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Uvalde families ask to be added to the public information lawsuit against DPS

A direct response to the Uvalde County DA and her questionable claims.

Some Uvalde families of victims who were killed or injured during the massacre at Robb Elementary School last year have asked a judge to add them as plaintiffs to a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Public Safety to argue that public records related to the shooting be released.

Numerous news organizations, including The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, are suing DPS for records that could provide a more complete picture of law enforcement’s response to the shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead in the border community.

Thomas J. Henry and Robert Wilson, the lawyers for the families of a teacher and a student killed, and other injured children, wrote in a court document filed in the case this week asking to be part of the lawsuit because they have the same interest as the news organizations suing.

“The reasons given for the withholding of the investigation or finding of the Texas Rangers and the Texas Department of Public Safety are without merit and unreasonable,” the lawyers wrote. The families “as victims of the tragedy, have a compelling need for the information that will override the need to keep the information withheld.”

[…]

Last week, [Uvalde County DA Christine] Mitchell’s office claimed in a court affidavit that the families of every child who was killed shared her view of withholding the investigative report.

“All of the families of the deceased children have stated to District Attorney Mitchell that they do not want the investigation of the Texas Rangers released until she has had ample time to review the case and present it to an Uvalde grand jury, if appropriate,” her office wrote.

But the families’ attorneys said they do want the report released.

“These Uvalde families fundamentally deserve the opportunity to gain the most complete factual picture possible of what happened to their children,” wrote Brent Ryan Walker, one of the attorneys who represents the parents of 16 deceased children and one who survived, in a court affidavit filed in the lawsuit.

See here for the previous update. As I said then, the clearest takeaway here is that one should be very reluctant to publicly lie about things that can be easily fact-checked. I mean, okay, the entire Wingnut Cinematic Universe contradicts that thesis, but we’re in the context of legal filings, and grieving parents who will surely have long memories. I have hope this will matter on both fronts.

Uvalde DA joins DPS in resisting release of shooting info

We’re still waiting.

Uvalde’s district attorney has joined the Texas Department of Public Safety in fighting the release of public records related to last year’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, arguing that all of the families who lost children want them withheld. But attorneys for a vast majority of the families are refuting that claim, saying that the information should be made public.

“These Uvalde families fundamentally deserve the opportunity to gain the most complete factual picture possible of what happened to their children,” wrote Brent Ryan Walker, one of the attorneys who represents the parents of 16 deceased children and one who survived, in a court affidavit filed Tuesday evening.

Numerous news organizations, including The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, are suing DPS for records that could provide a more complete picture of law enforcement’s response to the shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead in the border community.

The state’s top police agency has refused to release records, including incident reports, internal communications, ballistic reports and body-camera footage.

Last week, Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell supported DPS’ position in a court filing. Disclosing such records could jeopardize any criminal charges Mitchell may seek in response to an investigation by the Texas Rangers, her office wrote.

[…]

In a court filing asking a judge to block the release of records, Mitchell’s office claimed that the families of every child who was killed shared her view.

“All of the families of the deceased children have stated to District Attorney Mitchell that they do not want the investigation of the Texas Rangers released until she has had ample time to review the case and present it to an Uvalde grand jury, if appropriate,” her office wrote.

At least two parents told ProPublica and the Tribune that Mitchell never asked for their input on the release of records. Separately, attorneys representing numerous families said they disagreed with Mitchell’s attempt to withhold the records related to the investigation.

“To date our attempts to gain information that these families should be entitled to receive from their government officials has been thwarted under the vague allegation of ongoing investigations. This attempt by Ms. Mitchell to intervene and prevent the release of this report is another example,” said Robert Paul Wilson, a lawyer representing the families of a teacher and a student killed in the shooting as well as children who survived.

See here, here, and here for some background. We can certainly talk about the ongoing investigations and the need to keep at least some information confidential for the time being – it would be nice to have some limits on that, and to give some general idea of how much long it might take, though that is an issue the courts may rule on. Lying about having all of the affected parents on your side, that’s pretty egregious. Why lie about something that can be so easily checked? Not a good look at all. I hope she gets held to account for that.

One small gun loophole may get closed

Take your wins where you can find them.

Texas lawmakers are working to plug a gap in a 2009 law that was meant to keep people with a history of serious mental health issues from legally acquiring firearms.

Bipartisan legislation has been filed in the state House and Senate that would explicitly require courts to report information on involuntary mental health hospitalizations of juveniles age 16 and older after a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation revealed that they were being excluded from the national firearms background check system.

Under the current law, county and district clerks across the state are required to send information on court-ordered mental health hospitalizations to the Department of Public Safety. The state’s top law enforcement agency is charged with forwarding those records to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. Federally licensed dealers are required to check the system before they sell someone a firearm.

Elliott Naishtat, a former state lawmaker from Austin who authored the 2009 law, told the news organizations that he intended for it to apply to all Texans no matter their age. But following the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, the outlets discovered that local court clerks were not sharing that information for juveniles, either as a matter of policy or because they didn’t believe that they had to.

A bill by state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston-area Republican, passed unanimously out of committee last week with bipartisan support.

The legislation aligns Texas with new federal reporting requirements and is “meant to make the background check more thorough and hence make our communities and schools safer,” Huffman at the committee hearing.

Congress passed gun reform legislation in June that includes a requirement that federal investigators check state databases for juvenile mental health records. But such checks would fail to reveal many court-ordered juvenile commitments in Texas because they are not currently being reported.

See here for the background. This is a small thing and it will have a small effect. It’s still better than not doing it, and as a proponent of the idea that effective gun control involves a lot of small, overlapping protections in order to be effective, I’m happy to see these small steps take place even as we pointedly ignore the larger ones. It’s still one piece we won’t have to fit in later, and it will do some good in the meantime. The story notes that Naishtat had been making some calls to his former colleagues urging them to close this loophole, and to whatever extent he had an effect I salute him, and Sen. Huffman as well.

UPDATE: The bill has now passed the Senate, the first bill to do so. It heads to the House next.

So about that DPS delay in notifying the victims of the credential stuffing attack

Here’s their explanation.

[DPS Director Steve] McCraw said DPS officials kept the news under wraps to avoid jeopardizing the agency’s investigation, including efforts to arrest the fraudsters who organized the scheme.

The explanation came in response to questioning from state Rep. Mary González, D-El Paso, who expressed bewilderment over the delay.

“So, hold on,” González said. “It could be my driver’s license, and somebody could be going around as Mary González right now for two months, and nobody has been notified.”

González also queried McCraw and one of his top deputies, Jeoff Williams, about whether the state could face fines for possibly running afoul of federal regulations requiring timely notice of certain security breaches.

Williams, DPS’ deputy director of law enforcement services, said that was not the case. He added that the criminal investigation — which includes at least four states — “has taken priority at this point.”

“We recognize that there’s a requirement to notify people, and we want to do that more than anyone, believe me,” Williams said. “ — We’re going to handle each one of those (affected Texans) with the individual care that’s required, given what occurred to them.”

On Tuesday, DPS confirmed that it had begun sending letters informing victims of “fraudulent activity that resulted in your driver license card being sent to an unauthorized party.” The agency reportedly told the victims they would be issued a new replacement license at no charge.

Under state law, anyone who “conducts business” in Texas and owns or licenses data that includes “sensitive personal information” is required to notify people within 60 days if their information is compromised in a breach. The law provides an exception, however, if a law enforcement agency “determines that the notification will impede a criminal investigation.”

“The notification shall be made as soon as the law enforcement agency determines that the notification will not compromise the investigation,” the law states.

In 2021, state lawmakers tacked on a requirement to notify the state attorney general about any breach that involves at least 250 Texans. The attorney general’s office is required to post a publicly accessible list of the breaches on its website, updated within 30 days of each breach notice.

The attorney general’s office has tallied 468 such breaches since the law took effect in September 2021 — an average of 26 per month.

See here for the background. I get the reason for the delay, though perhaps there should be some limit to that, and the earlier stories mentioned that the FBI and Homeland Security were also involved, so that’s good. I just don’t trust Steve McCraw. But unless there’s some other nuance to this, I’ll have to get over it.

Of more interest to me is what DPS and the Texas Department of Information Resources will learn from this. Will they take proactive steps to notify their customers whose passwords are known to have been compromised? How about doing a better job of screening where these logons come from, and put in extra verifications to filter out unwanted foreign actors? McCraw specifically said there weren’t adequate controls in place. What controls does he have in mind, and who is responsible for implementing them? Put the cybersecurity stuff aside for a second, was this an unusual number of license requests, was there a way to detect that, and what if anything was supposed to be done if so? And if there wasn’t any way to flag that as suspicious, is there now? This is the kind of review process that an enterprise has to undertake when there is a successful attack like this. All of us drivers license holders need to know that this is happening. Please keep the pressure on them, legislators.

DPS victimized by credential stuffing attack

That’s the technical term for this.

The Texas Department of Public Safety was duped into shipping at least 3,000 Texas driver’s licenses to a Chinese organized crime group that targeted Asian Texans, DPS Director Steve McCraw told a Texas House committee on Monday.

The crime group worked through the state’s government portal, Texas.gov. The agency, which discovered the security breach in December, will begin notifying victims in letters to be sent out this week, the DPS chief said. More victims are still being identified, he said.

“We’re not happy at all, I can tell you that, one bit,” McCraw said in testimony to a House Appropriations subcommittee. “They should have had — controls should have been in place, and they never should have happened.”

The crime organization, which McCraw did not name, was able to get its hands on the Texas driver’s licenses by first pulling personal data on individuals with Asian surnames from the “dark web” and other underground data-trading portals.

That info, including previous addresses and family names, allowed thieves to correctly answer password security questions on the Texas.gov site and use stolen credit cards to order duplicate copies of active licenses — such as those ordered by people who misplace their licenses or report them stolen. A replacement license costs $11.

The state-run Texas.gov site is the central portal for Texans wanting to renew licenses, obtain driving records and registration, and obtain birth and death certificates, among other things.

The investigation into the stolen driver’s licenses spans at least four states and also involves fraudulent licenses duplicated from victims in other states as well as Texas. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are also investigating, according to the DPS letter to lawmakers.

House Appropriations Vice Chair Mary González, an El Paso Democrat, blasted DPS agency chiefs for letting so much time lapse while Texans were unaware that their identities were being used fraudulently.

“Somebody could be going around as Mary González right now for two months, and nobody’s been notified, I [wouldn’t have been] notified,” González said.

DPS officials are not calling the incident a “data breach” because they say no hacking was involved and vast amounts of data were not being stolen. Instead, the crime group used data obtained from underground sources to bypass a simple password security system — laying bare a security vulnerability that “should never have happened,” McCraw said.

Texas.gov is operated not by DPS, but by the Texas Department of Information Resources.

DPS officials declined to provide details about the security loophole that left the site open to fraud but told lawmakers that it had been closed.

DIR spokesperson Brittney Booth Paylor dismissed the notion that the incident was a cybersecurity breach, calling it “a case of fraudulent criminal activity based on factors unrelated to state systems.”

[…]

The problem was first detected in December when a third-party Texas.gov payment vendor “alerted DPS to an increase in customers challenging credit card charges for online transactions,” according to a February letter sent to lawmakers from the DPS. The credit cards used to buy the fraudulent copies were also stolen, authorities said.

Before investigators shut down the operation, McCraw said, the license thieves were able to use the site, billed as “the official website of the State of Texas,” to obtain driver’s licenses that are “Real ID compliant” — not cheap copies, McCraw said.

These stolen licenses can pass verification methods and be used fraudulently all over the country because they are real driver’s licenses being used by people who can pass for the photo on the original card, McCraw said.

See here if you want to learn a bit more about what a credential stuffing attack is. Long story short, don’t reuse your passwords and enable two-factor authentication where you can.

Putting my cybersecurity hat on for a minute, I will say that the DIR response to this is disingenuous. It’s true that there are plenty of pwned password lists available on the internet, and that it’s not Texas’ fault if people reuse passwords. But there are services that the state can subscribe to that would alert them to email addresses in their database that have been found in those pwned lists, which would then give DPS or DIR or whoever would have that responsibility the impetus to contact those address owners proactively and tell them to update their password. They could also enforce, or at least offer, a two-factor solution, and there are other proactive steps available as well. DPS/DIR isn’t “responsible” for this, but DPS/DIR absolutely could have done something to prevent or minimize it.

Rep. González’s complaint about the delay in notifying the affected users is addressed in a later Chron story. I drafted this originally Monday night, so I will do a separate post on that. Short answer, there is a legal requirement in Texas to report data breaches, but there is an exception for when there is an active law enforcement investigation, which DPS has invoked here.

Given the upsurge in violence against Asian-Americans, Rep. González also asked if this could be considered a hate crime, which McCraw avoided answering. It may not be possible to tell from what they know right now, but it is possible to try to figure it out. I’m glad DPS is in contact with the FBI and DHS about that, and I hope that leads to some action. I hope the Lege will press DPS and DIR to do better, and to share the results of the investigation when it’s over. The Lege – and the media – should also focus on McCraw’s statement about controls not being in place and demanding to know what is now being done about that. Either we learn from this or we risk having it happen again. The Chron has more.

Three stories on Uvalde and gun control

First, a story about locks and why an obsession with locking school doors is not really going to improve safety.

In the aftermath of school shootings like the one in Uvalde, what can get overlooked is basic: Schools need doors that work and don’t require special knowledge or keys to secure; they need locks that can be accessed from inside classrooms; and a system for accessing master keys swiftly when minutes matter.

The day of the Robb Elementary School shooting, a teacher had propped open the west exterior door of the school’s west building—added to the school campus 23 years ago—to get food from a colleague, when she saw the shooter heading toward the building. She slammed the door shut, according to the teacher’s attorney, Don Flanary. The door should have kept the shooter out—or at least delayed his entry. It didn’t. Contrary to school policy, all three of the west building’s exterior doors were unlocked that day.

