Uvalde Superintendent Recommends Police Chief Pete Arredondo Be Fired

Topline

The Uvalde schools’ superintendent recommended school District Police Chief Pete Arredondo be fired on Wednesday, over harsh criticism for his department’s response to the school shooting at Robb Elementary School in May — the deadliest since the Sandy Hook massacre 10 years earlier.

Key Facts

The recommendation comes two weeks after Arredondo resigned from the city council, telling the Uvalde Leader-News he wanted to allow the mayor and city councilors to “move forward without distractions.”

The Uvalde Board of Education will hold a special meeting Saturday morning to decide whether or not to fire Arredondo, whose response to the shooting on May 24 has been lambasted by Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw as an “abject failure” that prioritized the “lives of officers before the lives of children.”

The meeting comes less than a week after school surveillance footage was released, showing a delayed response from the police after gunman Salvador Ramos entered the school, killing 19 students and two teachers.

Key Background

A Texas House committee determined the response to the shooting was a result of “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” in a statement released last week. In June, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District placed Arredondo on administrative leave, after he was criticized for waiting over an hour to approach the shooter. He was elected as a member of the city council just a month earlier. Arredondo, who has been in his position since March 2020, blamed the 77-minute delay from the time officers arrived at the school to the time they fatally shot the 18-year-old killer on a locked door and difficulty finding the right key, in an interview last month with the Texas Tribune — although it has since been disproven. In a scathing assessment released days later, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw called the response “antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.”

Further Reading

Uvalde School Police Chief Steps Down From City Council Amid Criticism For Mass Shooting Response (Forbes)

Waiting for keys, unable to break down doors: Uvalde schools police chief defends delay in confronting gunman (Texas Tribune)