- The largest police union in Texas has ripped authorities' handling of the Uvalde elementary school massacre.
- "False and misleading information" tied to the shooting has come from "the very highest levels of government and law enforcement," the union said.
- That misinformation has "created a hotbed of unreliability when it comes to finding the truth," said the union.
The largest police union in Texas ripped authorities' handling of the Uvalde elementary school massacre, saying that "false and misleading information" about the mass shooting has come from "the very highest levels of government and law enforcement."
"Sources that Texans once saw as iron-clad and completely reliable have now been proven false," the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas or CLEAT said in a statement released Tuesday night.
"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 said.
Texas authorities have faced intense backlash for changing their story more than a dozen times about what happened before, during, and after the May 24 shooting at Uvalde's Robb Elementary School, which left 19 children and two teachers dead.
"There has been a great deal of false and misleading information in the aftermath of this tragedy," the police union said, adding, "Some of the information came from the very highest levels of government and law enforcement."
Additionally, the police union advised its more than 25,000 members "to cooperate fully with all official governmental investigations into actions relating to the law enforcement response to the Uvalde mass shooting."
The union made the warning after state officials said the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District — Pete Arredondo — is not cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is leading the investigation into the mass shooting.
Last week, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steve McCraw identified Arredondo as the on-scene commander during the school massacre who made the "wrong decision" in delaying authorities for more than an hour from breaching the classroom where an 18-year–old gunman carried out the shooting.
"The on-scene commander at that time believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject," McCraw said, adding, "He was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children."
"From the benefit of hindsight, where I'm sitting now, of course, it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. Period," McCraw said.
Ultimately, a US Border Patrol tactical team stormed into the classroom more than an hour after the gunman entered the school and shot and killed him.
Texas DPS said Tuesday that Arredondo stopped cooperating with state investigators and "has yet to respond" to a request for a follow-up interview.
However, Arredondo on Wednesday denied this to CNN, saying, "I am in contact with DPS every day."
DPS did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Insider on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the US Justice Department said this weekend that it will investigate the Uvalde school shooting — a move that was welcomed by CLEAT.
"[W]e believe that a strong, independent investigation by the US Department of Justice with assistance from the FBI will discover what really happened, thus helping agencies everywhere to understand how best to stop a similar compounded tragedy from happening again," the police union said.
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