The police response to a Texas school shooting that killed 19 children and two adults was an “abject failure”, a state Senate hearing has been told.

Steven McCraw, Texas’s public safety chief, also accused the on-scene commander of placing officers’ lives above the children’s when they responded to the attack at the school in Uvalde.

“There is compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we have learned in the last two decades since the Columbine massacre,” he said.

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