, the local police chief—who lacked basic communications equipment, including radios—sought instead to contain the shooter, who was still able to shoot children and place a search keys to open the reinforced classroom door.
Even when “overwhelming numbers of law enforcement personnel from different agencies” arrived on the scene, the report describes, there was no effective command and control at the school. Because of this lack of effective leadership, law enforcement's response was slow – even as the shooter continued to shoot inside the school. The shooter was finally confronted and killed by federal agents “77 minutes after the first officers entered the school,” the report describes, and only after “45 shots were fired by the shooter in the presence of officers.”
This wildly disorganized response — in which even well-trained officers stood by as the minutes ticked by, and law enforcement continued to act as if the incident was a “subject-blocking scenario” rather than an “active shooter situation” — leads the federal government's recommendation to develop national standards for dealing with mass shooters.
The report describes that many officers on the scene “believed they were waiting for more elements, such as shields and a specialist tactical team, to arrive before they could go in”. The report counters that law enforcement responding to an active shooter “must be prepared to approach the threat and breach … a room using only the tools they have with them, which is often a standard firearm/service” .
National response standards, the report insists, will allow a “de-facto team of similarly trained officers” to “quickly come together, communicate and act as a team” moving immediately to “stop the killing and stop the death”. Such standards would also give on-scene leaders a playbook for when a “situation stalls” — to establish a core “tactical team” responsible for neutralizing the shooter while “removing all other personnel to avoid overcompensating for the situation ».
Introducing the report, Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted: “The victims and survivors of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School deserved better.” He bluntly described law enforcement's response to Uvalde as a “failure.” He insisted the federal review must spark change. “We hope to honor the victims and the survivors,” he said, “by working together to try to prevent something like this from happening again, here or anywhere.”
Among other key recommendations, the federal report also advises:
“Law enforcement training academies and providers must ensure that active shooter training modules include the factors that determine active shooter versus closed subject situations.”
“An active shooter with access to victims should never to be considered and treated as a closed issue”.
And: “[N]o only auxiliary equipment is required to respond to an active shooter.”
This is a developing story and may be updated.
Read the full Critical Incident Overview below:
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/uvalde-justice-department-national-active-shooter-training-1234948993/