Earlier today, a report indicated that a Texas House committee would release hallway video of the Uvalde school shooting police response on Sunday after showing it to the families of victims and survivors. However, the Austin American-Statesman has gotten a copy of the video and just posted it.
The video includes exterior footage of the killer crashing his truck, shooting at by standers and then approaching the school.
As the American-Statesman describes the newly released video evidence . . .
A 77-minute video recording captured from this vantage point, along with body camera footage from one of the responding officers, obtained by the American-Statesman and KVUE, shows in excruciating detail dozens of sworn officers, local, state and federal — heavily armed, clad in body armor, with helmets, some with protective shields — walking back and forth in the hallway, some leaving the camera frame and then reappearing, others training their weapons toward the classroom, talking, making cellphone calls, sending texts and looking at floor plans, but not entering or attempting to enter the classrooms.
The video, above, showing dozens of cops doing nothing brings to mind the security camera footage of Scot Peterson standing outside Marjory Stoneman-Douglas High School, listening to the sounds of students and staff being murdered inside.
Again from the American-Statesman . . .
The video tells in real time the brutal story of how heavily armed officers failed to immediately launch a cohesive and aggressive response to stop the shooter and save more children if possible. And it reinforces the trauma of those parents, friends and bystanders who were outside the school and pleaded with police to do something, and for those survivors who quietly called 911 from inside the classroom to beg for help.
Hearing the constantly shifting stories of the police response change over and over again in the days and weeks following the massacre, it gradually became all too clear that police were, at best, incompetent that day given long-established protocols for law enforcement tactics in active shooter situations.
The newly released video from Uvalde, however, showing well armed officers in tactical gear, some with ballistic shields, literally standing around for well over an hour while more children were being killed and at least some of the wounded died as a result of the delay is utterly devastating.
The video confirms the worst descriptions of what police did or, more accurately, didn’t do that day and, if anything, renders Texas DPS Director Steven McCraw’s assessment — he called the Uvalde response “an abject failure” — far too kind.
