Former Police Chief Charged in Uvalde School Shooting

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Facts

• On Thursday, the police chief of Uvalde, Texas, during the 2022 Robb Elementary school shooting, Pete Arredondo, was indicted on 10 counts of felony child endangerment over the law enforcement response to the mass shooting.¹
• These are the first criminal charges laid against police for the shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead. Arredondo was released the same day on a $10K bond, while a second officer was also indicted for his role in the police response.²
• Police waited more than 70 minutes on May 24, 2022, to confront an armed gunman who entered a fourth-grade classroom, with 376 law enforcement officers congregating on-site, including in the hallway outside the classroom, before the shooter was confronted and killed.³
• The indictment alleges that Arredondo didn't respond appropriately to the shooting through actions such as ordering officers to evacuate the area where the shooting was occurring and not determining if the classroom door was locked.⁴
• A Department of Justice report on the shooting determined that Arredondo did not fulfill his responsibilities as the presumed incident commander on the scene. Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell says a grand jury deliberated on the charges for six months.⁵
• The former chief has defended his conduct to investigators, saying that he did not believe he was the incident commander. The chief of the Texas state police, Steve McCraw, said Arredondo went against officer training that calls for the immediate confrontation of a school shooter.²

Sources: ¹Associated Press, ²New York Times, ³Guardian, ⁴CBS and ⁵TPR.

Narratives

• Democratic narrative, as provided by Los Angeles Times. The tragedy in Uvalde was a failure on all levels of government. The police on scene violated every principle they've been taught regarding active shooters, as incompetence and cowardice allowed the shooter to continue his massacre unabated. While this indictment will hopefully afford the families of those affected some closure for the events of that awful day, there is still no political will to address the root issue of guns in America.
• Republican narrative, as provided by Federalist. The police response at Robb Elementary was disastrous, but the political hijacking of this case for gun control causes has obscured that. The lesson we should learn is that guns do indeed keep us safer, and it was the failure of the police to use them soon enough that allowed the tragedy to unfold. These indictments lay bare that guns are not the issue, as good people with guns do stop tragedies.

Predictions