Democrat Senators Grills McCraw on Why
DPS Declined to Take Control in Uvalde

Capitol Inside
June 21, 2022

Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw found himself on the defensive for the first time since a mass shooting in Uvalde four weeks ago when a Democratic state senator grilled him on Tuesday on why the state police failed to take command at Robb Elementary instead of standing down to a local officer.

After attempting to lay the entire blame for a failed police response on the local school chief, McCraw cited misinformation and best practices involving on-scene commanders as some of the reasons why a dozen DPS officers declined to seize control of the situation after determining that children were still alive in two classrooms where a lone gunman was holed up.

But State Senator Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa of McAllen characterized the response at the school as a "complete failure among all the law enforcement agencies" at the scene during a hearing that a special Texas Senate Committee To Protect All Texans conducted on the upper chamber floor.

McCraw, who testified for almost four hours, had sought to pin the culpability exclusively on Uvalde school chief Pete Arredondo. But Hinojosa argued that the local school police didn't have as much training and experience as DPS officers. The South Texas Democrat said he did not understand why the state police did not overrule Arredondo and storm the classrooms instead of waiting for U.S. Border Patrol agents to take over and end the siege.

"If you all would have taken over and taken charge we would have saved lives," Hinojosa told the veteran DPS leader.

State Senator Roland Gutierrez - a San Antonio Democrat who represents Uvalde but was excluded from the special panel - was given an opportunity to question McCraw. Gutierrez pointed out that Arredondo has contended that he wasn't the incident commander at the school despite McCraw's labeling him as such several days after the rampage.

"The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children," McCraw had said in testimony during the early stage of the hearing.

McCraw had testified earlier that police are trained to confront a gunman in such a situation regardless of whether they have shields and other protective equipment. "I don't care if you have flip flops and wearing Bermuda shorts," the DPS chief told the committee. "It doesn't matter. You go in."

But McCraw at one point indicated that DPS lacked the legal authority to take command in the hodgepodge of answers he gave the special panel.

After allowing Gutierrez to participate even thought he's not a committee member, GOP State Senator Robert Nichols of Jacksonville warned him as the panel chairman that the questions that he was posing to McCraw had been coming across more like those in a deposition. Nichols asked Gutierrez to get to the point of his inquiry.

Gutierrez asked McCraw about a statement that he made in a conversation with a promise that the DPS would never stand down again. While McCraw suggested that he didn't remember making that exact statement, he didn't attempt to deny that he had.

Some Republicans on the committee appeared to accept McCraw's version of the story with remarks that took aim at Arredono with State Senator Paul Bettencourt of Houston branding the response as "an absolute total breakdown of any command and control.”

“I challenge this chief to come testify in public as to what happened here,” Bettencourt said. “Don't go hide in the House and talk privately. Come to the Senate where the public and Texas can ask these questions. It’s just abominable when you have to read this.”

more to come ...