United States | News & Politics

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A Justice Department investigation released on Thursday found that a near-total breakdown in policing protocols hindered the response to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 people dead — but the gravest error was the reluctance of officials to confront the killer during the first few minutes of the attack.

The department blamed “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” for the delayed and passive law enforcement response that allowed an 18-year-old gunman with a semiautomatic rifle to remain inside a pair of connected fourth grade classrooms at Robb Elementary School for 77 minutes before he was confronted and killed.

The “most significant failure,” investigators concluded, was the fateful decision by local police officials to classify the incident as a barricaded standoff rather than an “active-shooter” scenario, which would have demanded instant and aggressive action regardless of the danger to those responding or the lack of appropriate weapons to confront the gunman.

The report, known as a critical incident review and initiated 20 months ago at the request of the town’s former mayor, Don McLaughlin, also found fault with local and state officials who provided incomplete and at times inaccurate information to the families of students and the news media.

That state report cited a range of factors unrelated to law enforcement that contributed to the sluggish response, including the remote location of Uvalde, a small city of 14,000, and its proximity to a border crossing with Mexico that has been a popular gateway for illegal immigration.

For more than an hour, local, state and federal officials, including agents from the U.S. Border Patrol, discussed how to deal with the situation — and made the fateful decision to classify the incident as a barricaded standoff, requiring negotiation, rather than an active-shooter scenario, which would demand an immediate and aggressive response.

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