While this report from the Department of Justice regarding the school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has no surprises for those who followed the horrific twists and turns in real time, it is a damning indictment of law enforcement.

To put it bluntly, those who were supposed to be the “professionals in charge” in Uvalde screwed up, were too complacent, and people died as a result.

A review team empowered by the department to investigate the shooting “identified several critical failures and other breakdowns prior to, during, and after the Robb Elementary School response,” the report found.

An 18-year-old gunman entered Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, killing 19 students and two teachers before law enforcement breached the classroom and killed the shooter. Responding officers from state and local outfits waited some 77 minutes before breaching a classroom and killing the shooter.

That work culminated this week in a searing 575-page report that includes gut-wrenching new details about law enforcement’s lack of preparation for an active shooter, failures in the police response, and the toll of misinformation and chaos in its aftermath.

The school and the school district were woefully unprepared, the report found. Most officers “lacked specialized, advanced training and preparation to handle such situations” and the school district had cultivated “a culture of complacency regarding locked-door policies” – both of which contributed to the challenges in responding to the incident.

The review team reserved its most critical commentary for the officers who arrived first on scene, who retreated from the classroom and treated the gunman as a barricaded subject, not an active shooter. The review team described this as “the most significant failure.”

“The most significant failure was that responding officers should have immediately recognized the incident as an active shooter situation, using the resources and equipment that were sufficient to push forward immediately and continuously toward the threat until entry was made into classrooms 111/112 and the threat was eliminated,” according to the report.

Lt. Mariano Pargas, Uvalde’s acting police chief at the time, was among the first officers to arrive at Robb. He was deemed by the review team to be “the person best positioned to direct command and control” the law enforcement response, but “failed to do so.”

After the initial failure to pursue and confront the shooter, communications breakdowns compounded the confusion on-scene – even after the arrival of Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, whom the report identified as the de-facto on-scene commander. Arredondo “lacked a radio,” the report found, “having discarded his radios during his arrival thinking they were unnecessary.”

“Leadership … demonstrated no urgency for establishing a command and control structure, which led to challenges related to information sharing, lack of situational statuses, and limited-to-no direction for personnel in the hallway or on the perimeter,” the report found.

These were all details we knew as the investigation moved forward after the shooting, including the detail that one officer was removed from the scene because his wife had been shot and was in the room with the shooter. We knew that law enforcement sat around, and that no one took control of the situation. The decision made on the scene to not follow established protocol for an active school shooter ended up being a fatal one.

The Justice Department report describes the quick arrival of law enforcement officers who ran toward the sound of gunfire, then almost immediately stopped once they got near the classrooms where the gunman was killing fourth graders and educators – a decision that ran counter to widely established active shooter response protocol, which instructs law enforcement to move toward and eliminate any threat.

“Officers on scene should have recognized the incident as an active shooter scenario and moved and pushed forward immediately and continuously toward the threat until the room was entered, and the threat was eliminated. That did not occur,” it says.

Instead, the intensity level dropped as responders began to treat the situation as a “barricaded suspect” operation that did not need immediate action, even as more officers arrived and the signals of ongoing danger multiplied.

That was the “single most critical tactical failure,” the team from the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services finds.

Then-school Police Chief Pete Arredondo, then-acting Uvalde Police Chief Mariano Pargas and Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco are singled out for failing to lead. Both were on the scene within minutes, but neither took effective command, the report finds.

Arredondo, whom the Justice Department calls the de facto on-scene commander, even delayed help getting to the children and their teachers in classrooms 111 and 112, thinking they were already dead, the report finds, as CNN has reported.

“He acknowledged the likelihood that there were victims and deceased in the room with the shooter and intentionally prioritized the evacuations over immediate breach and entry into the room,” the report says.

“This is counter to active shooter response principles, which state the priority is to address and eliminate the threat.”

As we know, Pete Arredondo has consistently dodged any responsibility for what happened that day, including making the school board fire him instead of him resigning in disgrace.

The report also details how disjointed and disorganized the medical response was for the victims once the shooter was eliminated, including a lack of appropriate triage and treatment, and a breakdown when it came to notifying families with accurate information. And yes, the crime scene was not secured.

Initial crime scene investigation was hampered by too many people going to have a look at classrooms 111 and 112, while the gunman’s hellfire trigger system – only later recovered from a trash can – was not catalogued as evidence because teams didn’t know what it was or its possible relevance, the Justice Department report finds. Further, an FBI offer to process the shooter’s truck before a storm was not accepted, it says, leading to heavy rain compromising evidence there.

A press conference today, given by Attorney General Merrick Garland, laid out many of the findings and pointed out the failures in Uvalde.

The DOJ report apparently gives Uvalde an action plan going forward, even though many changes have already taken place.

The department offered a list of detailed recommendations. They included requiring adherence to guidelines, created in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine school shooting, that call for neutralizing the gunman immediately in any situation where an active shooter might be present.

Officers responding to such a situation “must be prepared” to risk their lives for the protection of their communities, the report said, even if they have inadequate firepower and are armed with only a standard-issue handgun to confront a gunman with a much more powerful weapon.

The report includes a lengthy to-do list for systemic improvements, like establishing a clear chain-of-command structure at the scenes of mass shootings and adhering more strictly to school safety protocols.

Some of the report’s recommendations have already been implemented, and several police officials in Uvalde — including the school district police chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, and the acting Uvalde police chief Mariano Pargas — have already been fired or have resigned.

However, the DOJ does not address any potential criminal prosecutions or sanctions.

While the report lays out law enforcement actions – and shortfalls – in often-excruciating detail, it also has its limits: The much-anticipated assessment, for instance, does not make recommendations for punitive steps and offers limited introspection of federal forces’ actions.

This is interesting because the Justice Department has been more than happy to take over local law enforcement agencies with “consent decrees” in order to push the DOJ’s agenda in local jurisdictions. Will the Justice Department be pursuing a consent decree in Uvalde in order to “fix” the problems that were uncovered in this report? Or is the removal and/or resignation of those deemed to be at fault enough for the DOJ?

Naturally, Joe Biden’s team (not Biden himself, we all know he doesn’t tweet or speak in complete sentences) decided this was the perfect time to grandstand for… wait for it… gun control. Which was NOT the point of the report.

NEW: President Biden responds to release of scathing DOJ report into the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas calls for new gun safety laws:

“Congress must now pass commonsense gun safety laws to ensure that mass shootings like this one don’t happen in the first place.  We need… pic.twitter.com/OPr09gC48X

— Ali Bradley (@AliBradleyTV) January 18, 2024

Nothing is ever going to bring back the souls that were lost on that day in Uvalde. This report simply confirms what became quickly apparent when the shooting happened – that there was a massive failure in law enforcement leadership, and people died because police sat outside the door, twiddling their thumbs. Fortunately, the story of Uvalde is now a warning to law enforcement, and in school shootings since then, police have acted aggressively and without hesitation in their efforts to eliminate threats and save lives. If anything good can come out of the legacy of Uvalde, let it be that police know exactly what to do when confronted with an active shooter, with no confusion or dawdling.

Featured image: Robb Elementary School in 2015, via Don Holloway on Flickr, cropped, CC BY 2.0.