Accountability needs to occur as Uvalde, Texas, recovers from the revelation that the police response to last week’s school shooting was flawed, Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas said on Sunday.
On Friday, Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said the decision not to let officers enter the classroom where the shooter killed 19 children and two adults “was the wrong decision.”
“It’s hard not to see how someone doesn’t get fired,” Crenshaw said during a CNN interview, according to Fox News.
Crenshaw calls for ‘accountability’ in Uvalde police response: ‘Protocols were not followed’ https://t.co/xpX1YCft7a
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“I know better than most not to necessarily judge the person who’s walking through the breach and is in that moment in the arena, but it does seem clear that protocols were not followed.”
“This isn’t a training problem,” Crenshaw said. “We have very clear training doctrine on this.”
“The situation changes for a barricaded shooter if there are innocents inside. You have to put away your sense of self-preservation and go through that door.
“I mean, the training clearly states that you might get shot, but the guy behind you might be able to get in and save innocent people. You have to put them before you. It doesn’t appear that that happened here,” he said
Would a faster response have saved lives in Uvalde?
“So what does accountability look like?” he said.
“And the fact that it took Border Patrol an hour later to come in and actually do the job for the police, I think, is pretty embarrassing for a lot of local police officers. So we’re going to see how this plays out, but there should definitely be accountability,” he said.
In a separate CNN interview, Democratic state Sen. Roland Gutierrez of Texas said that “these mistakes may have led to the passing away of these children as well,” according to Politico.
Gutierrez said he spoke to the mother of a victim whose daughter died from a single gunshot.
“The first responder that they eventually talked to said that their child likely bled out,” Gutierrez said. “In that span of 30 or 40 minutes extra, that little girl might have lived. That little girl might have lived.”
The Department of Justice announced Sunday it will also review the incident, according to Fox News.
“At the request of Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, the U.S. Department of Justice will conduct a Critical Incident Review of the law enforcement response to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24,” DOJ spokesman Anthony Coley said in a statement.
“The goal of the review is to provide an independent account of law enforcement actions and responses that day and to identify lessons learned and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events. The review will be conducted with the Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing,” Coley said.
“As with prior Justice Department after-action reviews of mass shootings and other critical incidents, this assessment will be fair, transparent and independent. The Justice Department will publish a report with its findings at the conclusion of its review.”
