Recently released body camera footage shows that police officers in Uvalde, Texas, waiting outside Robb Elementary School during a mass shooting earlier this year were expressing their hesitation to respond over fears they may be shot.
NBC affiliate WOAI in San Antonio obtained the footage, which was taken from the body cameras of three Texas Department of Public Safety troopers who had responded to the scene. The shooter killed 19 students and two teachers in the assault.
The troopers who speak in the video have not been identified.
"We need to go in there," one trooper says in the video. "I wonder if we can get in there … and maybe open that door."
Another trooper responds, saying they had the same idea.
A third trooper chimes in, saying that the gunman is "there" and that "he’s gonna shoot at you again."
"He’s gonna hit you that time. You have nowhere to go," the trooper says.
Later in the video, law enforcement officers say that there are about eight or nine children in the room with the shooter and say that "it’s been about an hour."
Another responder notes that there have been no attempts to negotiate with the gunman. After the shooting, police said they were treating the incident as a barricaded suspect situation rather than as an active shooting.
"The most I can think of is, like, a response team or something. They’re already there? If they’re already there, I don’t know. I don’t hear no one trying to negotiate or nothing, either," the trooper says.
At one point, a trooper asks if anyone wants to "jump the f****** gate or what?"
"What’s the safest way to do this? I’m not trying to get clapped out," another officer says.
The first officer responds "me, neither."
The Indpendent has reached out to Texas DPS for comment.
Officers waited 70 minutes before entering the building and killing the gunman.
The video was first released on Wednesday ahead of a meeting of the Texas Public Safety Commission reviewing the shooting.
During the meeting, which took place in Austin, Colonel Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas DPS, said he did not think his troopers failed the agency.
"If DPS as an institution failed the families, failed the school or failed the community of Uvalde, then absolutely, I need to go," Mr McCraw said at the meeting Thursday. "But I can tell you this right now: DPS as an institution right now did not fail the community, plain and simple."
The Texas DPS had more than 90 troopers at the school that day, far more than any other agency that responded.
Parents in Uvalde have been furious with what they call a lack of action by both the Uvalde school board and law enforcement following the shooting, with some even camping outside the school board’s administrative offices to demand action.
