A 'failure of leadership': Former Providence police chief leads federal report on Uvalde

A former Providence police chief was in the heartbroken town of Uvalde, Texas, on Thursday morning.

Hugh T. Clements Jr. flanked U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland as Garland talked about the national tragedy. The office that Clements directs, within the U.S. Department of Justice, has compiled a scathing 600-page report on the police response to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.

Clements was ready to reflect on some of the "cascading" police failures described in the report. But first, he listened to Garland.

"… 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," Garland said. "But that is the terrible reality that we face."

Uvalde report highlights mistakes police made during school shooting

Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta talked at length about failures that left children and teachers trapped and vulnerable to the rage of a man armed with an AR-15.

Once police arrived on the scene at 11:33 a.m., it took them 75 minutes to enter the classroom and confront the gunman, Garland said.

More: Providence chief, long a community policing advocate, to lead that effort nationwide

During the first seven minutes, police made some advances toward the carnage.

But gunfire from the classroom pushed back a group of officers within seconds and other efforts by a single officer were unsuccessful.

Victims waited for rescue even after an officer at the scene told law-enforcement leaders that his wife, a teacher in one of the two connected classrooms, had been shot.

They continued to wait after officers' radios alerted them that a student, on the phone with a 911 operator, was in a room full of victims, Garland said.

Police leaders waited for additional officers and equipment and for keys to open doors that were probably unlocked, Garland said.

They wrongly prioritized an evacuation of students and teachers from other classrooms instead of immediately rescuing those trapped with the shooter.

They tried to negotiate with the shooter.

And they failed to establish an incident command structure so everyone would know who was in charge.

Gupta said "a lack of action by adults failed to protect children and their teachers."

"But we cannot look away from what happened here," she said. "We cannot look away from these children." We cannot look away from … Uvalde."

After the shooting stopped, some children with gunshot wounds were put on school buses without any medical attention, Gupta said. Meanwhile, victims who had already died were taken to hospitals in ambulances, she said. Nineteen children and two teachers died.

Uvalde's mayor makes a request

At that point in 2022, Clements was still Providence's police chief. Like other chiefs across the country, he was concerned about mass shootings and criminals with AR-15s.

Uvalde's mayor asked Gupta to seek an investigation from the Department of Justice.

Five days after the May 24 shooting, the department announced it would conduct an examination known as a "Critical Incident Review." The Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, which is known widely as the COPS Office, would lead the review of the mass shooting with support from a team of experts.

Between June 1, 2022, and June 1, 2023, the team visited Uvalde nine times and conducted 260 interviews. They collected 14,100 pieces of data and documentation, from police policies to body camera videos. This work was well underway when Garland announced Clements' appointment as director of the COPS Office in January 2023.

The report makes 273 recommendations

On Thursday, it appeared Clements was well versed in the details.

And immersed in the sadness, too, hopeful that his office's recent work might help police officers across the country deal with the threat of active shooters.

The final report, which is more than 600 pages, offers 273 recommendations.

"We have seen how vitally important preparation is," Clements said, "how important it is to have the right policies and procedures in place, how incredibly important training is, and how critical it is that agencies train together."

At the news conference, Garland thanked Clements and his office.

At one point, when someone made a comparison between the Uvalde shooting and the 2016 massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Garland deferred to Clements.

The question, the last one at the news conference, isn't audible in online video.

It prompted Clements to emphasize that police set up incident command at the 2016 shooting while the "complete lack of leadership" and absence of "unity of command" in Uvalde was "epic."

The Uvalde response, Clements added, was "a failure of leadership."

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Former Providence police chief leads sprawling investigation of Uvalde massacre