- Former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton ripped Texas law enforcement as "an embarrassment" over the handling of the Uvalde, Texas, shooting.
- Bratton said on MSNBC that Texas authorities seemed to have violated "a basic tenet of active shooters" by not immediately charging the gunman.
- "You move to the shooter no matter what. You move to the shooter to save lives," Bratton said.
Former two-time commissioner of the New York City Police Department Bill Bratton ripped Texas law enforcement on Friday as "an embarrassment" amid mounting criticism of the police response and handling of the deadly Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting.
"What we're dealing with … is speculation at this stage because law enforcement in Texas has been an embarrassment in terms of the information they've been providing, the misinformation they've been providing," Bratton said during an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
The former top cop of the largest police force in the United States said that Texas authorities who initially responded to Tuesday's massacre, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, seemed to violate "a basic tenet of active shooters" by not immediately charging the gunman.
"You move to the shooter no matter what. You move to the shooter to save lives," Bratton said, explaining, "Officers around the country" since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre "have trained to do that."
"We're going to need to find out in the days and weeks ahead did this department train for it," Bratton said.
Bratton criticized the Uvalde Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety — the lead investigative agency into Tuesday's shooting at Robb Elementary School — for leaving "so many unanswered questions" at this point.
"At this stage in the game, they should be doing a much better job than they have been doing to try to explain what they do know, and it's a mess — an absolute mess," said Bratton.
Bratton, who also led the Los Angeles Police Department and the Boston Police Department in addition to the NYPD, said "at the moment" Texas authorities handling the shooting are "doing a terrible job of trying to basically control this situation."
"Hopefully they get their act together," Bratton said.
Texas authorities who responded to the Robb Elementary School shooting have been facing heavy criticism over allegations that officers did not go after the 18-year-old gunman quickly enough.
Roughly an hour passed between the time the shooter arrived at the school on Tuesday and when he was killed by law enforcement, Texas Department of Public Safety South Regional Director Victor Escalon told reporters on Thursday.
Bystanders at the elementary school told The Associated Press that some officers on the scene at the time did not enter the building as the gunman was inside, even as parents pleaded for them to enter.
Additionally, the Texas Department of Public Safety has given conflicting accounts about what happened before the gunman entered the school building with an AR-15 rifle.
Steven McCraw, the director of DPS, initially said that a school district police officer "approached" and "engaged" the shooter before the gunman entered the school building, but Escalon said Thursday that McCraw's statement was "not accurate" and that a school district police officer never confronted the shooter.
"There was not an officer, readily available, armed [at the school]," Escalon said.
Escalon also said Thursday that the shooter was outside the school for about 12 minutes, at times opening fire, shortly after he shot his grandmother in the face at their home nearby.
Ultimately, a US Border Patrol tactical team shot and killed the gunman about an hour after he entered the school and barricaded himself inside a classroom where he slaughtered children and adults, authorities said.
It remains unclear why it took authorities an hour to stop the gunman.