The west building’s exterior doors weren’t the only problem on May 24. Several of the classroom doors had problems latching, including room 111—the classroom through which the shooter “most likely” entered, per the Texas House of Representatives investigation report. KENS5 further reported that the door’s bolt didn’t fit its frame. In addition, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said that the strike plate that allows the door to latch was damaged.

Whatever the cause, securing the door required extra effort to ensure the latch engaged. Room 111 was not the only classroom whose door had problems. The fourth-grade teacher in room 109 testified in the Texas House report that she also “slammed [her] door shut because otherwise the lock would not [otherwise] latch.”

According to the Texas House report, Arnulfo Reyes, the teacher in Room 111, had alerted school administrators multiple times about the issue with the door prior to May 24. Yet a work order was never issued nor was there documentation of Reyes’ complaint in Robb Elementary maintenance records.

[…]

Part of the reason doors were propped open or left unlocked was because of a key shortage. The manufacturer had discontinued production of the door locks used at Robb; the school district had acquired a supply of key blanks, but those were gone by May 2022, Uvalde CISD Maintenance & Operations Director Rodney Harrison said in the Texas House report. Because of the key shortage, substitute teachers were told to use magnets and other methods to get around the locks in violation of school district policy.

Reading this story, and because I have a cybersecurity mindset, reminded me of two things. One is that there’s always a tradeoff between security and ease of use. Think about passwords. People use simple passwords and reuse the same password on multiple systems and fail to enable two-factor authentication because it’s easier that way, and because there’s a big price to pay for forgetting a password and getting locked out of an account or application that you really need. Finding shortcuts and conveniences and workarounds is human nature. You can spend a ton of money on fancy security systems – the story talks about how much money school districts have had to spend, usually via bond issuances that can be hard to convince voters to support, to meet new state requirements for physical security in schools. But if these systems don’t take the human factor into account, a lot of that money is wasted.

And two, no single security measure is ever sufficient on its own. This is why effective cybersecurity for an enterprise network is all about multiple layered, redundant, overlapping defense mechanisms. We expect there to be gaps and failures and weaknesses, which is why there are backups in place. You can “harden” schools all you want, but you can’t make them safe until you address the gun problem, and that’s something our Legislature just won’t do as things stand now.

It has become a mournful pattern. Following mass shootings, lawmakers in many states have taken stock of what happened and voted to approve gun control legislation to try to prevent additional bloodshed.

In Colorado, the Legislature passed universal background checks in 2013 after a shooter at an Aurora movie theater killed 12 people. After 58 people were shot dead during a 2017 concert in Las Vegas, the Nevada Legislature passed a red flag law that allows a judge to order that weapons be taken from people who are deemed a threat. And in Florida in 2018, then-Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill that raised the minimum age to buy a firearm to 21 after a teenager with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire at a Parkland high school, killing 17 people.

But not in Texas.

In the past six decades, the state has experienced at least 19 mass shootings that have killed a total of nearly 200 people and wounded more than 230 others. Yet state leaders have repeatedly batted away measures that would limit access to guns, opting instead to ease restrictions on publicly carrying them while making it harder for local governments to regulate them.

As the state Legislature convenes for the first time since the Uvalde school shooting last May, lawmakers have once again filed a slate of gun control bills. If history is an indicator, and top legislative leaders predict it will be, they are unlikely to pass.

An analysis by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune of hundreds of bills filed in the Texas Legislature over nearly the past six decades found that at least two dozen measures would have prevented people from legally obtaining the weapons, including assault rifles and large-capacity magazines, used in seven of the state’s mass shootings.

At least five bills would have required that people seeking to obtain a gun undergo a background check. Such a check would have kept the man involved in a 2019 shooting spree in Midland and Odessa from legally purchasing the weapon because he had been deemed to have a mental illness.

Seven bills would have banned the sale or possession of the semi-automatic rifle that a shooter used to kill dozens of people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.

And at least two bills would have raised the legal age to own or purchase an assault weapon from 18 to 21 years old, which would have made it illegal for the Uvalde shooter to buy the semi-automatic assault rifles.

A state House committee that investigated the Uvalde massacre found that the shooter had tried to get at least two people to buy a gun for him before he turned 18 but was unsuccessful. Immediately after his birthday, he purchased two AR-15-style rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, which he used to kill 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.

“If that law had been 21, I guarantee you he would have continued to be frustrated and not be able to obtain that weapon,” said state Rep. Joe Moody, a Democrat from El Paso who served as vice chair of the House committee.

It’s funny, in a bitterly ironic and painful way, that the first line of argument advanced by the legislative gun-huggers and the paid shills they listen to is that this one specific gun control law would not have stopped that one particular mass shooter, so therefore all gun control laws are useless. Yet there they are in the Lege going back to the same “harden the schools” well, time and time again. It takes a comprehensive approach, but the Republicans just won’t allow it.

Despite that, the work continues.

As a new legislative session kicks into gear, [Rep. Tracy] King is working on a bill that would increase the age limit to buy semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21. The Uvalde gunman had tried to get at least two people to buy him firearms before he turned 18. Days after his 18th birthday, he purchased two AR-15-style rifles before invading the school and targeting students and teachers. In August, Uvalde residents and relatives of the shooting victims protested at the Capitol, calling on lawmakers to raise the age limit to buy the kind of firearms the Robb Elementary gunman used.

“In this particular case, that guy had tried to buy a gun,” said King, who previously wouldn’t support the legislation he plans to champion for his constituents. “It sure might have made a difference.”

Still, King’s legislation is a bold proposal in the state that leads the nation in gun sales and whose lawmakers have steadily loosened firearm restrictions amid eight mass shootings in 13 years. And it’s coming from a Democrat who previously voted to allow people to carry a handgun without training or a license. King hasn’t yet filed his bill, though other lawmakers have filed similar pieces of legislation this year.

Gov. Greg Abbott has dismissed the idea of raising the age limit as unconstitutional. In December, Texas dropped a fight to protect an existing state law that required people who carry handguns without licenses to be 21 or older after a federal district judge said it violates people’s Second Amendment rights. And Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan has said a proposal such as King’s lacks the votes to pass the lower chamber. But Phelan also said that “will not prevent a bill from being discussed and being debated.”

King knows he faces an uphill battle. But he’s also committed to trying, after spending nearly eight months helping folks — some of whom he knew before the tragedy — grapple with a staggering amount of loss.

“We have to go in it with our eyes open,” he said during a recent interview in his Texas Capitol office. “It’ll be a challenge. It’ll be a difficult conversation for a lot of people.”

King isn’t the only lawmaker who represents Uvalde and is pushing to limit access to semi-automatic rifles. State Sen. Roland Gutierre, a San Antonio Democrat whose district includes Uvalde, has already filed a bill in the Senate that would address the same issue.

Gutierrez has publicly criticized the law enforcement response, Texas’ loose gun laws and officials who have withheld information about the investigations into the shooting. Gutierrez has also filed legislation that would create robust mass shooting response training for all public safety entities and improve radio communication between certain agencies.

“I’m for Tracy’s bill, I’m for my bill, I’m for anybody’s bill if a Republican wants to come up and have a bill that raises the age limit on long guns right now to 21,” Gutierrez said. “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away. We’re regulating guns for what I would argue are minors, just like we do alcohol, just like we do cigarettes in Texas.”

I greatly respect what Sen. Gutierrez has been doing, and I’m glad to have Rep. King on board. I’ve also seen this movie before and I know how it ends. You know what my prescription for this problem is. If Gutierrez and King can change a few minds along the way, that will help. We have a long way to go.

Still more Uvalde bills from Sen. Gutierrez

At least one of these might have a chance to pass.

Sen. Roland Gutierrez

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez wants the Texas Department of Public Safety to create robust mass shooting response training for all public safety entities after the chaotic response to the Uvalde school massacre delayed medical treatment of victims.

“Everybody in Texas needs to examine the complete and utter failure that happened on this day,” Gutierrez said at a news conference in Austin, joined by families of victims from last year’s Uvalde shooting and the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting. “It must not ever happen again.”

The new slate of bills Gutierrez unveiled Tuesday came less than two months after an investigation by The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and The Washington Post found a faltered medical response undermined the chances that some Uvalde victims would survive the shooting.

[…]

On Tuesday, Gutierrez said the victims who had a pulse before later dying “might have lived” had the response been more in line with the average length of a mass shooting, which he said was about 12 to 14 minutes, compared to the 77 minutes children waited in Uvalde before the shooter was killed.

“We do not know how many of the other kids that didn’t have a pulse, at what time did they expire?” he said. “We do not know that.”

Gutierrez is a San Antonio Democrat whose Senate district includes Uvalde. His Senate Bill 738 calls for ensuring all public safety entities in certain counties have the radio infrastructure for communication between all public safety entities, including between different kinds of agencies.

Further, the bill would create a process to train public safety entities in responding to mass shootings. The training would be required to include protection of students at a school; emergency medical response training in minimizing casualties; tactics for denying an intruder entry into a school or classroom; and the chain of command during such an event.

Another legislative proposal outlined Tuesday would create a law enforcement unit tasked with having at least one officer present at each public school and higher education facility in the state. The unit, Texas School Patrol, would be expected to coordinate with local police officials about emergency responses to mass shooting events.

A third proposal, which Gutierrez called “a little bit more aspirational,” would replace a Confederate monument at the Capitol with a memorial to honor victims and survivors of mass gun violence.

“Each parent should be able to send their kids to school knowing that they’re going to be able to pick them up at the end of the day,” Gutierrez said. “We can afford to do this and we should do this and it will have the adequate training to make sure that they can handle this type of situation.”

Senate Bill 737, to create the new police unit, would require 10,000 additional officers in the state within the Texas Highway Patrol; it would cost about $750 million, Gutierrez said.

See here, here, and here for the background on Sen. Gutierrez’s efforts, and here for more on the failed medical response at Robb Elementary. I don’t want to predict success for any bill, especially a Democratic bill in Dan Patrick’s Senate, but SB738 strikes me as the kind of thing that probably won’t generate much ideological opposition. Spending money on enhanced security measures is one of the few acceptable-to-Republicans responses to mass shootings, so it has a chance. SB737 might have a chance as well, but it’s a lot more expensive and that might make people balk, even in a flush-budget biennium. I’m not saying these would be my top choices for bills to pass – I think SB738 has merit and hope it succeeds, while I’m far less enthusiastic about SB737 – but they are the sort of thing that could pass. This is the state government we have.

Uvalde DA gets DPS report on school shooting

We’re still a long way from seeing it for ourselves.

State police investigating the Uvalde school shooting have sent an initial report to prosecutors, according to a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The Texas Rangers, a division of DPS, are conducting a criminal investigation into the shooting at Robb Elementary, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in May. Hundreds of law enforcement officers who responded to the school, including those from DPS, did not confront the shooter for more than an hour after initial reports of shots fired.

The district attorney in Uvalde, Christina Mitchell, said the Rangers’ investigation remains open and that she did not anticipate a complete report for at least a few more months. Neither she nor DPS have publicly released the initial report yet. The investigation is expected to eventually include a review about whether any victims who died may have survived had police intervened sooner

DPS Director Steve McCraw said last fall that the Rangers’ investigation would be completed by the end of December.

“The initial report is what the Director was referring to and that was made available to the DA’s team last week,” agency spokesperson Travis Considine wrote in an email this week.

In previous statements, Mitchell said that she needs a completed investigation to make any decisions about potential charges, including against any of the nearly 400 officers whose actions and inactions have been under scrutiny since the massacre, which was the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.

“I don’t expect to receive the complete investigation report until the spring, at the earliest,” Mitchell said in an email last week. “It is not uncommon for an investigation of this magnitude to take over a year.”

[…]

At least one part of the investigation has not yet been completed.

medical analysis of victims’ injuries — led by Dr. Mark Escott, medical director for the Texas Department of Public Safety and chief medical officer for the city of Austin — to “determine whether there may have been opportunities to save lives had emergency medical care been provided sooner” remained underway as of Tuesday, a city of Austin spokesperson said.

That review began in earnest around November. Autopsies of the victims, key for the examination, were completed a few weeks ago. The results of the autopsies have since been sealed, according to local news reports.

Considine, the DPS spokesperson, said the overall investigation is considered ongoing — and the report is initial rather than final — because “Rangers may receive assignments from special prosecutors for some time, which would lead to additional information.”

See here, here, and here for some background. So far two DPS officers have been forced out of their jobs as a result of DPS’ internal investigation. One chose to retire and the other was fired; the latter has filed an appeal. Yes, having the Rangers investigate DPS, for whom they work, is at best a weird idea and sure looks like a conflict of interest, but here we are anyway. We missed our chance for political accountability on this, so we’ll get what we get when we get it.

The medical response also failed at Uvalde

This is a very hard story to read, with graphic descriptions of injuries suffered by the shooting victims at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Click over very carefully, but whether you read or not know that the failures at the site of this shooting were not limited to law enforcement’s response.

The chaotic scene exemplified the flawed medical response — captured in video footage, investigative documents, interviews and radio traffic — that experts said undermined the chances of survival for some victims of the May 24 massacre. Two teachers and 19 students died.

Law enforcement’s well-documented failure to confront the shooter who terrorized the school for 77 minutes was the most serious problem in getting victims timely care, experts said. But previously unreleased records obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Washington Post for the first time show that communication lapses and muddled lines of authority among medical responders further hampered treatment.

Three victims who emerged from the school with a pulse later died. In the case of two of those victims, critical resources were not available when medics expected they would be, delaying hospital treatment for [teacher Eva] Mireles, 44, and student Xavier Lopez, 10, records show.

