Texas police's botched response to the Uvalde school shooting 'set our profession back a decade,' top cop says

• A top Texas cop said the police response to the Uvalde school shooting set his profession "back a decade."
• Department of Public Safety's Steve McCraw slammed police response to the May 24 shooting.

A top Texas law enforcement official said the botched police response to last month's deadly school shooting in Uvalde set his profession "back a decade."

During a hearing with Texas state senators on Tuesday, Steve McCraw — the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety — criticized fellow cops for their collective failure to stop the May 24 massacre, which left 19 elementary school children and two teachers dead.

"I appear to be hypercritical of the on-scene commander, and I don't mean to be, but the facts are the facts. Mistakes were made — it should have never happened that way," McCraw said, referring to the Uvalde school district's embattled police chief Pete Arredondo.

He continued: "We can't allow that to happen in our profession — this set our profession back a decade, is what it did."

"If you're there on the scene you have an obligation to immediately engage the shooter and stop the shooting, which is really stop the killing … and to stop the dying," McCraw said. "That's preached, practiced and required in the state of Texas. It just wasn't implemented."

McCraw earlier said police could have actually stopped the 18-year-old gunman just three minutes after he entered the building, and called the response an "abject failure."

During the attack at Robb Elementary School, police failed to confront the gunman for nearly an hour as he was in a classroom with children. After the botched response, law enforcement — including DeCraw himself — changed the narrative of how the shooting unfolded multiple times.

City officials have refused to release documents about the shooting to Insider, instead asking Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton to decide if the bodycamera footage, 911 calls, and other details should be released.

McCraw's testimony came as a Texas State Senate committee investigates the massacre. Arredondo was also scheduled to address state House lawmakers behind closed doors on Tuesday.