Uvalde schools suspend entire police force after outrage

The extraordinary move follows the revelation that the drict hired a former state trooper who was among hundreds of officers who rushed to the scene of the May 24 shooting.
School leaders also put two members of the drict police department on adminrative leave, one of whom chose to retire instead, according to a statement released the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School Drict. Remaining officers will be reassigned to other jobs in the drict.
Investigators search for evidences outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, May 25, 2022, after an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and two teachers. (AP)
Uvalde school leaders’ suspension of campus police operations one month into a new school year in the South Texas community underscores the sustained pressure that families of some of the 19 children and two teachers killed have kept on the drict.
Brett Cross, the uncle of 10-year-old victim Uziyah Garcia, had been protesting outside the Uvalde school adminration building for the past two weeks, demanding accountability over officers allowing a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle to remain in a fourth-grade classroom for more than 70 minutes.

Uvalde families have said students in the drict are not safe so long as officers who waited so long to confront and kill the gunman remain on the job.
“We did it!” Cross tweeted.
Family, parents and friends file out of a meeting where Uvalde School Drict Police Chief Pete Arredondo was dismissed the Board of Trustees of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School Drict, Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (AP)
The Uvalde school drict had five campus police officers on the scene of the shooting, according to a damning report from Texas lawmakers that laid out multiple breakdowns in the response. A total of nearly 400 officers responded, including school drict police, the city’s police, county sheriff’s deputies, state police and U.S. Border Patrol agents, among others.

The fallout Friday is the first in Uvalde’s school police force since the drict fired former police Chief Pete Arredondo in August. He remains the only officer to have been fired from his job following one of the deadliest classroom attacks in U.S. hory.
The drict said it would ask the Texas Department of Public Safety, which had already assigned dozens of troopers to the drict for the school year, for additional help. Spokespersons for the agency did not immediately return messages seeking comment Friday.
Law enforcement, and other first responders, gather outside Robb Elementary School following a shooting, May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (AP)
“We are confident that staff and student safety will not be compromised during this transition,” the drict said in a statement.
The statement did not specify how long campus police operations would remain suspended.

The former DPS trooper who was hired the drict was among at least seven troopers later placed under internal investigation for her actions at Robb Elementary.
Officer Crimson Elizondo was fired Thursday, one day after CNN first reported her hiring. She has not responded to messages left The Associated Press.

Steve McCraw, the head of the Department of Public Safety, has called the law enforcement response to the shooting an “abject failure.” McCraw has also come under pressure as the leader of a department had more than 90 troopers on the scene but still has the support of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
On Thursday, after Elizondo was fired, Abbott called it a “poor decision” for the school to hire the former trooper and that it was up to the drict to “own up to it.”