Another student, Jacklyn “Jackie” Cazares, 9, likely survived for more than an hour after being shot and was promptly placed in an ambulance after medics finally gained access to her classroom. She died in transport.

The disjointed medical response frustrated medics while delaying efforts to get ambulances, air transport and other emergency services to victims. Medical helicopters with critical supplies of blood tried to land at the school, but an unidentified fire department official told them to wait at an airport 3 miles away. Dozens of parked police vehicles blocked the paths of ambulances trying to reach victims.

Multiple cameras worn by officers and one on the dashboard of a police car showed just two ambulances positioned outside the school when the shooter was killed. That was not nearly enough for the 10 or more gunshot victims then still alive, though additional ambulances began arriving 10 minutes later. Six students, including one who was seriously wounded, were taken to a hospital in a school bus with no trained medics on board, according to Texas EMS records.

[…]

Although helicopters were available, none were used to carry victims directly from the school. At least four patients who survived were flown by helicopter to a more fully equipped trauma center in San Antonio after first being driven by ambulance to a nearby hospital or airport.

In public statements made since May, law enforcement officials have defended their officers’ actions as reasonable under difficult circumstances. Federal, state and local agencies that responded to the shooting have not directly addressed the medical response, nor did they answer detailed questions from the news organizations that worked jointly on this investigation.

Eric Epley, executive director of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, a nonprofit that helps coordinate trauma care in Southwest Texas during mass-casualty events, said medics encountered challenges, including a faulty radio system.

“These scenes are inherently confusing, challenging, and chaotic,” Epley said in an email. He later added, “We remain steadfast that the decisions by the on-scene medical leadership were sound and appropriate.”

The Texas Rangers, an arm of the state Department of Public Safety, are investigating what went wrong in Uvalde, including whether any victims might have survived if they had received prompt medical care. The local district attorney has said she will use that investigation to determine whether to charge anyone with a crime, including law enforcement officers.

[…]

It’s difficult to know whether Mireles or anyone else who died that day might have survived their wounds, in part because local officials have refused to release autopsy reports. But footage shows that Mireles was conscious and responsive when she was pulled from the classroom, an indicator that she probably had survivable wounds, according to medical experts.

“Had medics gotten to her quickly, there’s a good chance she would’ve survived,” said Babak Sarani, director of critical care at George Washington University Hospital.

The flawed coordination among police and medical crews echoes missteps during other mass shootings, despite the development of recommended practices after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. In several of those cases, the communication problems resulted in delays in getting medical care for victims.

Medics on helicopters and in ambulances who responded to the Uvalde shooting told investigators they were confused about who was in charge, where they should be stationed and how many victims to expect. Some of them pleaded to be allowed closer to the scene. In the absence of clear guidance, experts said medics did the best they could while trying to save lives.

“They were told, essentially, to go to the airport and wait,” according to an interview the Texas Rangers conducted with Julie Lewis, the regional manager for AirLIFE, an air medical transport service that sent three helicopters from the greater San Antonio area. “They couldn’t figure out who was in command.”

There’s a lot more. The bottom line is, as we have learned before, that there was no clear command structure, so those who were trying to help didn’t know who to talk or listen to and didn’t know what they needed to know to proceed. It remains the case that a lot of official information about what happened is still closely guarded and not available to reporters or the public. More infuriating is that we have learned what the best practices are to respond to one of these tragedies, as there have been so many to learn from, and yet the same type of failures keep happening. Given the regularity with which they occur in Texas and the certainty that the next one is a matter of when and not if, that failure is owned not just by local officials but also by our state “leaders”. We know that failure will continue, because they have no interest in doing anything about it. Go read the rest of the story if you can stand it.

Ken Paxton’s hatred of LGBTQ+ people continues unabated

Item #1: Texas attorney general’s office sought state data on transgender Texans.

The only criminal involved

Employees at the Texas Department of Public Safety in June received a sweeping request from Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office: to compile a list of individuals who had changed their gender on their Texas driver’s licenses and other department records during the past two years.

“Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month,” the chief of the DPS driver license division emailed colleagues in the department on June 30, according to a copy of a message obtained by The Washington Post through a public records request. “We won’t need DL/ID numbers at first but may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents.”

After more than 16,000 such instances were identified, DPS officials determined that a manual search would be needed to determine the reason for the changes, DPS spokesperson Travis Considine told The Post in response to questions.

“A verbal request was received,” he wrote in an email. “Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced. Thus, no data of any kind was provided.”

Asked who in Paxton’s office had requested the records, he replied: “I cannot say.”

[…]

Public records obtained by The Post do not indicate why the attorney general’s office sought the driver’s license information. But advocates for transgender Texans say Paxton could use the data to further restrict their right to transition, calling it a chilling effort to secretly harness personal information to persecute already vulnerable people.

“This is another brick building toward targeting these individuals,” said Ian Pittman, an Austin attorney who represents Texas parents of transgender children investigated by the state. “They’ve already targeted children and parents. The next step would be targeting adults. And what better way than seeing what adults had had their sex changed on their driver’s licenses?”

[…]

The records obtained by The Post, which document communications among DPS employees, are titled “AG Request Sex Change Data” and “AG data request.” They indicate that Paxton’s office sought the records a month after the state Supreme Court ruled that Paxton and Abbott had overreached in their efforts to investigate families with transgender children for child abuse.

Paxton’s office bypassed the normal channels — DPS’ government relations and general counsel’s offices — and went straight to the driver license division staff in making the request, according to a state employee familiar with it, who said the staff was told that Paxton’s office wanted “numbers” and later would want “a list” of names, as well as “the number of people who had had a legal sex change.”

During the following two months, the employee said, the DPS staff searched its records for changes in the “sex” category of not only driver’s licenses but also state ID cards available from birth, learner’s permits issued to those age 15 and up, commercial licenses, state election certificates, and occupational licenses. The employee spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation for describing internal state discussions.

DPS staff members compiled a list of 16,466 gender changes between June 1, 2020, and June 30, 2022, public records show. In the emails, DPS staff members repeatedly referred to the request as coming from the attorney general’s office as they discussed attempting to narrow the data to include only licenses that had been altered to reflect a court-ordered change in someone’s gender.

DPS staff members did spot checks on the data, examining records that included names of specific individuals, according to records and the state employee familiar with the inquiry. But it was hard to weed out driver’s licenses that had been changed in error, or multiple times, or for reasons other than gender changes.

“It will be very difficult to determine which records had a valid update without a manual review of all supporting documents,” an assistant manager in the DPS driver’s license division wrote in an email to colleagues on July 22.

On Aug. 4, the division chief emailed staff members, “We have expended enough effort on this attempt to provide data. After this run, have them package the data that they have with the high level explanations and close it out.” On Aug. 18, a senior manager emailed to say a data engineer had “provided the data request by the AG’s office (attached).”

Last month, The Post made a request to Paxton’s office for all records the attorney general’s office had directed other state offices to compile related to driver’s licenses in which the sex of the driver was changed, as well as related emails between Paxton’s office and other state agencies.

Officials indicated that no such records existed.

“Why would the Office of the Attorney General have gathered this information?” Assistant Attorney General June Harden wrote in an email to The Post, later adding, “Why do you believe this is the case?”

If it did, Harden said, any records were probably exempt from release because of either attorney-client privilege or confidentiality.

Marisol Bernal-Leon, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, later emailed that the office “has reviewed its files and has no information responsive to your request” for either records it had requested from DPS or emails between the attorney general’s office and DPS.

Separately, DPS provided The Post with a half-dozen documents spanning three months that referenced the request by Paxton’s office.

When The Post shared copies of the records that had been provided by DPS, Assistant Attorney General Lauren Downey noted that “none of the records provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety are communications with the Office of the Attorney General. Our response to your request was accurate.”

Downey did not reply to questions about why the DPS emails refer to the request as originating from the attorney general. Paxton’s office has yet to respond to another public records request for any records of its contact with DPS concerning driver’s license changes via means other than email, including phone calls, video meetings and in-person exchanges.

It’s the brazen lying about it that really kicks this up a notch. I can’t think of a good reason for a public official to need this data, or to bypass the normal channels for requesting it, but there are plenty of bad reasons for it. Because data tends to be messy, you can see how potentially thousands of people who were not Paxton’s intended targets could have been caught up in whatever malevolent scheme he cooked up for them. In a way it’s too bad this came to light before that could have happened, because the harassment of such a large number of people might have been an actual scandal that could damage him. Now it’s just another unfair MSM hit piece that Paxton’s enablers can ignore.

And in case that wasn’t enough, we also got news item #2: Texas fights federal rule that would outlaw LGBTQ discrimination in state adoptions and foster care.

Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the federal government to preserve Texas’ ability to include religious groups that won’t place kids with same-sex couples in the state’s adoption process without losing federal funding.

With his lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Galveston, Paxton continued a yearslong, cross-country legal fight over anti-discrimination rules for adoption and foster programs drafted under the Obama administration that languished under former President Donald Trump and have never been enforced.

The rule on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination, known as the SOGI rule, prohibits recipients of federal funds for adoption and foster programs from discriminating on the basis of age, disability, sex, race, color, national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or same-sex marriage status.

A Texas law passed in 2017 allows religious organizations that contract with the state to refuse to work with LGBTQ couples who are seeking to foster or adopt. The law requires the state to ensure there are other providers to work with LBGTQ children or families who are refused help by a religious provider, although there is no specific process for ensuring that happens.

Losing federal funding would be a major blow for Texas’ foster care budget. Federal money accounts for nearly a quarter of the $550 million the state spends on residential care each year, and another $58 million supports case work for foster children who qualify for the funds, according to the attorney general’s complaint.

[…]

The anti-discrimination rule has been the subject of court battles. In 2019, Texas joined the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston to sue the federal government over the rule, arguing it would prevent the religious group from becoming a provider of child welfare services. Shortly after the suit was filed, the Trump administration announced a rollback of the rule.

But Paxton is now seeking to have the rule thrown out preemptively as other groups are suing to compel its enforcement.

[…]

Bryan Mares, the government relations director at the National Association of Social Workers Texas, said the state law allowing religious providers to refuse services to LGBTQ couples creates a supply issue for the LGBTQ children in the foster system who need affirming homes.

“It makes it much more difficult to find families who might already identify as part of the LGBTQ community to bring children that are in the system into their home,” Mares said of the law. “It really just impedes our ability to prioritize LGBTQ youth placements into homes where they are being supported in a way that they need.”

A 2018 analysis of Texas licensed child-placing agencies by the Center for American Progress found that nearly half of them had statements of faith listed on their websites, but only 10% had expressed specific willingness to work with LGBTQ foster and adoptive parents. “Given this landscape, and the religious exemptions and lack of legal protections … prospective parents may understandably become discouraged about finding a welcoming agency and choose to abandon their efforts,” the report concluded.

Pretty sure that’s the intent. I’ve run out of accurate descriptors for Paxton and his shameless hate. At this point, I don’t know what can be done to stop him. He certainly acts as though there is nothing in his way and no possible consequences for anything he does.

Uvalde class action lawsuit over mass shooting officially filed

We’ve been waiting for this.

Survivors of the fatal mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, have filed a $27 billion class action lawsuit against multiple law enforcement agencies in Texas, according to court documents.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Austin, names the city, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, the school district’s police department, the Uvalde Police Department, the Texas Department of Public Safety and a number of persons who are members or former members of the agencies listed as defendants.

The plaintiffs include parents and teachers and school staff members who were at the school May 24 when 19 students and two teachers were gunned down in adjoining classrooms just a few days before school was to let out for the summer. At least 17 others were wounded.

A total of 376 law enforcement officers from multiple agencies responded to the massacre, the second deadliest shooting on a K-12 school in the United States.

Officers waited 77 minutes after the shooter entered two adjoining classrooms before storming in and killing the gunman, an 18-year-old Uvalde resident.

The lawsuit alleges the victims and survivors “sustained emotional and psychological damages as a result of Defendants’ conduct and omissions” as a result of the shooting.

According to the lawsuit, despite active shooter training, law enforcement “fundamentally strayed from conducting themselves in conformity with what they knew to be the well-established protocols and standards for responding to an active shooter.”

The lawsuit went on to reference the dysfunction and extended time period law enforcement took to respond to the shooting.

“Instead of swiftly implementing an organized and concerted response to an active school shooter who had breached the otherwise ‘secured’ school buildings at Robb Elementary school, the conduct of the three hundred and seventy-six (376) law enforcement officials who were on hand for the exhaustively torturous seventy-seven minutes of law enforcement indecision, dysfunction, and harm, fell exceedingly short of their duty bound standards,” the suit claims.

[…]

The civil complaint is one of several around the massacre that seeks damages from a number of parties. One federal lawsuit filed earlier this week alleges nearly two dozen people and entities, including the gun manufacturer and store that provided the rifle used in the attack, were negligent and failed to protect a student who was killed. Other families filed a similar lawsuit in September.

See here and here for the background on this class action lawsuit, which we first heard about in August. As the story notes, there are separate lawsuits filed in September and earlier this week by different plaintiffs, mostly against the same defendants. As I’ve said before, I don’t know what the odds of success are – I’m more pessimistic than optimistic, but will be delighted to be proven wrong. I’ll be rooting for them regardless. NPR, Reuters, and KENS5 have more.

Another lawsuit filed by Uvalde parents

Another one to watch.

The mother of a 10-year-old killed in the Uvalde school shooting has filed a federal lawsuit against the gun-maker and seller, the city of Uvalde, its school district and several law enforcement officers.

Sandra Torres’ daughter Eliahna was one of 19 students and 2 teachers killed by an 18-year-old gunman at Robb Elementary in May.

