Texas chief who called Uvalde response ‘abject failure’ but defended his state police is retiring

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas’ state police chief who came under scrutiny over the hesitant response to the Robb Elementary school shooting in 2022 and has overseen Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s aggressive efforts to stop migrant crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border said Friday he will retire at the end of the year.

Col. Steve McCraw has been the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety since 2009. He announced his retirement while addressing a new class of state troopers at a graduation ceremony in Austin.

McCraw did not elaborate during his remarks on the decision to step down. In a letter to agency employees, he praised their courage but did not mention Uvalde or any other specific police action during his tenure.

“Your bravery and willingness to face danger head-on have garnered the admiration and support of our leadership, Legislature and the people of Texas,” McCraw wrote.

McCraw was not on the scene during the May 24, 2022, school attack in Uvalde that killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. He called the police response an “abject failure” but resisted calls from victims’ families and some Texas lawmakers to step down after the shooting.

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About 90 state troopers in McCraw’s ranks were among the nearly 400 local, state and federal officers who arrived on scene but waited more than 70 minutes before confronting and killing the gunman inside a classroom. Scathing state and federal investigative reports catalogued “cascading failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems.

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, said McCraw should have been forced out soon after the massacre. McCraw’s troopers were “armed to the teeth” but “stood around and failed to confront the shooter,” said Gutierrez, who blamed him for the delay.

“McCraw’s legacy will always be the failure in Uvalde, and one day, he will be brought to justice for his inaction,” Gutierrez said.

At a news conference a few days after the shooting, McCraw choked back tears in describing emergency calls and texts from students inside the classroom. He blamed the police delay on the local schools police chief, who McCraw said was the on-scene incident commander in charge of the response.

Former Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo and former school police officer Adrian Gonzales have been indicted on multiple counts of child abandonment and endangerment, but they remain the only two officers to face charges. They both have pleaded not guilty.

Arredondo has said he has been “scapegoated” for the police response, and that he never should have been considered the officer in charge that day.

Last month, McCraw reinstated one of the few DPS troopers disciplined over the Uvalde shooting response. A group of families of Uvalde victims has filed a $500 million lawsuit over the police response.

The DPS also has been at the center of Abbott’s multi-billion border “Operation Lone Star” security mission that has sent state troopers to the region, given the National Guard arrest powers, bused migrants to Washington, D.C., and put buoys in the Rio Grande to try to prevent migrant crossings.

The agency also led a police crackdown earlier this year on campus protests at the University of Texas over the Israel-Hamas war.

Abbott called McCraw “one of the most highly regarded law enforcement officers,” in the country and called him the “quintessential lawman that Texas is so famous for.”