Author of FBI's active-shooter policy criticizes Uvalde police for waiting 78 minutes to confront gunman

• The author of the FBI's active shooter protocol criticized the police response in Uvalde.
• In an op-ed, she questioned police for waiting 78 minutes to kill the shooter.

The FBI agent who created the protocol for dealing with active shooter incidents criticized the police response to the mass shooting in the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last week.

In an op-ed in The New York Times, retired FBI special agent Katherine Schweit questioned why police waited more than an an hour before confronting and killing the gunman, who shot dead 19 children and 2 teachers.

"Why did the police leadership make that call?" Schweit wrote.

"Current protocol and best practices say officers must persistently pursue efforts to neutralize a shooter when a shooting is underway," Schweit said. "This is true even if only one officer is present. This is without question the right approach."

The FBI's protocol serves as the model for police departments throughout the US.

Schweit's comments came as Uvalde's police department was under intense scrutiny for its response to one of the worst mass shootings in US history.

The Justice Department launched a probe into the response, and in particular into why it took 78 minutes before law enforcement entered the classroom where the shooter had locked himself.

As police waited outside the school, they stopped desperate parents attempting to enter the building and rescue their children.

The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday the decision to wait 78 minutes until confronting the shooter "was the wrong decision. Period."

Schweit went on to ask whether active shooter training could be incorporated more closely into officers' routines to build preparedness. She suggested that schools should be calling on children to flee active shooters instead of hide.

"I still have nightmares about details from school shootings in which survivors told me they huddled under their desks, hoping against logic that the shooter would not see them. It's hard to shed the images of victims' bodies found huddled under plastic tables, behind cloth partitions or together in a group against a wall," wrote Schweit.

She said that the poor response in Uvalde had shaken her faith in the one part of the mass-shooting epidemic in the US which authorities were getting right.

"We aren't preventing the shootings," she wrote.

"Perhaps, I thought, we were doing better in responding to the attacks as they unfolded. But if the 78 minutes that the police in Uvalde waited before confronting the gunman at Robb Elementary are any indication, the answer is: We aren't."