“I miss her every moment of every day,” Torres said in a joint press release with her lawyers from Everytown for Gun Safety’s legal team and Texas-based LM Law Group. “I’ve brought this lawsuit to seek accountability. No parent should ever go through what I have.”

The new lawsuit alleges that Daniel Defense — the manufacturer of the shooter’s weapon — violated the Federal Trade Commission Act, arguing that the Georgia-based company’s marketing on social media and video games “prime young buyers to purchase AR-15-style rifles as soon as they are legally able.” Earlier this year, gun-maker Remington settled a lawsuit for $73 million with the Sandy Hook shooting victims’ families who had also targeted the company’s marketing.

Torres’ lawsuit also accused Oasis Outback of “reckless dereliction” of selling weapons to the 18-year-old shooter. Some store patrons later told the FBI that he had “appeared odd and looked like one of those school shooters.”

The suit also accuses various law enforcement officers of failing “to follow active shooter protocols.” It argues that their decision to treat the active shooter as a “barricaded subject” inside the two classrooms had violated the victims’ constitutional rights.

[…]

Many of these defendants have also been facing a federal lawsuit filed by the families of three student survivors in September, which alleges that the parties’ actions and negligence contributed to the shooting. This followed another claim filed in August seeking $27 billion from the school district and other government agencies to compensate the victims.

Numerous Uvalde officials and officers have also resigned or been fired over the past few months, and the school district also suspended its entire police department in October. Some are named in Torres’ lawsuit, including former Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo, Uvalde Police Department’s acting chief Lt. Mariano Pargas, as well as Texas Department of Public Safety’s troopers  Juan Maldonado andCrimson Elizondo.

See here and here for more on the earlier lawsuits; the former is a class action suit that I’m still not sure has actually been filed yet. The Chron adds some details.

The 77-page lawsuit accuses many of the defendants of contributing to wrongful death, negligence and violating the constitutional rights of Eliahna and other victims at Robb Elementary.

“Sometimes the only way you get justice is by filing a lawsuit,” said Blas Delgado of San Antonio, the lead lawyer for the Torres family. “There have been a lot of questions throughout the investigation, and we hope this also helps answer some of them.”

The suit alleges that Daniel Defense “markets its products to adolescent and young men using a range of channels, including social media content, product placements, and print advertising.

“For example, Daniel Defense promotes its products heavily on Instagram, a platform with a young user base,” the lawsuit states.

“Daniel Defense also places its products in video games, and then heavily promotes the video game tie-ins in the company’s social media accounts,” the suit said.

The gun manufacturer did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

Salvador Ramos of Uvalde bought a DDM4 V7 rifle on Daniel Defense’s website for $2,054.28 on May 16, his 18th birthday.

On another website, he paid $1,761.50 for 1,740 rounds of ammunition for the rifle.

The next day, Ramos went to Oasis Outback and bought a Smith & Wesson M&P15 assault rifle for $1,081.42, the lawsuit said.

The day after that, the teenager went back to Oasis Outback to buy an additional 375 rounds of AR-15 ammunition.

Ramos returned to Oasis Outback again two days later, on May 20, to pick up his Daniel Defense rifle and bought accessories for the weapon.

“Oasis Outback had a duty not to sell weapons to the just-turned 18-year-old shooter, who it knew or reasonably should have known was likely to harm himself or others,” the suit said.

“The shooter was described by patrons of the store as having a nervous disposition and behaving suspiciously.”

“The shooter had purchased two extraordinarily lethal assault weapons and enough ammunition to fight off a small army, as well as a holographic sight and Hellfire Gen 2 trigger system, spending thousands of dollars within days of his 18th birthday,” it stated.

We’ve talked about Daniel Defense before. I’d love to see them at least feel compelled to settle, but suffice it to say I consider that an underdog. With SCOTUS as it is I fear they’re untouchable. But I hope to be proved wrong. Reform Houston and the Current have more.

DPS asks to be rewarded for its abject failure at Uvalde

I like to think that I don’t get easily shocked, but this did it to me.

The Texas Department of Public Safety wants $1.2 billion to turn its training center north of Austin into a full-time statewide law enforcement academy — starting with a state-of-the-art active-shooter facility that would need a nearly half-billion-dollar investment from Texas taxpayers next year.

“You play like you practice,” DPS Director Steve McCraw told budget officials last month. “You need to practice in a real environment.”

If approved, the requested $466.6 million “down payment,” as McCraw called it, in the state’s 2024-25 budget — which won’t be finalized until the middle of next year — would be the start of a six-year proposal to turn the nearly 200-acre Williamson County DPS Tactical Training Center complex in Florence into a Texas law enforcement academy for use by agencies across the state, he said.

The $1.2 billion project figure does not appear in the agency’s legislative appropriations request, which comes at a time when agencies are making their bids for a share of a historic state cash surplus in the next biennium — and against the backdrop of an emotional debate over what the state needs to do to prevent more mass killings.

A “state-of-the-art” active-shooter facility would be built with the first round of funding next year and could be used “right off the bat,” independent of the rest of the proposed upgrades, to immediately enhance active-shooter response by Texas law enforcement, McCraw said in a brief presentation before the Texas Legislative Budget Board on Oct. 4.

If fully funded over the next three budget cycles, the training academy would cost $1.2 billion and eventually include dormitories, a cafeteria and other elements, McCraw said.

“It’s a cost we recognize as a cost that can’t be borne in any one session. It takes time to build it,” McCraw said of the proposed academy.

He did not specify whether the center would charge fees for other law enforcement agencies to use the facility, if it would draw down any federal funding or what it would cost to run the center beyond the six-year construction budget.

DPS officials did not respond to repeated requests for a copy of the proposed plans for the active-shooter facility or the larger multiyear proposal for the academy, information about whether additional land purchases would be needed or the breakdown of the cost estimate for the upgrades.

The proposed active-shooter facility was part of a presentation made by McCraw to captains at the Texas Highway Patrol, an arm of the DPS, according to meeting minutes obtained by The Texas Tribune. The minutes said the facility would include the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training program — an active-shooter response training system developed 20 years ago at Texas State University in San Marcos that has been the national standard for active-shooter training for a decade.

[…]

Pete Blair, executive director of the ALERRT center at Texas State, said his San Marcos facility is used for several types of first-responder training as well as active-shooter training on site.

Blair hasn’t seen the DPS plans for the proposed site but said a facility that would be considered state of the art might include reconfigurable walls, cameras and similar technological upgrades.

That’s the sort of technology that would be found at facilities like the federal Military Operations in Urban Terrain facility in Quantico, Virginia, which has 17 structures including a school scenario. Another of the nation’s top-tier facilities is at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers Glynco campus, a 1,600-acre facility near Brunswick, Georgia.

Most of the quarter-million first responders the Texas ALERRT center has worked with in the past two decades were trained somewhere besides the Texas State center in San Marcos, Blair said.

“I will say there is a need for training facilities across the state,” Blair said. “We’ve always had more demand than we have money to provide training. So every cycle, it’s been a situation of us having to put departments on the waitlist and say, ‘We’re coming to you, but it’s going to be a while.’”

Here’s my proposal for DPS active shooter training: A single PowerPoint slide that says “Don’t stand around with your thumb up your ass while kids are being murdered.” I can deliver that for a lot less than $1.2 billion, and the results can’t possibly be any worse than what we already had. The idea that we could turn mass shooter situations into a growth industry is just…I can’t. I’m going to go eat some pie. Reform Austin.

If Greg Abbott demands an investigation, Greg Abbott will get an investigation

This is all still so dumb.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg is launching an investigation into “alleged irregularities” during last week’s election after receiving a referral from the Texas Secretary of State’s office.

Ogg sent a letter to Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw asking for the Texas Rangers’ assistance on Monday, the same day Gov. Greg Abbott called for an investigation and the Harris County Republican Party filed a lawsuit accusing Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum and the county of numerous violations of the Texas Election Code.

The allegations include paper shortages at 23 polling locations, releasing early voting results before polls closed at 8 p.m., the improper disposition of damaged ballots and inadequate instructions on how poll workers were to manage instances in which the two-page ballots were not completely or adequately scanned into machines.

Under Harris County’s countywide voting system, residents had 782 locations to cast their ballots on Election Day. The paper shortages affected a small number of polling places.

The GOP lawsuit, however, claims “countless” voters were turned away due to the paper shortages and did not go to a second location to vote.

See here for the background. Ogg, who was not exactly an asset to Democrats in this election, has taken some heat for this. I get that and I’m not here to defend any of her recent actions, but I’m not exercised about this. There was going to be an investigation of some kind once Abbott threw his tantrum, and given that it can’t be Ken Paxton unless he’s invited in, it may as well be the local DA. Having the Texas Rangers assist makes sense in that it’s best to have outside help for an internal political matter. If this turns out to be much ado about nothing, as I believe it is, then let the Rangers take the blame from the Republicans for not finding anything. I am not going to waste my energy sweating about this at this time.

In the meantime:

Harris County Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum, speaking at length publicly for the first time since Election Day, pledged a complete assessment of voting issues Tuesday but said the county is in “dire need” of improvements to the way it conducts elections.

“A full assessment is in order,” Tatum told Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday. “We have started that assessment, but I’d like to remind you and the public we are still counting votes.”

He said his office still was working its way through about 2,100 provisional ballots cast after 7 p.m. last Tuesday. A state district judge ordered the county to keep the polls open until 8 p.m. because some voting locations failed to open on time. Those provisional ballots are being kept separate from the unofficial count, pending a court ruling on the validity of those votes.

The deadline for the county to canvass the vote is Nov. 22.

[…]

Tatum told Commissioners Court his staff is contacting each election judge to gather feedback and assess challenges they faced, including any technical difficulties and the response they received.

At least one polling place had a late opening and certain locations ran out of paper, Tatum confirmed.

Tatum took over the job in August, just two months before early voting in the November election began. So far, he noted the county is in “dire need” of some critically needed improvements, including a better communication system, more maintenance and operations personnel and a tracking system for monitoring requests from the election workers running polling locations.

Tatum said he has spoken with election judges who requested technical help and did not receive it.

“Because I can’t track that technician within the system that I have, I can’t tell you what happened,” Tatum said.

I dunno, maybe wait until all the work is done and see what happens before storming the barricades? And yes, especially now that they have full control over the budget, the Democratic majority on Commissioners Court needs to ensure this office has sufficient resources. We need to do better. Reform Austin has more.

If all we ever do are defensive measures, we’ll never make any progress

I’m not saying we shouldn’t do these things, although some of them definitely should be questioned. I am saying we can’t just do things like these.

The Texas Education Agency announced Thursday a plethora of proposals that would, among other changes, require public schools to install silent panic alarms and automatic locks on exterior doors.

Other proposals include inspecting doors on a weekly basis to make sure they lock and can be opened from the outside only with a key. Two-way emergency radios would also have to be tested regularly. Schools would need to add some sort of vestibules so visitors can wait before being let in, and all ground-level windows would have to be made with bulletproof glass.

These proposed requirements come about five months after a gunman killed 21 people, including 19 children, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. The gunman entered a door that had been closed by a teacher, but the automatic lock failed.

If approved, schools would have to start putting in place these safety measures starting in 2023. Before the end of this year, the education department will collect public comments on the proposed rules.

The state has allocated $400 million for increased safety measures that will be disbursed to districts. In the coming weeks, the education department will make a grant application available to districts. Districts will receive those grants based on enrollment, while smaller, rural schools will receive the minimum $200,000.

Proposing these safety measures is the latest action the state has taken to secure schools in the wake of the Uvalde shooting. In June, the education department announced that it would check all the locks on exterior doors prior to the start of the 2022-2023 school year and review every district’s school safety plans.

[…]

As Texas moves forward with different safety measures, experts have said there is no indication that beefing up security in schools has prevented violence. Rather, they can can be detrimental to children, especially Black and Hispanic children. Black students are overrepresented in all types of disciplinary referrals and are more likely to have their behavior addressed by school police officers than their white peers.

School districts also expressed concerns about the cost, because the Lege is famous for under-appropriating funds for things it mandates, and the ability to get this done by the deadline since every other district will be scrambling to do the same and there will be some competition for resources. I share the concern about how effective any of this is – remember that a lot of school shooters are current or former students at the schools in question and can often get through security checkpoints because of that – and of the negative effects on the children at the schools. We’re still dancing around the questions of law enforcement’s response to mass shooting incidents at schools, as certain key players continue to evade accountability. And we can’t even talk about restricting gun sales to people over the age of 21, for reasons that make no sense. There’s an extremely limited range of “solutions” to this problem that are politically acceptable to Republicans, and as long as they remain in power those are the only “solutions” we’re going to get, whether they have any effect or not.

Sen. Gutierrez vows to be a pest about Uvalde and gun control in the next session

I’m rooting for him.

Sen. Roland Gutierrez

As he watched a couple load ice chests into their car at a gas station, something didn’t sit right with Roland Gutierrez. The pair were likely on their way to the lake to enjoy the late May sunshine in San Antonio—a normal way to spend the day, he knew. But Gutierrez, the state senator for District 19, couldn’t help thinking how surreal it is that life continues after a tragedy. He was on his way to Uvalde just days after an 18-year-old had opened fire on a classroom at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers.

“I was thinking how sad it is that … we move on with our lives,” Gutierrez said when we met at his San Antonio law office in September. “It’s not an unnatural thing. I get it. When these things happen, we always say, ‘Oh, it’s just too bad. I feel so sorry for those people.’”

Gutierrez represents a massive district that stretches from his hometown of San Antonio west to Big Bend National Park, encompassing a broad swath of southwest Texas, including Uvalde. The Democrat is relatively new to the Texas Senate, taking office in January 2021. His campaign had promised certain priorities: to push for legalized marijuana, to bolster mental health resources for rural Texans, and to improve public schools. Although he hasn’t dropped these issues, nearly all of his public appearances since May have been about Uvalde.

