UVALDE, Texas – Public records released by the city of Uvalde confirm officers who responded to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School contradicted the department’s own active shooter response policy.
The 484-page policy manual and body-worn camera footage from five UPD officers was among a trove of records released by the city Saturday.
The city is the first entity to release records publicly after media outlets, including KSAT TV, sued the city, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, Uvalde County and the Texas Department of Public Safety months after the shooting, which killed 19 students and two teachers.
PLEASE READ: Why KSAT is publishing the majority of the City of Uvalde’s footage, audio from Robb Elementary shooting
Footage recorded by UPD Sergeant Daniel Coronado shows him instructing officers to get inside the building after hearing shots being fired.
But after a group of responding officers, which also included police personnel from UCISD, encountered rifle fire coming from one of the classrooms, they retreated and then hung back for well over an hour.
Officers in the released footage repeatedly ask for ballistic shields to be brought to the campus.
At one point, a law enforcement official is heard on Coronado’s camera stating that a shield is on its way but is in a vehicle that is trying to get through traffic.
Law enforcement waited close to an hour after the first shield was brought into the school before breaching the classroom and killing the gunman, previous analyses of the massacre showed.
Neutralizing the threat
UPD’s four-page active shooter response policy instructs officers to make an “immediate and forceful response.”
The policy defines “Contact Team” as “The first officer(s) at the scene of an active shooting who enter a location with the intent of neutralizing the threat.”
The policy’s summary states that “The first officers entering the structure should recognize that their primary objective is to stop further violence. Officers must move quickly and deliberately to the source of gunfire and stop the violence.”
Uvalde PD Active Shooter Response Policy by Dillon Collier on Scribd
“We have a responsibility and that’s to stop the threat,” said Willie Ng, a former San Antonio police officer and former chief investigator for the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office whose law enforcement career spanned nearly 30 years.
Ng, who owns his own security company that provides active shooter training, also works as an adjunct professor at the University of the Incarnate Word teaching graduate-level courses on criminal justice.
Included in the release of records was a narrative from an unnamed officer stating that breaching the door without a shield “was suicide.”
“We don’t want an officer to lose their life, but we take an oath. That’s one of the things that we understand going into this occupation is that you may have to lay your life down for the life of another,” said Ng.
He added that UPD’s active shooter response policy appears to be in line with policies put in place by law enforcement agencies across the United States following the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.
A Uvalde PD spokesman confirmed to KSAT Monday that following the shooting, UPD has increased the number of shields in its possession so that each unit now has its own shield.
He added that corporals within the department also are equipped with a lighter-weight shield.
In a separate statement released Monday, the spokesman said UPD will meet with UCISD police officials bi-weekly throughout the school year to “focus on ongoing safety initiatives, coordination, and response planning.”
Where the lawsuits filed by media outlets stand
Uvalde County and UCISD officials this summer filed notices that they intend to appeal a judge’s ruling that ordered them and the city of Uvalde to release records from the shooting response.
A separate 2022 lawsuit filed by a group of news organizations, including KSAT TV, against the Texas Department of Public Safety remains pending.
A Travis County District Court judge last year ordered DPS to release records from its response to the school, but DPS officials quickly appealed the ruling.
Read more reporting on the KSAT Investigates page.