A veteran law enforcement officer slammed the police response to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, as an "avalanche of failure."
CNN security correspondent and former FBI special agent Josh Campbell explained that newly released video from the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School showed police failed at nearly every aspect of their response when an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and two teachers.
"The problem here is there isn't one problem," Campbell said. "We have seen this seemingly avalanche of failure here, everything from tactics to leadership or lack thereof and this issue of transparency. To your point about tactics, I think everyone now listening to my voice knows in this era of mass shootings, officers are trained to go to the sound of gunfire, and that is a very difficult decision for an officer to make to put their own life on the line. That is the profession that they are in."
"No situation is the same," he added. "We know that oftentimes if an officer has chased someone into the building and don't suspect there might be innocent people in danger, they might move it a barricade situation where they call the SWAT team, some of the heavier weaponry, some of the heavier ballistic shields, waiting a suspect out, this was not that. We know this was a school that was in session, children there that were present, we know officers were sounding the alarm that there were shots fired."
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"It was a few minutes that transpired between when the suspect showed up and the shooting started and so we know that even if the chief was not in communication, the officers there knew that they were dealing with an emerging situation," Campbell said. "That's the key question."
Photos taken inside the school show officers had high-powered rifles and at least two ballistic shields, so they may not have been outgunned during the massacre, as police had initially claimed.
"Just an avalanche of failure here, it seems," Campbell said. "I'll also point out that this is revictimizing this community, this kind of slow drip of information, this lack of transparency. I was talking with a friend of mine who pointed out a good point, he said, 'Look, in small-town Texas, we were raised to respect law enforcement -- the local police chief, the local state trooper assigned to a region -- they were held on a pedestal.'"
"You can imagine putting yourself in the shoes of the people of Uvalde," he added, "being revictimized by the lack of transparency in every new revelation that comes is that much more difficult to take."
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