The shooting “changed me for sure,” Gutierrez said. “I won’t be a singular-issue public servant, but it has become a very, very big issue in my life and in the lives of these new friends that I’ve made. … For these parents … there’s no issue out there that matters if you don’t have your kid.”

Gutierrez, a father of two girls aged 15 and 13, has emerged as one of the most vocal lawmakers in the shooting’s aftermath. He called for accountability from the agencies that responded to the killings, appealed to Governor Greg Abbott to call a special session on gun laws, and sued the Texas Department of Public Safety and its powerful chief Steve McCraw to try and force the release of more records about the massacre. The state police agency’s response to the Uvalde shooting only deepened his concern. He’s been skeptical of DPS ever since the launch of the “bullshit propaganda machine for Greg Abbott” that is Operation Lone Star, the multi-billion-dollar border security initiative in which state troopers play a starring role.

[…]

If re-elected, Gutierrez said, he’ll go into the 2023 legislative session with a no-excuses plan: force the issue on gun reform. He plans to spearhead legislation on age increases for gun purchases, expanded background checks, and red flag laws. If that doesn’t work, he said he’ll force debate by offering gun control measures as amendments on all sorts of other priority legislation.

“If they don’t want to talk about guns, and they don’t want to talk about gun violence in this state, well, I’m going to be talking about it,” Gutierrez said. “We’ll have Uvalde families in there. … As far as I can see, those families aren’t going to stop, nor should they.”

I’m sure there are plenty of procedural ways in which he can make a pain of himself – Dems have had some success in this department in recent years, though generally speaking at some point the weight of the majority wins, if not in the same session. I would hope that he’ll have plenty of company – it’s clear that one of the Republican goals for this session is to limit Democrats’ influence, so it’s not like there’s much to lose. Not everyone needs to be actively involved with this, but plenty of Dems will have little else of substance to do, most likely. May as well make some political hay – if you want the public that agrees with you on the issues to support you in the next election, you have to make sure they know who is and is not on their side.

Sen. Gutierrez is already at work on this.

Texas Sen. Roland Gutierrez released call logs Monday that he said show Gov. Greg Abbott waited hours after the shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School to have phone conversations about the tragedy with the state’s top cop.

Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde, said the late timing of the three calls Abbott made on May 24, the date of the shooting, to the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, shows the Republican governor’s lack of concern.

So do their brevity, the Democratic senator added. Records show the three calls totaled 31 minutes.

“That’s not what leaders do, but that’s what this person did,” said Gutierrez, who shared the call logs during a Monday press conference.

[…]

During his Monday press event, Gutierrez said he received the call logs 60 days ago but declined to share them until now because he wanted to give the state’s investigation into the shooting “the benefit of the doubt.”

However, Gutierrez said he’s dismayed by the lack of transparency from both DPS and Abbott’s office around the shooting. He also accused the governor of bankrolling recent ads against him.

“If he wants to play politics with me and with South Texas, then we’re going to tell the truth,” Gutierrez said.

“This man has done absolutely nothing, which is why we’re sharing this today,” the senator added.

I might have acted sooner than that, but at least we’re all clear about who has good faith. This will definitely be worth watching come January.

We have different definitions of “failure”

And by “we”, I mean DPS head Steve McCraw and everybody else.

Weeks after Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said he would resign if his troopers had “any culpability” in the botched police response to the Uvalde school shooting, he told families calling for his resignation Thursday that the agency has not failed as an institution.

“If DPS as an institution — as an institution — failed the families, failed the school or failed the community of Uvalde, then absolutely I need to go,” McCraw said during a heated Public Safety Commission meeting. “But I can tell you this right now: DPS as an institution, right now, did not fail the community — plain and simple.”

McCraw made the remark during a frazzled nearly 15 minutes of comments after several families of the 19 children who were killed spoke during the meeting’s public hearing portion. Two teachers were also killed during the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary.

At least three sets of relatives — as well as state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio — addressed McCraw, sharing the pain they endure every day and castigating government officials who have failed to release accurate and complete information about the shooting since it occurred.

“Typically when situations like this come up, you expect people to tell you the truth, to be transparent, to own up to their mistakes — nothing much to it,” said an uncle of Jackie Cazares, one of the children killed. “But every single time, it seemed like a lie after lie, misinformation, roadblock after roadblock. You can’t begin the healing process.”

Last week, DPS fired the first trooper in connection to the incident, Sgt. Juan Maldonado, who was one of the first and most senior troopers to get to the school. The agency revealed in September at least five troopers were under investigation for their conduct that day.

[…]

As he spoke, relatives of the victims who were present in the room appeared infuriated. Looking at the leader of the state’s top law enforcement agency, they broke their stare to shake their heads.

Afterward, McCraw told the commission he wanted any families present to have an opportunity to respond.

Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old nephew Uziyah Garcia was among the children killed, walked to a podium.

“Are you a man of your word?” Cross asked.

“Absolutely,” McCraw said.

“Then resign,” Cross responded.

Honestly, I can’t add anything to that. I approve of this message. Texas Public Radio has more.

Uvalde school district suspends its entire police force

Um, wow.

Uvalde school officials on Friday suspended all of the district police department’s activities following the firing of a recently hired district officer who was revealed to have been among the first state troopers to respond to the deadly school shooting in May.

Lt. Miguel Hernandez and Ken Mueller were placed on leave, and other officers employed with the department will fill other roles in the district, according to a Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District press release issued Friday. Mueller decided to retire, the release said.

The release did not specify why Hernandez and Mueller were placed on leave. A district spokesperson did not immediately return phone and email messages.

The decision arrived 10 days after protesters set up at the UCISD administrative building to demand the removal of officers from campus grounds until investigations into the police department’s response to the shooting are complete.

The district said decisions regarding the future of the department had been pending the results of two investigations, but it suspended the department’s activities Friday citing “recent developments that have uncovered additional concerns with department operations.”

[…]

Upon suspending the police department, the district asked DPS for extra troopers for campus and extra-curricular activities, according to the Friday news release.

Berlinda Arreola, the grandmother of Amerie Jo Garza, a 10-year-old who was among the 19 students killed in the shooting, was walking into her workplace when she received an email with news about the suspension of the school district’s police department. Arreola told her supervisor she had to go.

“Go go go go,” the boss told her.

She went to meet other family members of the victims, who have been gathering outside the school district to protest. Arreola said she hugged everybody.

“This was a huge step,” she said. “But there’s still a lot of, there’s still a lot more that needs to be done and so we’re going to continue the fight because we’re not done.”

I did not follow the story of the former DPS trooper, whose name is Crimson Elizondo, who was hired by the Uvalde police despite being under investigation by DPS for the way she responded to the shooting. You can read the story and click the links to catch up as needed. I’m just trying to think of something remotely analogous to this in my memory, and I cannot. I am absolutely stunned. Texas Public Radio has more.

Fifth Circuit does its thing with appeal of voter purge case

Get out the rubber stamp.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

A federal appeals court has ruled that Texas does not need to release details about a list of 11,737 registered voters whom the state has identified as potential noncitizens.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Thursday reversed a lower court’s ruling in August in which a district judge had found Texas was violating federal law by refusing to release the list.

The appellate court found that the five civil rights groups suing the Texas secretary of state for the list did not have standing to sue. Circuit Judge Edith H. Jones wrote in the ruling that the groups have neither established injury to themselves from the state’s refusal to release the list nor sued on behalf of any voter included on the list who could be harmed.

The coalition “offered no meaningful evidence regarding any downstream consequences from an alleged injury in law under the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act],” Jones wrote. “The lack of concrete harm here is reinforced because not a single Plaintiff is a Texas voter, much less a voter wrongfully identified as ineligible.”

The groups suing the state are the Campaign Legal Center, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Demos. The groups, which sued the state in February for failing to comply with the NVRA’s public disclosure requirements, sought to hold Texas accountable if it incorrectly misidentified registered voters as noncitizens and disenfranchised naturalized citizens.

“We are disappointed with the court’s opinion and are exploring our options with respect to any next steps,” Molly Danahy, the Campaign Legal Center’s senior legal counsel for litigation, said in a statement. We will continue to monitor potential voter purges in Texas because transparency is vital to a healthy democracy and all citizens deserve to have equal access to the ballot.”

See here and here for the background. I didn’t find any discussion of this in the usual places I look on Twitter, so I don’t know if there’s a hint of merit to the ruling or if it’s wholly made up. Given the recent history of this circuit and that top-level bad actor Edith Jones wrote it, you can probably guess what I think. The Fifth Circuit not only gets no benefit of the doubt from me, they get a presumption of doubt. This is simply not a legitimate court, and this wasn’t even their worst ruling of the week. Burn it all down.

Uvalde parents file lawsuit against multiple defendants

Keep an eye on this one.

The first major lawsuit has been filed over the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde by the families of three surviving students.

“The horrors of May 24, 2022, were only possible because so many in positions of power were negligent, careless, and reckless,” Stephanie B. Sherman, the lead attorney in the case, said in a statement.

Defendants in the federal lawsuit include the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, the city of Uvalde, former school district Police Chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, suspended Uvalde Police Lt. Mariano Pargas and then-Robb Principal Mandy Gutierrez.

The families also are suing Daniel Defense, the Georgia manufacturer of the assault-style rifle Salvador Ramos, 18, used in the massacre; gun accessory maker Firequest International Inc., over a mechanism that makes a semi-automatic rifle fire like an automatic; Uvalde gun shop Oasis Outback LLC, which transferred guns Ramos purchased online to the mass shooter; lock manufacturer Schneider Electric, over alleged problems with locks on Robb Elementary doors; and Motorola Solutions, over issues with a dispatch communications system that complicated the police response.

Another defendant: an unknown company, John Doe Company 1, that the lawsuit said the district contracted with to ensure security measures were in place and effective.

The 81-page lawsuit, filed in Del Rio, accuses most defendants of negligence, inaction or defective products or systems that enabled Ramos to buy the firearm, ammunition and gun accessories he used to kill 19 students and two teachers. He wounded 16 others.

[…]

“Due to the conduct of the school and police, and the deliberate choices of the gun makers and sellers to directly market their lethal weapons to young untrained civilians, the shooter bought and assembled a military grade assault weapon with 30-round magazines days after his 18th birthday…,” the lawsuit said.

The plaintiffs include Corina Camacho, the mother of G.M., a 10-year-old boy who was shot in the leg in classroom 112; Tanisha Rodriguez, the mother of G.R., a 9-year old girl who was playing with classmates on the playground when Ramos began firing; and Selena Sanchez and Omar Carbajal, the parents of D.J., an 8-year-old boy who saw the shooter firing as the boy headed from the gym to the nurse’s station.

Sherman and Monique Alarcon, Texas-based attorneys for the Baum Hedlund law firm of California, and attorney Shawn Brown of San Antonio allege a host of civil claims, including intentional infliction of emotional distress, product liability and violations of due process, among others.

The suit seeks undetermined compensatory damages against all defendants and punitive damages against all the defendants except the school district and the city.

There was a class action lawsuit announced in August that perhaps hasn’t been filed yet. The intended defendants are roughly the same, but I see in those earlier stories that there was no mention of who the plaintiffs were, and I believe that’s because the final paperwork hasn’t been filed yet. Of greatest interest to me is the inclusion of the gun manufacturer and sellers – there’s a legal example to follow, but I don’t know how effective it will be. Let’s just say that I wish these plaintiffs, and those who follow them, a lot of luck. The Trib has more.

The one big question DPS still hasn’t answered about Uvalde

The Trib gets at something that I’ve mentioned a couple of times.

Ever since the Uvalde elementary school shooting left 19 students and two teachers dead, blame for the delayed response has been thrust on local law enforcement. The school police chief was fired and the city’s acting police chief was suspended.

But the only statewide law enforcement agency, the Texas Department of Public Safety, has largely avoided scrutiny even though it had scores of officers on the scene. That’s in part because DPS leaders are controlling which records get released to the public and carefully shaping a narrative that casts local law enforcement as incompetent.

Now, in the wake of a critical legislative report and body camera footage released by local officials, law enforcement experts from across the country are questioning why DPS didn’t take a lead role in the response as it had done before during other mass shootings and public disasters.

The state police agency is tasked with helping all of Texas’ 254 counties respond to emergencies such as mass shootings, but it is particularly important in rural communities where smaller police departments lack the level of training and experience of larger metropolitan law enforcement agencies, experts say. That was the case in Uvalde, where the state agency’s 91 troopers at the scene dwarfed the school district’s five officers, the city police’s 25 emergency responders and the county’s 16 sheriff’s deputies.

The state police agency has been “totally intransparent in pointing out their own failures and inadequacies,” said Charles A. McClelland, who served as Houston police chief for six years before retiring in 2016. “I don’t know how the public, even in the state of Texas, would have confidence in the leadership of DPS after this.”

Instead of taking charge when it became clear that neither the school’s police chief nor the Uvalde Police Department had assumed command, DPS contributed to the 74-minute chaotic response that did not end until a Border Patrol tactical unit that arrived much later entered the classroom and killed the gunman.

“Here’s what DPS should have done as soon as they got there,” said Patrick O’Burke, a law enforcement consultant and former DPS commander who retired in 2008. “They should have contacted [the school police chief] and said: ‘We’re here. We have people.’ They should have just organized everything, said, ‘What are all of our resources?’ And they should have organized the breach.”

[…]

[Despite testimony from DPS director Steve McCraw], DPS has sprung into action time and again when disaster strikes in Texas, which has proved key during mass shootings and public emergencies, local officials across the state said.

More than three decades ago, for example, state troopers helped local law enforcement confront a gunman after arriving within minutes of a shooting at a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, about 60 miles north of Austin. The shooter killed himself after a brief exchange of gunfire.

