As President Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden visit Uvalde, Texas today in the wake of last week's deadly school shooting, the Justice Department says it will investigate the conduct of the local police response to the attack, which by all indications was a complete failure that directly contributed to the deaths.
The critical incident review, requested by Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, will include a report on law enforcement actions on May 24 — the day of shooting. The report will be conducted by the department's Office of Community Oriented Policing.
“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," said Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley.
“As with prior Justice Department after-action reviews of mass shootings and other critical incidents, this assessment will be fair, transparent, and independent."
Local police have admitted to a number of failures in responding to the shooting that left 21 people, including 19 children, dead.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said Friday that police made the "wrong decision" by waiting to confront the shooter.
“There were plenty of officers to do what needed to be done, with one exception, is that the incident commander inside believed he needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that time," McCraw said. “From the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. There’s no excuse for that.”
By all accounts, the Uvalde response team refused to go into the building because they already thought the kids were dead, and that there was no reason to rush to risk their lives in a shootout that was now a hostage situation. Of course, that was 100% nonsense as 911 calls were still coming from kids in the school building for 40 minutes.
The reality is cops are generally bullies, and all bullies are cowards deep down. They were afraid of an 18-year-old with an AR-15 who had shown he was willing to kill with it, and frankly that's the best argument yet that "police were too scared to go after the shooter given his firepower" for an assault weapons ban.
Again, three big things here, separate but related.
One, it's easier to get an AR-15 in Texas than to vote. Texas has one of the lowest Medicaid coverage rates for mental illness in America, less than 10%. The shooter should have been red flagged, the resources should have been there to prevent this, but he walked into the local gun store, got the rifle, got the ammo, and killed 21 people with it, 19 of them children.
Two, police lied to the press open-faced in the first 24-48 hours and the press believed them. The shooter "was engaged" and "had body armor", someone the Uvalde police were unable to stop despite training, because he was too much of an armed killer. None of that was true either, and it was only after parents of the victims were allowed to tell their stories that it became clear that Gov. Abbott and Texas Republicans were all helping to cover up this failure.
Three, Sen. Mitch McConnell is already plotting to blame the failure of any new legislation on Democrats. The fix is already in as Greg Sargent reminds us.
We’ve seen this before. When the House impeached Donald Trump over the violent Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt, McConnell signaled openness to convicting Trump. This produced headlines proclaiming “McConnell open to convicting Trump in impeachment trial.”
But in the end he voted to acquit Trump, as was surely his intention all along. Then as now, he got headlines advertising his reasonableness at exactly the moment when public emotions (over the attack on the Capitol) were at their height.
Any basic reading of McConnell’s incentives implies that this is likely to happen again. Killing a deal on gun control avoids the risk of a backlash from the Republican base, which might recoil at any deal as an unconscionable betrayal.
McConnell also knows that the Democratic base is frustrated with their leaders, in general and on this issue in particular. Congressional failure on guns could demobilize that base, making them more likely to stay home in November in disgust, boosting GOP chances.
We should offer a caveat. It’s perfectly possible that this time McConnell will decide a deal is more in his interests than failure is. He might calculate that the public’s horror over this shooting is so deep that being part of a bipartisan solution could give Republicans more benefit in the midterms than failure would.
After all, there are times that McConnell calculates that allowing bipartisanship to happen is better for him and Republicans politically, such as when the infrastructure bill passed last year.
And in this case, any deal will likely be pretty modest. As Murphy has said, such a compromise might combine a “red-flag” law with a proposal to close a loophole that allows some sellers to avoid performing background checks. That would fall well short of universal background checks, though still worth doing.
So maybe McConnell will decide that this is so modest that it carries more upside than downside. On the other hand, even if Republicans are feeling extra pressure to act, remember what happened after the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children in 2012: Senators reached a bipartisan deal seriously beefing up background checks. It had overwhelming public support. It fell to a GOP filibuster, led by ... McConnell.
The core point here is that McConnell’s calculation of what’s in Republicans’ naked political interests will carry the day either way. Substance will be largely irrelevant.
So no, I don't expect this time to be different, and the next school shooting will also be a national tragedy, and the next one, and the next...
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