Following a surge of fresh outrage over the hiring of a former state trooper who was a part of the hesitant law enforcement response during the May shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 21 people dead, Uvalde’s school district on Friday (local time) terminated its troubled campus police force.
According to a statement issued by the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, school administrators also placed two members of the district police department on administrative leave; one of them opted to retire instead. The remaining cops will be moved to different positions within the district.
One month into the new school year in the South Texas city, the extraordinary decision by Uvalde school authorities to suspend campus police operations highlighted the ongoing pressure that families of some of the 19 children and two teachers murdered in the May 24 attack have kept on the system.
Uziyah Garcia, a 10-year-old student at the Uvalde school, was one of the victims. Brett Cross, whose son was one of the victims, had been protesting for the past two weeks outside the administration building, calling for officers’ accountability for letting a shooter with an AR-15-style rifle stay in a fourth-grade classroom for more than 70 minutes.
Families in Uvalde have said that the district’s pupils are not secure as long as the officers who took so long to catch and kill the shooter are still on duty.
Tweeted Cross, “We did it!
Five campus police officers from the Uvalde school district were on the scene of the shooting, according to a devastating report from Texas lawmakers that detailed several failures in the response. Nearly 400 cops in total, including members of the state police, US Border Patrol agents, county sheriff’s deputies, city police, school district police, and city police, responded.
The school police in Uvalde are experiencing their first setback since the district let go of previous police chief Pete Arredondo in August.
He is still the only police officer to have had his employment terminated as a result of one of the worst attacks on schools in US history.
The district announced that it will request further assistance from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which has previously delegated dozens of troopers to the district for the academic year. Yesterday, messages sent to agency spokespersons requesting comment were not immediately answered.
The district issued a statement saying, “We are confident that staff and student safety will not be jeopardised throughout this transition.”
The timeframe for the suspension of campus police operations was not made clear in the announcement.
The decision was made a day after it became public that the district had not only hired a former DPS trooper who had been among the officers who had rushed to the scene of Robb Elementary, but also that she had been one of at least seven troopers who had later been the subject of an internal investigation as a result of her actions.
On Thursday (local time), Officer Crimson Elizondo was let go, one day after CNN first reported on her employment. The Associated Press has left voicemails and texts for her, but she has not returned them.
The state’s Department of Public Safety’s chief, Steve McCraw, has labelled the police reaction to the shooting a “abject failure.” Despite having more than 90 troopers on the scene, McCraw has also under pressure despite having the backing of Republican Governor Greg Abbott.
Following Elizondo’s dismissal on Thursday (local time), Abbott referred to the school’s hiring of the former trooper as a “bad decision” and said the district should “own up to it.”
After outcry, Uvalde schools suspend the whole police force.
About Author