“They knew that people were dying, and so they acted,” said Suzanna Hupp, a former Republican state representative whose parents died during the 1991 Luby’s massacre. She said that didn’t happen in Uvalde, adding that “clearly there was a command breakdown there.”

In a 2013 chemical explosion in West, about 70 miles south of Dallas, state troopers immediately took control of the law enforcement response at the request of the county’s emergency management coordinator. And in the 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School, about 30 miles south of Houston, state troopers quickly fired at the gunman, according to local law enforcement officials who initially responded. The rapid engagement by school police and DPS was key to the gunman surrendering, district and county officials said.

“DPS had a tremendous role in Santa Fe of stopping the killing because they were among the first to arrive and they actually did what they were supposed to,” said Texas City Independent School District trustee Mike Matranga, the district’s security chief at the time of the shooting. He added that, in Uvalde, DPS supervisors “should have essentially asked [Arredondo] to stand down due to his ineffectiveness and taken over.”

Police experts and lawmakers pointed to clear signs that they believe should have alerted emergency responders that no one was in control. Arredondo, who resigned from his elected City Council seat in July and was fired from the school district on Aug. 24, remained inside the hallway on the phone during the shooting. He said he was trying to find a key to the classroom that the gunman was in. Investigators later determined that the door was likely unlocked. The school police chief did not identify himself as the incident commander and told The Texas Tribune he never issued any orders; his lawyer later said his firing was unjust. In a letter, Arredondo’s attorneys said the police chief “could not have served as the incident commander and did not attempt to take that role” because he was on the front lines.

Separately, no command post was set up outside of the school, which lawmakers noted should have been an indicator to responding officers that no one was in charge.

[…]

The disconnect over who should take charge and when exemplifies a need for detailed planning and frequent training between larger law enforcement agencies and smaller departments, police experts told ProPublica and the Tribune.

Larger agencies with more personnel, equipment and training should have agreements with school districts that clearly state that they will assume command upon arriving at critical incidents that include active shooters, hostage situations and explosive devices, said Gil Kerlikowske, a former Seattle police chief and CBP commissioner until 2017. He and other experts said that even if school police are designated as the lead, the role of every law enforcement agency in the region should be specified.

San Antonio, one of the state’s biggest police departments, has such agreements with local school districts and universities that name the bigger city police agency as the incident commander in the event of a mass shooting. After the Uvalde shooting, San Antonio police Chief William McManus met with school officials in his city and reminded them that his agency would take charge in an active shooter situation.

McManus, whose officers arrived in Uvalde after the gunman was killed, said in an interview that because of the confusion at the scene, he felt the need to emphasize how his department would respond to such an incident in San Antonio.

It is unclear what, if any, involvement DPS or another law enforcement agency had with the Uvalde school district’s mass shooting plan because those governmental bodies declined to release such documents or answer questions. The state police did not have a written memorandum of agreement with the school district outlining its role in such situations, according to DPS records.

Who’s in charge in these situations is a question I’ve raised a few times in writing about this, when the legislative report was released and when the HISD board addressed the question. This is an area where I believe the Lege can and should take action, by requiring school districts (and hell, colleges and universities and community colleges) to have some kind of agreement with either local or state law enforcement agencies and ensuring some minimum standards are met. It’s also a big question for DPS to answer: Why didn’t you take over at Uvalde? Steve McCraw has addressed that already, but I don’t think we should believe him. Certainly, not as long as DPS is being sued over its refusal to release its information to the public about their actions, anything McCraw says should be taken as self-serving first and foremost. And those same questions also go to Greg Abbott, who is McCraw’s boss and patron. Both of them have gotten away with doing nothing for a long time. We need to make sure that time runs out.

Five DPS agents being investigated for their Uvalde actions

It’s a start. It just can’t be the end.

Five Texas Department of Public Safety officers who responded to the Uvalde school shooting in May will face an investigation into their actions at Robb Elementary, the agency said.

The officers were referred to the inspector general’s office, which will determine if they violated any policies in their response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, said DPS spokesperson Travis Considine. The inspector general’s office will also determine if the five officers will face disciplinary actions.

The investigation was first reported by the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE.

[…]

The announcement of an investigation into five DPS officers coincided with the first day of classes for Uvalde students, which marks 15 weeks since the shooting. Following Arredondo’s firing, residents called for further accountability from public officials, including the firing of school district employees.

Arnulfo Reyes, a Robb Elementary teacher who was shot and injured in Room 111, said the investigation into DPS officers “will give the families a sense of accountability” that they’ve demanded.

Reyes didn’t go back to teach his fourth-grade class Tuesday because he is still mentally and physically recovering from injuries to his left arm and lower back. Before the gunman was confronted, Reyes could hear officers outside of his classroom trying to negotiate with the 18-year-old. When officers stopped talking, Reyes thought the officers had “abandoned” him and his students.

He added that he hopes other agencies’ officers are also investigated.

“It’s a glimmer of hope that there will be justice served,” Reyes said.

The story goes into the House committee investigation and report, and the responses from DPS director Steve McCraw, among other things with which we are familiar. I say this is a good start because there needs to be a transparent investigation into everyone’s actions on that horrible day. It’s not just Pete Arredondo and the local cops, and it’s also not just DPS. We need a full accounting of what happened, with consequences as needed for those who should face them. Until then, this is all unfinished business.

Another lawsuit over Uvalde public information

This all really is ridiculous.

The Texas Tribune, along with a group of other news organizations, filed a lawsuit Monday against the city of Uvalde, the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office and the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District asking a judge to order the release of records related to the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School.

The lawsuit states that the local entities have unlawfully withheld information detailing the actions of their dozens of law enforcement officers who responded to the massacre, which the news organizations requested under the Texas Public Information Act. These records include 911 calls, radio traffic, officer body camera footage, police reports, training materials and school surveillance footage.

“For more than three months, the City of Uvalde, Uvalde CISD and Uvalde Sheriff’s Office have resisted the community’s calls for transparency and accountability,” said Laura Lee Prather, a First Amendment lawyer at Haynes Boone who represents the plaintiffs. “Their obfuscation has only prolonged the pain and grief of this tragedy. Today we are asking the Uvalde District Court to heed the call of the community and recognize that the public is entitled to these records under Texas law. We ask that the court grant our petition so that the people of Uvalde can understand the truth about what happened that fateful day.”

[…]

The Tribune and other news organizations also previously filed suit against the Department of Public Safety over its refusal to release records related to the shooting. The agency’s director publicly pinned much of the blame for the flawed police response on the Uvalde school district police chief, though DPS has repeatedly declined to detail the actions of most of its 91 officers who were on the scene.

The city, county and school district have sought permission from the state’s attorney general to withhold information requested by the news organizations. Under the state’s public records law, documents can be exempted from public disclosure in certain circumstances. The lawsuit states that even after the attorney general informed the city of Uvalde that it could not withhold some documents sought by journalists, the city has yet to release them.

Other news outlets that joined Monday’s lawsuit include ProPublica, The New York Times Co., The Washington Post, Gannett, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News and Dow Jones & Co.

See here for some background on the previous lawsuit against DPS. That one was filed in Travis County, this one in Uvalde County. DPS had also been sued by State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, but it was dismissed for not having been filed correctly. I’m about as unsympathetic to the claims of whatever secrecy these entities have made, and even more so for their lack of action where they don’t even have that excuse. The public deserves to know, and these entities are just covering their asses. It’s long past time for us all to find out more about what happened.

Harris County looks to sue over Comptroller’s BS “defunding” claim

Tell it to the judge.

Harris County Commissioners Court this week is expected to hire an outside law firm to take legal action against the state and Comptroller Glenn Hegar, who accused the county of defunding law enforcement in violation of state law.

The accusation by Hegar, delivered in a letter to county Judge Lina Hidalgo last week, blocks Harris County from approving its proposed $2.2 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

The court will hold a special meeting Wednesday to consider hiring the law firm of Alexander Dubose & Jefferson LLP to pursue legal action against Hegar and other state officials.

Hegar threw the curveball just before county officials presented their proposed spending plan last tuesday, saying the county should reconsider its budget plan or gain voter approval for it. The letter, however, was sent on Monday, the last day the county could get a measure onto the November ballot.

Senate Bill 23, passed by the Texas Legislature and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott last year, bars counties with a population of more than 1 million from cutting law enforcement spending without the approval of voters.

The defunding accusation was sparked by two Republican Harris County constables — Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman and Precinct 5 Constable Ted Heap — who had complained to Gov. Greg Abbott after the county changed its policy last year to do away with “rollover” budgeting that had allowed departments to save unspent funds and use them in future budget cycles.

Herman and Heap did not respond to requests for comment.

In his letter, Hegar said doing away with the rollover funds resulted in a loss of $3 million previously dedicated to the constables office in fiscal 2021. However, by preventing the county from adopting its proposed budget, the letter could cost the sheriff, constables and district attorney’s office an additional $100 million in funding included in the new spending plan, county officials said.

On Wednesday, Commissioners Court could vote to authorize two outside law firms to file a lawsuit against the comptroller. If the county does pursue legal action, other state officials could be named, as well.

See here for the background on this completely ridiculous claim. The vote in Commissioners Court is today; I’ll be interested to see if it’s unanimous or not. I also have no idea what to expect from the courts, but I sure hope they get it right, because this is a terrible precedent to set otherwise. Finally, a special shoutout to Constables Herman and Heap for going radio silent after leaving this bag of poop on the Court’s front porch. Mighty courageous of you two there.

The gaps in Texas’ background check law

From Pro Publica:

In the spring of 2009, Elliott Naishtat persuaded his colleagues in the Texas Legislature to pass a bill that he believed would require the state to report court-ordered mental health hospitalizations for Texans of all ages to the national firearms background check system.

Nearly two years had passed since a student with a history of serious mental illness had gone on a deadly shooting rampage that left 32 dead at Virginia Tech. And Naishtat, then a Democratic state representative from Austin, argued that Texas was as vulnerable as Virginia had been to such mass shootings because it didn’t require the reporting of involuntary mental health commitments to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. Federally licensed dealers are required to check the system before they sell someone a firearm.

“This bill will ultimately save lives, and I hope you’ll give it your most serious consideration,” Naishtat said when he introduced the measure.

But 13 years after the legislation became law, following a string of mass shootings carried out by troubled young men, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune has uncovered a major gap in the law and its implementation.

Despite language in Naishtat’s bill that says local courts should report to the state’s top law enforcement agency any time a judge orders any person, regardless of age, to receive inpatient mental health treatment, the news organizations found that they are not reporting juvenile records because of problems with the way the law was written, vague guidance from the state and conflicts with other Texas laws.

[…]

When it comes to the reporting of adult mental health records, the Texas law has been highly effective. By the end of 2021, the state had sent more than 332,000 mental health records — the sixth-highest number in the country — to the national background check system, according to FBI data.

Unlike adult records, juvenile records are tightly controlled under state law, which includes criminal penalties for officials who release them unlawfully. That has likely contributed to widespread confusion about the reach of the 2009 law, which does not differentiate between adults and minors, said Dru Stevenson, a South Texas College of Law professor whose research focuses on gun violence and regulation.

“Anybody dealing with either health records or juveniles are super skittish about preserving privacy and confidentiality,” he said.

Mike Schneider, a former Harris County juvenile court judge, said the 2009 law fails to account for nuances in the juvenile code. For example, the law requires the reporting of all court-ordered mental health commitments. But Schneider and other juvenile officials say that in many cases juveniles end up in inpatient treatment not through a judge’s order, but via treatment plans agreed to by mental health professionals working on their cases. Additionally, Schneider said he interprets the law to directly address only the mental health commitments of juveniles already in lockup, not those first entering the system.

As a result, he estimated that some 99% of juvenile mental health commitments in the state are not the result of the kinds of judicial orders spelled out in the 2009 law.

“It’s just a really, really, really tiny sliver and would miss most of the people who are juveniles who have court-ordered mental health services,” he said.

The Office of Court Administration convened a task force of clerks, judges and various state officials more than a decade ago to figure out how to increase the number of all mental health records being sent to DPS.

The resulting report, published in 2012, found that “DPS lacks the resources to assist the district and county clerks with reporting mental health information.” It made a number of recommendations for ensuring better reporting across the state, including that OCA distribute a reporting manual to clerks detailing the law’s exact requirements. But neither the report nor the resulting manual addressed the reporting of juvenile records.

The agency has since moved to remedy that.

“Recently, because of increased questions, we decided to update the quick reference table to make it even more clear that juvenile records should be included under those provisions, and an updated FAQ section will be going in the manual,” spokesperson Megan LaVoie wrote in an email last month.

Amid a lack of clear direction, courts across the state aren’t following the law as Naishtat intended.

[…]

Schneider, the former Harris County juvenile judge, said the Legislature should address the narrowness and ambiguity that has resulted in the widespread failure to report juvenile mental health records, though he said such an effort will require lawmakers to answer difficult questions about how to handle sensitive records. In his mind, the law should cover young Texans with troubling histories of bullying, animal cruelty and sexual assault, behavior that foreshadows what experts call “future dangerousness.”

“What do you do with kids who have tortured a cat or a dog or done something really cruel, sexually or not, to another kid?” he said. “Those are, I think, the ones that people really worry about, because that seems to be so strongly correlated with really, really bad outcomes in the future.”

This is a long story with a lot of detail, so go read the rest for yourself. I think I’ve captured the main points in my excerpts, so the real question is whether the Lege is even interested in trying to address the gaps in that law. On that score, there was no comment from either Dan Patrick or Dade Phelan, so at the least there’s a lot of work to be done to even get it on the radar. And in keeping with what I’ve suggested before, this isn’t a whole solution but a part of one. Combining a fix to the Naishtat law with a ban on most types of gun purchases by anyone under the age of 21 would be a start. But first, the will to act has to be there. We can have a say in that this November.

