Florida officials say mistakes made during Uvalde school shooting won’t happen here: ‘Every second counts’
New DOJ report: Major failures after Uvalde shooting
The Justice Department said they found "significant failures" after investigating the delayed police response to the deadly Uvalde elementary school shooting. The massacre happened in May 2022 and 19 children and two adults were killed. Evyn Moon reports.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - The Justice Department's report on a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas finds that police who responded to the shooting "demonstrated no urgency" in setting up a command post and failed to treat it as an active shooter situation.
The report was released on Thursday, nearly 20 months after the shooting at Robb Elementary School. It is only the third official report released on the shooting and identifies "cascading failures" in law enforcement's handling of the mass shooting.
"Every second counts. The priority of law enforcement must be to immediately enter the room and stop the shooter with whatever weapons and tools officers have with them," said Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday.
The 575-page report gives new details, from unreported warning signs to the 77 minutes officers took to stop the shooter. The most glaring missteps by deputies, who spent 40 minutes looking for keys to a cluster of classrooms without even checking if the doors were already unlocked, according to the report. It also states police leaders responded as if it was a barricade standoff, not an active-shooter situation.
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After the Parkland shooting in 2017, the Pinellas County Sheriff was appointed to lead a statewide committee on improving Florida campuses for active shooters. In February 2023, he said that Florida officials have learned a lot from that shooting.
A memorial outside of Robb Elementary School.
"The measures that we have worked hard and continue to work hard to put in place are very important because it's going to happen again," Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said. "We have single points of entry. We have fenced campuses with staff gates, we have communication devices, we have panic buttons, we have locked classroom doors, we have opaque coverings on windows."
A former SWAT team member, now active shooter response expert told FOX 13, his message after Uvalde: Don’t wait for police to react.
"Law enforcement's coming after the fact. We want people to be prepared to act on their own, even with kids," said Chad Ayers, ProActive Response Group. "Time is your most precious commodity that day -- and time is not on the gunman's hands. Unfortunately, at Uvalde, it was. But that was a lack of training and a lack of response in law enforcement."
Pictured: Victims of the Uvalde school shooting.
The Uvalde report also points to the aftermath, including kids who were shot, placed on buses without proper medical attention, and the insensitive way families were informed of their loved ones’ deaths by untrained professionals.
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Florida law enforcement says these mistakes -- before, during, and after -- won’t happen in the state.
"Look at what's happened and importantly not happened in Florida over the last five years. We haven't had another Stoneman Douglas. I think that we can say that the measures we put in place of at least contributed to that. And that's a good thing," Gualtieri said in Feb. 2023.
While the Uvalde report laws out police actions and shortfalls, it doesn’t make recommendations for punitive steps for Uvalde police.
The AP says the Justice Department report is the most comprehensive federal accounting of the police response to the May 24, 2022, shooting.