O’Rourke believes DOJ Uvalde Report needs to go further

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, says the Justice Department should have recommended criminal charges in its Uvalde report.

“The DOJ Uvalde report gets one thing right. The response by law enforcement — who waited over an hour to act — was ‘a failure,'” he said on X. “But it doesn’t go far enough.

“Without recommending criminal charges, there will be no accountability,” he continued. “Without accountability, there will be no change.”

The DOJ in its report Thursday identified “cascading failures” in law enforcement’s handling of the massacre at Robb Elementary School on May 4, 2022.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in active shooter situations and gone right after the shooter and stopped him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday at a news conference in Uvalde after Justice Department officials briefed family members on their findings. The Uvalde victims, he said, “deserved better.”

Even for a mass shooting that has already been the subject of intense scrutiny and in-depth examinations — an earlier report by Texas lawmakers, for instance, faulted law enforcement at every level with failing “to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety” — the nearly 600-page Justice Department report adds to the public understanding of how officers failed to stop an attack that killed 19 children and two staff members.

The flawed initial response was compounded in the following days by an ineptitude that added to family members’ anguish, according to the report.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.