AGENCIES WILL BETTER COOPERATE DURING ACTIVE SHOOTINGS UNDER BILL
(AUSTIN) — First responders answering the call of an active shooting would be better trained and better able to work with other agencies under a bill advanced by the Senate Criminal Justice Committee Tuesday. The “Uvalde Strong” bill, HB 33 by former Uvalde mayor and current Representative Don McLaughlin and sponsored by committee chair and Pleasanton Senator Pete Flores, looks to correct deficiencies revealed by the catastrophic response to the shooting at Robb Elementary in 2022 that took the lives of 19 children and 2 teachers. A federal investigation into the event found that a breakdown in leadership, policy, tactics, and training led to the one hour, seventeen minute delay from when officers first arrived on the scene until they confronted and killed the shooter inside the school. “Texas must take action to address our current shortcomings and future readiness for active shooter situations,” said Flores. “This bill makes notable reforms to ensure that our schools are a safe place to send our children.”
HB 33, sponsored by committee chair and Pleasanton Senator Pete Flores, seeks to improve cooperation between law enforcement agencies responding to active shooter events.
“We learned quite a bit from the Uvalde fiasco,” said McAllen Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, who sat on the Senate committee tasked with looking into how the law enforcement response failed in 2022. Nearly 400 officers representing differing local, county, and state agencies responded to the active shooting, creating a situation which Hinojosa called “chaos”. There was no clear chain of command and no consistent coordination between the agencies present at the scene. “The work that needs to be done is making law enforcement, whether it’s local police, DPS coming in, sheriff’s department, need to coordinate their efforts and come in and respond immediately to a shooter in our schools,” he said.
“A lot of that has to do with preparation,” said Flores. “Preparation, communication, training; all those things that were identified as hindering an effective response is what this bill is addressing”. Leading that training and preparation will be the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University in San Marcos, which is charged under the bill to develop an active shooter training program for local law enforcement agencies that creates standardized protocols for responding to these emergencies. The bill would require the center to develop a standard for after-action reporting following active shooter emergencies in order to gauge the success and failures of any given response, and to inform and improve the active shooter training program.
The bill also mandates cooperation between schools, local officials, local, county, and state law enforcement, and any agency that might respond to an active shooter emergency. This includes regular meetings, standardized plans that create a uniform response, and helping schools and municipalities develop their own response plans to active shooters. Flores said that the intent of the bill is to get everyone involved from every agency and level of government that respond to these emergencies to work as a team and that everyone responding to an active shooter event understands their role. “This bill is intended to provide direction as a matter of policy to everyone that serves in a public capacity, that we need to work together to effectively address this threat and eliminate it as quickly as we can,” said Flores.
DPS head Colonel Freeman Martin said that the bill will challenge his agency as they develop plans and enter into mutual aid agreements with sheriff’s departments in all 254 Texas counties, which run the gamut from Harris County, the third most populous county in America, to Loving County, the least populous. The needs and resources of one won’t compare with the needs and resources of the other. Nevertheless, Martin said, his agency is up to it. “In the long run, I think it’s going to be really good,” he told members. “It’s just going to be a lot of work to get there.”
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