Texas School Shooting: Union Calls for Police to Aid with Probe

The largest police labor organization in Texas is warning Uvalde police and the Uvalde ISD police to cooperate with state officials amid reports that the two agencies have stopped working with the Texas Department of Public Safety's investigation into the massacre at Robb Elementary School.

"At this time, The Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, or CLEAT, is advising our members to cooperate fully with all official governmental investigations into actions relating to the law enforcement response to the Uvalde mass shooting," said a statement issued late Tuesday by the group.

That union's unusual warning was released a short time after ABC News reported that the Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde Independent School District police force had ceased cooperating with state investigators.

The resistance began shortly after Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, faulted the school police chief for deciding to delay sending officers into the classroom where the gunman hid last Tuesday, calling it "the wrong decision" and not the proper protocol in an active shooter situation.

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The shooter was in two adjoining classrooms for more than an hour while local police stood by, until Border Patrol tactical officers broke in and killed him.

DPS officials provided a statement to ABC News that indicates that the chief of police for the school district has not responded to requests for a second interview.

"Uvalde PD and Uvalde CISD are still cooperating; however, the Chief of Police for CISD has yet to respond to the Rangers' request for a follow-up interview that was made a couple of days ago," a DPS spokesperson told Hearst Newspapers on Tuesday night.

Neither the Uvalde police nor the school police department has responded to a request for comment.

State officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have expressed frustration at the shifting story of how police handled the attack on Tuesday, in which an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers.

Abbott said he was originally told a school resource officer engaged the gunman before he entered Robb Elementary School and that police went into the school and killed the gunman soon after.

But the public later learned that there was no school resource officer on duty at the time and police who arrived at the school waited more than an hour before entering the classroom

Abbott said he wrote down every detail he was told by law enforcement and others and had no reason to think he was being given misleading information on Wednesday.

"Yes, I was misled. I am livid about what happened," Abbott said on Friday when asked about the changing story. "The information that I was given turned out in part to be inaccurate."

CLEAT officials on Tuesday joined critics of the Uvalde law enforcement's response, saying there has been "a great deal of false and misleading information" about what happened.

"Some of the information came from the very highest levels of government and law enforcement," the statement said. "Sources that Texans once saw as iron-clad and completely reliable have now been proven false. This false information has exacerbated ill-informed speculation which has, in turn, created a hotbed of unreliability when it comes to finding the truth."

CLEAT is the state's largest police labor organization in the state, with more than 27,000 members and more than 100 local affiliates.

Already, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin has called on the U.S. Department of Justice to provide the community with "a fair independent review" of what happened. On Sunday the Justice Department announced it would investigate the police response. CLEAT officials also on Tuesday publicly backed the Justice Department inquiry, saying the truth will be revealed.

"The goal of the review is to provide an independent account of law enforcement actions and responses that day, and to identify lessons learned and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events," DOJ spokesman Anthony Coley said on Sunday in announcing the review.

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