More on the Uvalde class action lawsuit

A few more details, anyway.

Charles Bonner served the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District with the multibillion-dollar claim Monday, requesting compensation for the victims. Bonner told The Texas Tribune he intended to serve Uvalde city leaders on Tuesday evening at a City Council meeting.

As evidence of the school district’s responsibility, the claim pointed to a Texas House committee’s report that investigated the shooting as well as law enforcement’s response. The report, which was published a month ago, found that “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” contributed to the gunman’s ability to get inside a classroom and law enforcement’s delayed response in confronting him.

[…]

The claim, which could become a precursor to a class-action lawsuit, puts the would-be defendants of a potential suit on notice. Bonner said he hopes to reach a settlement ahead of the class-action suit, but if those parties don’t come to the negotiating table, he plans to file the federal lawsuit in September.

Bonner said the claim seeks to establish a medical monitoring fund to pay for counseling for those affected by the incident and further compensation for the victims of the shooting, their families and the other people in the school on the day of the tragedy.

As it stands, the class named in the prospective lawsuit covers nine families of shooting victims, but Bonner said he expects that more people impacted by the shooting will sign on moving forward.

“The theme of this invitation to negotiate is accountability, responsibility and justice, and that’s what we want for everyone in that class. We will leave no victim behind,” Bonner said.

See here for some background on the lawsuit, and here for more on that House committee report. I don’t know what might qualify this as a class action lawsuit – I know that having multiple plaintiffs isn’t enough for that. I do know that $27 billion could pay for a lot of counseling and still provide for significant “further compensation”. I don’t expect there to be a settlement, though one presumes with an opening bid of $27 billion there’s plenty of room to negotiate, so we’ll see what the filing looks like next month. Any lawyers want to comment on this? ABC News and the Express News have more.

Arredondo fired

Took awhile, but there it is.

The Uvalde school board agreed Wednesday to fire Pete Arredondo, the school district police chief broadly criticized for his response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, in a vote that came shortly after he asked to be taken off of suspension and receive backpay.

Arredondo, widely blamed for law enforcement’s delayed response in confronting the gunman who killed 21 people at Robb Elementary, made the request for reinstatement through his attorney, George E. Hyde. The meeting came exactly three months after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at the school.

“Chief Arredondo will not participate in his own illegal and unconstitutional public lynching and respectfully requests the Board immediately reinstate him, with all backpay and benefits and close the complaint as unfounded,” Hyde said in a statement.

Arredondo didn’t attend the meeting, citing death threats made against him.

But about 100 people, including relatives of the shooting victims, showed up for the vote. Many chanted “coward” and “no justice, no peace.” Four people spoke during a public comment period before the seven-member board went into closed session to deliberate Arredondo’s employment, criticizing the decision to not discuss the matter in front of the public.

[…]

In his statement Wednesday, Arredondo’s lawyer said that the school district violated his constitutional due process rights by failing to provide him notice of the complaints against him and conduct an investigation of his response to the mass shooting ahead of the termination hearing.

Arredondo’s lawyer said that he received an email from the district on July 19, recommending his termination based on his failure to establish himself as the incident commander during the shooting, but argued the letter should have been sent earlier and in a physical format.

Arredondo was listed in the district’s active-shooter plan as the commanding officer, but the consensus of those interviewed by the House committee was that Arredondo did not assume that role and no one else took over for him, which resulted in a chaotic law enforcement response.

See here and here for some background. I wasn’t particularly inclined to be sympathetic to Pete Arredondo, though I do agree that not all of the blame for the law enforcement response at Robb Elementary is his and I will push back against DPS’ self-serving efforts to scapegoat him, but that’s about as far as I’ll go. Seeing him refer to this as a “lynching” and whining about his “constitutional rights” in an employment matter confirms to me that I’m in the right place. Go away and find another line of work, dude. We’ll all be better off that way.

The Constables’ and Comptroller’s ridiculous complaint

This is transparent bullshit.

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar this week accused Harris County commissioners of defunding local constables and threatened to prevent the county from implementing its proposed 2023 budget if the county does not reverse course.

In a letter sent late Monday, Hegar said the county’s move to do away with “rollover” budgeting led to more than $3 million dedicated to the constables last year being returned to the general fund.

“If the county proceeds with the Constable budget as proposed without obtaining voter approval, the county may not adopt an ad valorem tax rate that exceeds the county’s no-new-revenue tax rate,” Hegar wrote.

Harris County Administrator David Berry on Tuesday afternoon said Hegar’s position would prevent the county from adopting a budget that increases funding to Harris County Constables’ and Sheriff’s offices by “millions of dollars.”

“The Comptroller’s position would keep us from making these new investments,” he said, “which is contrary to the intent of SB 23. … I hope the Comptroller’s position does not prevent us from achieving our goal, and we look forward to working with the state to resolve this matter.

Berry said that in the past, county departments could “roll over” their unspent budget from one year to the next “with no questions asked.”

“This practice was unique to Harris County and is not the practice of other local governments,” he said. “Under the current policy, departments, including the Constable’s Offices, can request the use of unspent funds on vehicles, equipment, and other one-time expenses. The County has continued to support these investments.”

Paradoxically, by preventing Harris County from adopting the new tax rate, Hegar’s actions would prevent the county from implementing $96.7 million in increases to the sheriff and constable offices, and a proposed $10 million increase to the District Attorney’s Office.

Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman — one of the two constables who first raised the issue with Abbott — said he was “thankful” to the governor and to Hegar for looking into the matter.

“We look forward to a resolution one way or another,” he said, explaining that he and other constables had used their rollover funds to purchase new patrol cars and safety equipment, and in some cases, to pay employees’ salaries.

“All that’s been taken away from us,” he said. “What it’s come to is an elected official has no say in his own department, basically, and it’s jeopardized public safety and officer safety.”

[…]

Hegar said his investigation began after Harris County Precinct 4 and Precinct 5 Constables Mark Herman and Ted Heap wrote to the governor complaining about losing their “rollover” funds last year. Prior to County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s election in 2018, county commissioners had allowed county agencies to keep unspent funds, which “rolled over” into the following year’s budget. Constables used the money for a variety of projects and other issues — including paying for some staff.

Eva DeLuna Castro, who oversees budget and fiscal policy analysis for Every Texan, said that within state agencies, rolling over unspent money from one budget cycle to the next was permitted only in a very limited number of circumstances, and generally required the specific approval of the legislature.

After Hidalgo’s election, the county did away with the unusual budgeting technique and adopted more traditional budgeting practices — similar to what the state requires of its own agencies and their funding.

Hegar sent the letter to commissioners late last night — the deadline for when the county would potentially be able to add any voter initiatives to the ballot.

County officials disputed Hegar’s claims, noting that the decision to do away with rollover funds took place before SB23 went into effect. They also disputed Hegar’s numbers.

A review of county records show that the county allocated $205,290,000 to its constables in 2020. This year, its proposed budget includes a 13 percent increase to the constables budget, for a total of $231,491,249.

The two constables who first complained to Gov. Greg Abbott about losing their rollover funds have also seen increases to their budget. In 2020, Precinct 4 received about $57 million in funding; Precinct 5 received $44 million. This year, county commissioners have proposed giving Pct. 4 $65 million, while Pct. 5 is slated to receive more than $48 million.

I mean, come on:

1. Harris County is increasing its spending on public safety across the board.

2. The two Constables in question are each getting more money in this budget than in the previous one. The Constables overall are getting more money.

3. “Rollover budget” means unspent funds from the previous cycle. These two Constables didn’t even spend all the money they had been allocated before!

4. The practice of not rolling over funds is exactly how the state does its own budgeting, including for DPS.

From every angle this is ridiculous, and clearly driven by partisan motives – the two Constables in question are Republicans. I don’t expect to get better arguments about public policy from these clowns, but I am insulted that they can’t come up with a better pretext for their crap than this. Shame on everyone involved. The Trib has more.

Class action lawsuit for Uvalde parents being prepped

There are a lot of blanks to be filled in for this. You can be sure I’ll be watching for them.

Some of the families affected by the Robb Elementary School mass shooting are now a part of a major lawsuit.

The class action lawsuit, which was announced Sunday, is going after several law enforcement agencies as well as the manufacturer of the gun used in the massacre.

”What we intend to do (is) to help serve this community, and that is to file a $27 billion civil rights lawsuit under our United States Constitution, one-of-a-kind in the whole world,” attorney Charles Bonner of Bonner & Bonner Law said.

The civil rights attorney is holding no punches. He intends to file a class action lawsuit against anyone who can be held responsible for what happened inside Robb Elementary on May 24.

“We have the school police, OK, Arredondo, we have the city police, and we have the sheriffs and we have the Texas Rangers, the DPS and we have the Border Patrol,” Bonner said.

The defendants also include gun manufacturer Daniel Defense and Oasis Outback, where the gunman bought the weapon used in the shooting.

“There will be some institutional defendants as well, such as school board or such as City Council or such as the City of the Uvalde,” Bonner said.

[…]

The suit is being filed on constitutionality, as Bonner said the victims, survivors, and their families had their 14th Amendment rights violated.

“People have a right to life under the 14th Amendment and what we’ve seen here is that the law enforcement agencies have shown a deliberate conscious disregard of the life,” Bonner said.

Bonner’s law firm is taking on this class action lawsuit with a team of other firms, including a local Uvalde law office and Everytown, a gun safety organization.

See here and here for some background, though it’s not clear to me that there’s a connection between the previous actions we’ve seen and this pending case. Attorney Bonner says he will file in September, after the Justice Department releases its report on Uvalde and the various law enforcement failures.

I have no idea what to expect from this lawsuit. I think the odds of the plaintiffs winning a judgment whose dollar value starts with a B are vanishingly small, but they could win multiple millions. How long it takes, and what the fallout from it might be – assuming they do in fact win and not have the suit tossed by an appeals court or SCOTUS – is anyone’s guess. We’ll know a little bit more next month.

A long look at the lack of accountability in Uvalde

CNN has a very long piece about how there are many investigations going on about the Uvalde massacre but seemingly little to hold anyone accountable for it. Uvalde residents, especially the parents of Robb Elementary children, are increasingly frustrated with the lack of information and the lack of action.

At Uvalde school district and city council meetings this week, community members again pressed their elected officials on why officers at the school that day haven’t been relegated to desk duty or fired. The school district superintendent also was asked why he had not sought an independent investigation into the tragedy, and the mayor was pressed on how and why the city chose an Austin, Texas, investigator to lead its internal review.

“We have yet, almost three months later, to hear any answers or to see any accountability from anybody at any level — from law enforcement officers, to campus staff, to central office and beyond,” Uvalde resident Diana Olvedo-Karau told the school board. “And we just don’t understand why. I mean, how can we lose 19 children and two teachers tragically, just horribly, and not have anybody yet be accountable.”

“It’s approaching three months, and we are still being placated with tidbits or being outright stonewalled or being given excuses” about the city police department’s response, said resident Michele Prouty, who passed out complaint forms against Uvalde police at Tuesday’s city council meeting. “What we have instead — what we are traumatized again and again by — is an inept, unstructured national embarrassment of a circus tent full of smug clowns. These clowns continue to cruise our streets sporting their tarnished badges.”

A looming US Department of Justice after-action report has perhaps the strongest chance of giving a clear understanding of how the day’s horrific events unfolded, experts who spoke to CNN said. Such reports tend to home in on opportunities for improvement, while discipline typically must be backed by precise allegations that would hold up if challenged by an officer or subject to court hearings or arbitration processes.

But it’s not clear precisely what parameters those who are overseeing reviews of the city and school district police departments are using to identify systemic failures or root out findings that could lead to discipline for officers.

The Texas Department of Public Safety has said its wide-ranging internal review could result in referrals to an inspector general. The agency also is conducting the criminal investigation into the Uvalde massacre itself — probing details such as how the shooter got his guns and his online communications before the attack — separate from the internal review of its officers’ conduct at Robb Elementary. Part of that work, it has said, is “examining the actions of every member of (a) law enforcement agency that day.” But it’s not clear whether officers are cooperating with the inquiry.

The district attorney reviewing the criminal investigation, Christina Mitchell Busbee, said she would “seek an indictment on a law enforcement officer for a criminal offense, when appropriate, under the laws of Texas.” But it’s not clear under what law any officer might be charged or whether evidence so far supports charges.

Meantime, how Texas DPS has cast its own role in the tragedy already has come under scrutiny. Its officers were at Robb Elementary earlier than previously known — and longer than Texas DPS has publicly acknowledged — materials reviewed by CNN show, with at least one DPS trooper seen running toward the school, taking cover behind a vehicle and then running toward an entrance within 2-1/2 minutes of the shooter entering. The agency’s director instead publicly has focused on when the first DPS agent entered the hallway where classrooms were under attack.

Further, a Texas DPS spokesperson who made three phone calls to a DPS sergeant inside the school during the 70-plus minutes officers waited to confront the gunman later gave journalists a narrative that quickly unraveled. Since then, news organizations, including CNN, have sued the Texas DPS for access to public records related to the massacre.

Amid the inconsistencies, the head of the state’s largest police union, along with a senior state lawmaker, have questioned Texas DPS’s ability to investigate itself. “I don’t know that we can trust them to do an internal investigation,” Charley Wilkison, executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, told CNN.

“It would be best if the investigation were headed up by an outside independent source that the public can have total confidence in,” said Wilkison, whose union represents law enforcement officers across the state, including some in Uvalde. 

[…]

It’s not clear whether any internal city investigation was underway between the May 24 massacre and the announcement of the internal investigation, though best practices for investigations dictate they usually begin as close to the incident as possible.

