"Unprepared"

INVESTIGATIVE CATEGORY — SHOWCASE Certificate of merit

The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Frontline
Contributors: Staffs of The Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and FRONTLINE
02/16/2023

By 2023, it was widely understood that the law enforcement response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was deeply flawed. Our work in 2022 helped establish that understanding, including an investigation showing that the medical response further hampered the ability to save victims who later died.

But even as our work and a report by state lawmakers had found critical gaps, much remained uncovered. Most media moved on to other stories, but we stayed.

We understood that Uvalde was not a failure because of one or two moments or officers, but rather because of a collection of errors in judgment and action. Larger root causes that contributed to the massively flawed response had not been examined by any other news organization.

In the absence of such reporting, divisions had deepened in the small community where families grieved and local officers, some of whom had lost relatives, faced relentless attacks for the response. Uvalde residents did not understand who to hold accountable beyond a few officers they had read about.

Using a trove of unreleased investigative files, the Tribune, in partnership with ProPublica and FRONTLINE, produced a startling and exhaustive investigation that ultimately revealed what no one else had: States across the country are providing devastatingly insufficient training for law enforcement to confront a mass shooter, leaving critical and long-overlooked gaps in preparedness between children and the officers expected to protect them.

After our investigation was published, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland unveiled the findings of a federal probe into the response. Garland pointed to missteps that led to delays in confronting the shooter. Then he turned to what he said was the biggest failure, one that required the most urgent action to avoid another colossal breakdown such as the one that cost lives that day: The lack of sufficient active shooter training.

“Our children deserve better than to grow up in a country where an 18-year-old has easy access to a weapon that belongs on the battlefield, not in a classroom,” Garland said. “And communities across the country, and the law enforcement officers who protect them, deserve better than to be forced to respond to one horrific mass shooting after another. But that is the terrible reality that we face. And so it is the reality that every law enforcement agency in every community across the country must be prepared for.”

Garland’s comments and call to immediately prioritize active shooter training across the country validated our finding that there is an astounding dearth of such instruction around the country.

The news organizations’ investigation began by examining Texas lawmakers’ decadeslong success at rebuffing gun control legislation, showing that at least two dozen bills could have prevented people from legally obtaining assault rifles used in seven of the state’s mass shootings, including Uvalde. To do so, reporters painstakingly pored over decades of legislation, identifying actual bills that would have had an impact.

Then, they explored how officers’ fears of such weapons affected the response in Uvalde, revealing for the first time that they played a key role in the catastrophic delay. Those fears, however, weren't the only reason officers did not confront the shooter. In interviews with investigators, officer after officer repeated reasons for not engaging the gunman that ran contrary to what training teaches, including the mistaken belief that children were not in the classroom because they were so quiet.

At its core, the news organizations’ investigation was about the government's choices.

Since the May 2022 shooting, state and local officials have fought the release public records that could help bring answers, forcing news organizations including the Tribune and ProPublica to file a lawsuit.

As part of a deep commitment to the state we cover every day, the Tribune has invested considerable resources in the legal battle even as it faced financial challenges. In fact, the Tribune is the only local news organization that is not part of a larger, national, corporation doing so.

Uvalde families, many of whom have been desperately seeking information, joined the news organizations in calling on the state to make records from the shooting public.

But as the legal battle continued, we knew it was imperative to find other ways to examine what went wrong.

Our investigation provided families in Uvalde with an exhaustive examination of the day that they have not been able to get from local and state officials, identifying systemic failures in how we prepare officers across the country. The investigation’s findings about the wide disparities in training offer a roadmap for change.

The bulk of the work in this entry was produced by Texas Tribune and ProPublica journalists. FRONTLINE produced the documentary, which we have not included here, based on research from reporters. Lomi Kriel of the Texas Tribune-ProPublica investigative unit contributed significant research to the film. FRONTLINE also helped standardize the initially incorrect timestamps on the body cam footage, which helped reporters produce a timeline of the failed response.

We are proud to nominate “Unprepared” for this prestigious award.

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Submitted by Tara Ballew.