The largest police union in Texas criticized authorities’ handling of the Uvalde elementary school shooting, saying that “false and misleading information” about the mass shooting came from “the very highest levels of government and law enforcement.”
“Sources that Texans once saw as iron-clad and completely reliable have now been proven false,” the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas said in a statement released on Tuesday night.
“This false information has exacerbated ill-informed speculation which has, in turn, created a hotbed of unreliability when it comes to finding the truth,” CLEAT said.
Texas authorities have faced intense backlash for changing their story more than a dozen times about what happened before, during, and after the May 24 shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, which left 19 children and two teachers dead.
“There has been a great deal of false and misleading information in the aftermath of this tragedy,” the police union said, adding, “Some of the information came from the very highest levels of government and law enforcement.”
Additionally, the police union advised its more than 25,000 members “to cooperate fully with all official governmental investigations into actions relating to the law enforcement response to the Uvalde mass shooting.”
The union made the warning after state officials said Pete Arredondo, the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, wasn’t cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is leading the investigation into the mass shooting.
Last week, Col. Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, identified Arredondo as the on-scene commander during the school shooting who made the “wrong decision” in delaying authorities for more than an hour from breaching the classroom where an 18-year-old gunman carried out the shooting.
“The on-scene commander at that time believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject,” McCraw said, adding, “He was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children.” “From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course, it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. Period,” McCraw said.
Ultimately, a US Border Patrol tactical team stormed into the classroom more than an hour after the gunman entered the school and shot and killed him. Texas DPS said on Tuesday that Arredondo stopped cooperating with state investigators and had “yet to respond” to a request for a follow-up interview.