Then at a July 26 city council meeting, city officials said they’d hired the firm of Jesse Prado, a former Austin police homicide detective, to lead their review. Council members said their investigator should finish his work within two months, then Prado will make recommendations — possibly including disciplinary actions — to the council.

“If there’s any officer that’s in violation of any policy or procedure that they needed to act on and did not and might have caused these children to die, these teachers to die, I can assure you, heads are going to roll,” Uvalde City Councilmember Hector Luevano said during the session. Prado declined to comment for this story.

City officials, meantime, have refused for nearly two weeks to answer questions about their review of officers’ actions that day. Tarski Law, listed on the city council’s website as city attorney, also declined to comment and referred questions to Gina Eisenberg, president of a public relations firm that specializes in “crisis communications” and was hired by the city to field media requests. Eisenberg said the city would not comment. McLaughlin, the mayor, said Tuesday he couldn’t characterize the city’s relationship with Eisenberg, who hired her or who is paying her bill, saying, “I don’t know anything about her. I have nothing to do with it.”

Eisenberg also declined to answer questions about the city police department review process. McLaughlin was certain such a process existed but wasn’t aware of related procedures, he told CNN on Tuesday. The internal investigation led by Prado was launched August 1, Eisenberg said. The city attorney chose Prado for the job without a bidding process and based on word-of-mouth recommendations, the mayor told CNN; Tarski Law referred CNN to Eisenberg, who wouldn’t provide a copy of its contract with Prado’s firm, explain what the department’s internal affairs process was before the shooting or say whether that process was used at any time before Prado was hired. Eisenberg said the city would not release further information or comment.

The full scope of Prado’s investigation also isn’t clear — whether he’s conducting an after-action review meant to identify failures for future understanding or investigating specific allegations of broken rules in response to internal complaints, or some hybrid. Prado will have “free range to take the investigation wherever the investigation takes him,” McLaughlin told CNN on Tuesday. While it’s unlikely Prado’s source materials will be released, the mayor said, he vowed to make Prado’s report public after first sharing it with victims’ families — “if I have any say in it.”

“When we see that report, whatever it tells us we need to do and changes we need to make — if it tells us we need to let people go or whatever it tells us — then that’s what we will do,” McLaughlin told CNN.

[…]

While it’s unclear when any of the reviews of law enforcement’s response to the Uvalde massacre will wrap up, the Texas DPS probe — like the others — could have implications for its own and other officers, raising the stakes for how impartially and transparently it’s handled. As with the other probes, too, how it’s conducted and what it concludes will impact what closure families of the slain in this small, tortured city can receive.

Texas DPS “was fast to wash its hands, to point fingers and to make sure that the general public, particularly the elected officials, knew that they were spotless, blameless and that this was a local problem,” said Wilkison, the police union chief.  ”No one created this environment, (in) which everyone’s to blame except DPS. No one did that except them. If we’re to never, ever let this happen in Texas, we have to know what happened, exactly what happened.”

Even with that long excerpt, there’s a ton more at the link, so go read the whole thing. I can’t say I’m a big fan of CLEAT, but Charley Wilkison is right that the report DPS is working on is deeply suspect. I expect that the Justice Department probe will be the most useful, but all they can do is make recommendations. They have no power to change anything. That’s up to DPS and the locals themselves, and it’s clear none of them are particularly motivated to examine themselves.

As I see it, there are two paths to actually making things happen. One is through lawsuits, filed by the parents of the murdered children. File against DPS, against the city of Uvalde, the Uvalde police and the Uvalde school police, and so forth. This will be painful for them, it will take years to get to a conclusion, and it will be a massive fight to get the kind of information they’ve been demanding released, but the discovery process once it kicks in will be a very effective provider of sunlight. The downside is as noted – it will take years and be traumatic over and over again for the families – but in the end I would expect to finally get a real view of what happened, and maybe some financial penalties for the malfunctioning government entities.

The other is through elections. The people of Uvalde should give strong consideration to voting out their entire city and school district governments. Maybe some of those same parents might want to run for one or more of those offices. You want transparency, put some people in power who are truly committed to it. Along those same lines, voting in a new Governor would be the most direct route to getting transparency from DPS. I feel quite confident that Governor Beto O’Rourke will be delighted to appoint a new head of DPS with a mandate to clean house and make public all of the things that department did wrong in this debacle. Nothing like a little regime change to make things happen.

DPS can keep Uvalde info secret for now

Hopefully not for much longer.

Sen. Roland Gutierrez

A state district judge ruled Wednesday that the Department of Public Safety does not have to turn over records related to the Uvalde school shooting sought by state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who had sued the state police in hopes of securing them.

The order by Travis County 419th Civil District Court Judge Catherine A. Mauzy was narrow, however, and sidestepped the question of whether the state police can withhold records concerning their response to the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School. Mauzy concluded that Gutierrez had not properly filed his request under the Texas Public Information Act, the state’s public records law, and therefore DPS was not obligated to fulfill it.

Still, the outcome grants a reprieve for the state police, who have fought to keep secret the details of how 91 officers responded to the shooting. Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde, wrote a letter to DPS Director Steve McCraw on May 30, requesting the agency’s training manuals as well as any documents that detail how the state police responded to the shooting that day. In a hearing last week, DPS officials said that request should have gone to the agency’s media relations office.

Gutierrez said Wednesday he disagreed with the ruling and suggested the state police were simply looking for an excuse not to comply with his request. The lawmaker has been among the most critical state officials of how DPS has handled the shooting.

“It is most absurd that Department of Public Safety continues to fight even the most benign distribution of documents, like a training manual,” Gutierrez said. “And they refuse to do it because they’re culpable of their negligence and malfeasance on that day.”

See here for the background. Sen. Gutierrez has since released a statement that says he will appeal, and he will also re-file his request per the court’s orders. If so, then one way or another he should be able to get that information eventually. I’m sure we’ll have to go through more litigation before DPS complies. But I do expect that at some point they will have to.

How would HISD’s police respond to an active shooter incident?

It’s a question we would all rather not have to think about, but this is the world we live in. And at this time, the answer that Superintendent Millard House gave to that question was not reassuring.

Houston ISD’s police department would not be prepared should Texas’ largest school district be targeted by active shooter, Superintendent Millard House II said Thursday night.

“I don’t know that this has garnered community insight but what I do know is that, if there was an active shooter in HISD, our police department is not prepared,” House said during an agenda review meeting.

His remarks were in response to questioning from Trustee Dani Hernandez regarding an item the board is expected to vote on during next week’s meeting for purchase of items worth more than $100,000. The specific agenda item includes various purchases for the school district’s police department.

House said the district would be buying 200 rifles, 200 ballistic plate shields and rifle ammunition.

“As we study the Uvalde scenario and looked at what … proper preparation that needs to be in place, officers would not have been prepared for what that looks like,” House said.

[…]

Hernandez asked what research was guiding HISD, instead of feelings. House asked HISD police Chief Pete Lopez to share information in response to her question.

Lopez said research showed police who were better prepared helped in stopping a shooter faster. He was confident about training the district’s police force — estimated to be more than 200 employees — had received. But he did “not have a lot of confidence in preparing our officers to encounter a suspect without the proper equipment.” He said they needed scenario-based training to learn how to respond to such a threat.

The school district has about 195,000 students.

“The equipment that I’ve requested is to provide additional training to teach the officers how to breach the doors, how to use those shields and also quickly enter that room and neutralize the suspect,” Lopez said. “And of course save our students and our staff.”

Like I said, nobody wants to have to think about this. Given that we have to, there are two things that I want to know up front, based on what we have witnessed from Uvalde. One is that there is always a clear definition of who is in command at such a scene. While it’s unlikely that DPS and Border Patrol would show up at an HISD school wit an active shooter, HPD and the Sheriff’s office will almost certainly have officers on the scene. Make sure that there is a written policy that says who is the leader, so that we don’t have a nightmare situation where dozens of cops are waiting around for someone to tell them what to do. And two, the policy must also state that the top priority is going after the shooter, again to avoid a repeat of what happened at Robb Elementary. Everything else, from best practices to training to equipment to whatever else can be provided for. First and foremost, we have to make sure that there’s a commitment to stop the person or persons responsible for the shooting. You wouldn’t think this is a thing that needs to be said, and to be clearly spelled out in an official document for which there would be severe consequences for now following it, but it is and we do. So let’s make sure we have one. Campos has more.

State ordered to turn over voter purge data

Very good.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

A federal judge ruled this week that the state is violating U.S. law by refusing to release its list of more than 11,000 registered voters that it identified as potential noncitizens, and ordered the release of the data within 14 days.

A coalition of civil rights groups sued the Secretary of State’s Office in February for withholding the data concerning a voter purge program targeting immigrants that was mandated by a new Republican-backed election law.

The new elections law, passed after a heated partisan battle last summer, requires that the office conduct regular sweeps of the voter rolls to verify citizenship status by cross-checking data provided by the Texas Department of Public of Safety.

The groups are concerned that thousands of immigrants could have their voter registrations canceled based on outdated or incorrect records, a potential repeat of a botched voter purge in 2019 that ended with a court settlement restricting who could be targeted in future purges.

The state had attempted to cancel registrations of almost 100,000 registered voters, but many were later found to be naturalized citizens or others who had been flagged in error. About 70,000 immigrants are naturalized in Texas each year on average and become eligible to vote.

Without the data on the purge initiated earlier this year, the groups say they can’t confirm that the state is complying with the 2019 settlement agreement. Within months of the new program’s launch, county officials warned the state that the lists included people who registered to vote at their naturalization ceremonies.

“We’ve kind of seen this movie before in 2019,” said Danielle Lang, senior director for voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, which represented the civil rights groups. “Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests the same thing is happening despite Texas’ claims that it’s following 2019 settlement agreement. We’re glad to finally be able to get access to the data, so the public can better understand what this process looks like and why eligible citizens are being caught up in the system.”

See here for the background. The Secretary of State has amply demonstrated that it cannot be trusted in matters like this. They need to be watched like a hawk, and that means they need to be completely transparent about every step they take. As with the other voter registration case we heard about this week (*), the Fifth Circuit is a threat, but maybe not as bog a threat in this one. The state could accept the ruling and provide the data – surely they want to show they have nothing to hide, right? – but I’m not that naive. We’ll see what they do next.

(*) As it happens, the judge for both of these cases is Lee Yeakel, a George W. Bush appointee. He has had himself a busy week.

News orgs sue DPS over Uvalde info

Same annoying story, part whatever. Getting public records about this tragedy shouldn’t be this hard to do.

More than a dozen news organizations filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Public Safety on Monday, accusing the agency of unlawfully withholding public records related to the May school shooting in Uvalde.

The organizations — which include The Texas Tribune and its partner ProPublica and other local, state and national newsrooms — have each filed requests under the Texas Public Information Act for information detailing the response by various authorities, including law enforcement, to the massacre.

DPS has refused to release records in response to these requests, even as the agency has selectively disclosed some information through public testimonythird-party analyses and news conferences.

“In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, and continuing throughout the ensuing two months, DPS has declined to provide any meaningful information in response to the Requests regarding the events of that day — despite the unfathomable reality that some 376 members of law enforcement responded to the tragedy, and hundreds of those were in the school or on school property not going into the unlocked classroom where the gunman continued killing helpless youth,” the lawsuit states. “At the same time, DPS has offered conflicting accounts regarding the response of law enforcement, the conduct of its officers, the results of its own investigation, and the agency’s justifications for withholding information from the public.”

[…]

DPS is claiming an exemption for records related to an ongoing investigation, but the news organizations argue there is no such investigation, given the guilt of the gunman is not in dispute and authorities say the 18-year-old acted alone. The local prosecutor, Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee, has acknowledged that she is not conducting a criminal investigation.

The records requested include emails; body camera and other video footage; call logs, 911 and other emergency communications; interview notes; forensic and ballistic records; and lists of DPS personnel who responded to the tragedy, among other information.

The plaintiffs include The New York Times Company, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, Scripps Media and Gannett. The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, who also joined the suit, have filed about 70 records requests.

See here and here for some background. It’s not just been DPS that has been resistant to releasing information, but they’ve definitely dug in their heels. However this ends up, expect it to be fought till the bitter end in court.

Perhaps one reason why DPS is so reluctant to give up any of their information is because any time any data about the Uvalde massacre gets released, law enforcement just looks bad.

On July 17, the city of Uvalde released nearly 3.5 hours of video from city police body cameras. The stream of recordings came only hours after a special Texas House committee investigating the massacre issued a report that condemned the law enforcement response as a jumble of missed opportunities and unlearned lessons from past mass shootings.

The recordings — from seven Uvalde officers’ body cameras — show officers anxious, frustrated or confused by conflicting information. Several frantically searched for a master key for Room 111’s door, which apparently was unlocked.

The footage also shows a steadily increasing flow of police officers from other local, state and federal agencies into Robb Elementary, beginning less than 10 minutes after Ramos began shooting inside the classrooms. Some of the police carried rifles. Some wore body armor or full protective gear.

The recordings — especially of the radio message at 12:11 a.m. alerting officers that wounded victims were trapped in the rooms with Ramos — could become pivotal as prosecutors weigh whether to charge some of the responding officers with a crime because of their failure to confront the shooter much earlier in his rampage.

“They’re looking hard at when officers learned about kids being in the classrooms,” said one law enforcement source familiar with the conversations of prosecutors looking into the case. “At what point did (officers) know when the kids called from inside the classrooms?”

Christina Mitchell Busbee, district attorney of Uvalde and Real counties, has declined to comment on the investigation.

The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers are handling the probe, with input from Mitchell’s office. In August, the agencies are expected to hand over their findings to Mitchell, who will decide whether to file any charges.

I don’t know that any of the responding officers should be held criminally liable for their response, but I can damn sure imagine some civil lawsuits against the various agencies involved. But good luck building a case if you don’t have enough evidence.