Uvalde school police held active shooter training just two months before massacre

Uvalde school police held active shooter training just two months before Salvador Ramos massacred 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary.

The Texas city’s Consolidated Independent School District held the training session to “prepare as best as possible” for exactly the type of situation that took place earlier this week.

The Uvalde CISD posted about the training session on Facebook on 22 March.

In the post, they stated that the training took place at the city’s high school with the goal to “train every Uvalde law enforcement officer so that we can prepare as best as possible for any situation that may arise.”

The post also stated that they had “hosted serval of these courses.”

Texas state law requires all public school districts to “adopt and implement” an emergency operation plan, and to carry out drills related to active threats or severe weather, according to KSAT.

But the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University found in 2020 that only 200 of 1,022 school districts in the state had active shooter policies, according to the Texas Tribune.

UCISD received $69,999 from a state grant of $100m for schools to improve physical security at their sites, the Tribune also stated.

The police response to the shooting has come under heavy criticism after it emerged that officers who responded to Robb Elementary wrongly believed that the mass shooting was over and that they had the gunman in a “barricaded subject” situation.

Officials admit that as a result officers waited for backup instead of charging the classroom where Ramos killed the students and staff.

Steven McCraw, Director and Colonel of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told a press conference on Friday that “of course it was not the right decision” to wait for a tactical unit and extra equipment.

Colonel McCraw admitted that under police training standards in Texas, officers aren’t supposed to wait for tactical backup before neutralising an active shooter, and that there were enough officers on the scene to have been able to stop the gunman.