Meantime, Texas DPS has authorized its officers “responding to an active shooter at a school … to overcome any delay to neutralizing an attacker,” according to a July letter to staff from Director Col. Steven McCraw that was released Tuesday.
“In July, DPS announced the formation of an internal committee” to review is officers’ actions, agency spokesperson Ericka Miller said Tuesday in a statement. “Five DPS law enforcement officers have now been referred to the Office of Inspector General where a formal investigation into their actions that day will take place. Thus far, two of those five officers have been suspended with pay pending the outcome of the (office’s) investigation.”
Prosecutor Christina Mitchell Busbee will charge anyone who has committed a crime at Robb Elementary, including law enforcement officers, she’s said. “I have no hesitancy to seek an indictment on a law enforcement officer for a criminal offense, when appropriate, under the laws of Texas,” she told CNN in late July.
School shooters won’t be seen as ‘barricaded’
“In public testimony before the Senate Committee to Protect Texas, I stated that the law enforcement response to the active shooter attack at Robb Elementary School was an abject failure,” McCraw wrote in his July letter to “fellow employees.” “Every agency that responded that day shares in this failure, including DPS.”
McCraw in the same message announced what he called an “addition” to the Texas DPS shooting response policy. “When a subject fires a weapon at a school he remains an active shooter until he is neutralized and is not to be treated as a ‘barricaded subject,'” he wrote.
Texas DPS also is “in the process of purchasing ‘go bags’ containing breaching equipment and ballistic shields for all DPS officers,” McCraw added in his letter.
Doubts simmer over law enforcement capabilities
“We’ve already seen that (law enforcement officers) didn’t do their job. So, how are we supposed to trust that?” he said last week. “I don’t feel like my kids are safe.”
Third-grader Zayon Martinez was too traumatized by the shooting, during which he hid under a desk, his father said.
“He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. They’re not gonna protect us.'”
The head of the union that represents law enforcement officers across the state, including some in Uvalde, has called for an independent probe of Texas DPS in light of the school shooting.
Texas DPS “was fast to wash its hands, to point fingers and to make sure that the general public, particularly the elected officials, knew that they were spotless, blameless and that this was a local problem,” Wilkison said. “No one created this environment, (in) which everyone’s to blame except DPS. No one did that except them.”
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify the type of review under way by the Texas Department of Public Safety. It is an internal investigation.
CNN’s Rebekah Riess, Rosa Flores, Peter Nickeas, Holly Yan, Ashley Killough and Ed Lavandera contributed to this report.
Source : CNN