Uvalde school district will not finish its internal review of police response to mass shooting

If nothing else, there are two clear arguments to be made in this debate.

The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District announced it will not continue with an independent review of the district police response to the Robb Elementary School shooting.

UCISD announced in September it would work with JPPI Investigations to conduct an internal review of its police response to the deadly mass shooting that killed 19 students and 2 teachers last year.

The City of Uvalde previously engaged Jesse Prado of JPPI Investigations to investigate actions by the Uvalde Police Department.

A spokesperson with the district told the Uvalde Leader-News it halted the review and will work with findings from four different investigations.

This includes reports from a Texas House Committee, the Texas School Safety Center, the Texas School Police Chiefs’ Association, and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Note that UCISD has suspended its police force, and only one member of its force is still employed by UCISD, with that person still on leave. Given all this, pick your side:

1. It’s unlikely that UCISD’s own report would tell anyone anything that couldn’t be learned from the four other reviews. Producing that report costs money that UCISD could better spend elsewhere. UCISD doesn’t even have a police force at this point. The TSPCA report provided “a blueprint for building a suitable police force” if they do want one. Dropping the JPPI report was the sensible thing to do.

2. UCISD has a moral obligation to understand what went wrong with the police force they employed and why, whether or not they have their own police department going forward. The other reports will concentrate on their own actors and responsibilities and may not address concerns specific to UCISD. Those reports are being produced on their own timetable and may not be available to UCISD any time soon, or indeed at all. The TSPCA and Justice Department reports are not public, and if anyone deserves to know what happened, it’s the people of Uvalde. Not producing their own report is ducking their responsibilities and should be condemned.

Have at it.

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