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The city of Uvalde released a trove of records Saturday related to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, ending its more than two-year legal battle with nearly two dozen news organizations, including The Texas Tribune and ProPublica.
The material contains body and dash camera videos from responding Uvalde Police Department officers, documents between city officials, and hundreds of audio files from local police communications and emergency calls to city dispatchers, as well as those made by witnesses. The city is the first government entity to release records related to the Uvalde shooting, agreeing to a settlement with the news organizations that sued for the material. Other state and local government agencies continue to fight the public disclosure of their related records.
This is a developing story that will be updated as ProPublica and the Tribune review the records.
Laura Prather, who represented the news agencies, called the release a “step toward transparency,” and noted that the Uvalde school district, Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office and Texas Department of Public Safety are still fighting to withhold materials related to the shooting and law enforcement response.
“Transparency is necessary to help Uvalde heal and allow us all to understand what happened and learn how to prevent future tragedies,” said Prather, media law chair for Haynes Boone.
Nineteen fourth-grade students and two teachers were slain in what became the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. Nearly 400 officers from about two dozen local, state and federal law enforcement agencies waited 77 minutes to confront the teen shooter in a classroom. A state House committee investigating the response determined the room was likely unlocked all along.
ProPublica and the Tribune previously obtained material related to the botched response, including body camera footage and more than 200 interviews that law enforcement, witnesses and victims provided to the Texas Rangers, an arm of DPS initially investigating the shooting and police response.
In all, the leaked records showed widespread and previously unknown failures, which the newsrooms detailed in a minute-by-minute documentary published last year in collaboration with FRONTLINE as well as an accompanying investigation, as part of an ongoing series about the Uvalde shooting over the past two years.
The newsrooms’ investigation revealed that while the children in Uvalde were prepared, following what they had learned in their active shooter drills, many of the officers who responded were not. Many had not received active shooting training in years.
The U.S. Justice Department heavily criticized the delayed response and said that had responding officers followed common training practices, some victims would have survived.
In addition to the lawsuit against the city of Uvalde, the news conglomeration also sued the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Although two state district judges in Texas ruled in favor of the newsrooms in both lawsuits and ordered the government entities to make their records public, all three latter agencies appealed the decisions. That has prolonged the complete release of materials related to that day, which several victims’ families have said they seek.
The city in a statement Saturday said it wished to comply with the court order and end a legal battle.
“In the interest of serving taxpayers, the Uvalde community, and ensuring compliance with [Texas Public Information Act], the City is fulfilling its responsibility to provide responsive records, which have been appropriately redacted in accordance with Texas law pursuant to the Court’s Order, to conclude this lawsuit,” the statement read. “The City is exercising careful diligence to protect privacy rights and to comply with the Court’s Order.”
Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, who is now a Republican candidate for the Texas House, said in a phone interview Saturday morning that the other government entities in the lawsuit should follow the city’s example.
“The only way we’re going to know what truly happened is for everybody to release their records, put them out there,” McLaughlin said. “Mistakes were made, there’s no denying that. Take your lumps.”
Representatives for the sheriff’s office, the school district and DPS did not immediately return calls or emails Saturday.
The mistakes at Uvalde were many. Law enforcement failed to set up a clear command structure and no single officer took charge as the incident commander. Although the former school police chief, Pete Arredondo, was designated as such on the district’s active shooter plan, he later denied responsibility for that role.
More than two years after the shooting, Uvalde residents have said that they still feel like there is little accountability and few answers on who is to blame and why the law enforcement response went so wrong.
The investigation from the U.S. Justice Department released in January largely affirmed ProPublica and the Tribune’s findings about the botched response and law enforcement’s disparities in preparedness not only in Uvalde, but across the country.
The DOJ in its review recommended at least eight hours of active shooter training annually for every officer in the country.
“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference earlier this year.
In May, the city of Uvalde reached a settlement with the families of the victims, agreeing to overhaul police training and hiring policies. The agency also vowed to pay $2 million in restitution.
Victims’ families are seeking millions more from other government entities and private companies in multiple lawsuits that are ongoing.
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