Police Response to Uvalde Shooting 'Mind-Boggling': Ex-NYPD Commissioner

Bill Bratton, a former commissioner of the New York City Police Department, criticized police officers' response to the shooting this week at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

In an interview on WABC 770's "The Cats Roundtable" show on Sunday, Bratton called the days since the shooting "one of the most problematic weeks I've ever experienced in American policing in my 50 years."

"Misinformation that's been put out by government officials in Texas is mind-boggling and it continues even today," said Bratton, who led the Los Angeles and Boston police departments earlier in his career."I have great pride in my profession...But that pride was diminished somewhat this week."

Bratton's comments come after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday that he was "livid" after being "misled" about the police response, which he initially praised. On Friday, the Texas Department of Public Safety laid out a timeline of the response to the shooting, and said officers waited more than an hour after the first 911 call. Border Patrol Tactical Unit agents eventually breached the classroom door and fatally shot teen gunman Salvador Ramos.

"With the benefit of hindsight, from where I'm sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period," Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said Friday.

"There were plenty of officers to do what needed to be done, with one exception, is that the incident commander inside believed he needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that time," he added.

In his interview on Sunday, Bratton said there's "been so much misinformation that was put out as factual that the erosion of public trust, certainly in Texas and its police forces—I've never seen anything like it in all my years of policing."

"I have so much anger at the moment about how mishandled it's been, let alone compounding the grief of those families that lost those young children to be hearing that some of those lives might have been saved, but a wrong decision was made by apparently a police chief with a six-person police force that was put in charge of the response to this horrendous incident," Bratton said. "It's mind-boggling and frustrating."

Bratton also criticized officers' decision not to break into the classroom sooner.

"The fact that the chief of police...apparently opted not to break into that classroom may have resulted in the deaths of more of these young people who were effectively wounded and potentially...bleeding out, dying literally while they were standing outside the door."

Also on Sunday, John Cohen, who previously served as the Department of Homeland Security's counterterrorism coordinator, called the police response a "failure."

"At the end of the day we had 21 people die, we had 19 children die, we had people potentially die while law enforcement was on scene," Cohen said.

Newsweek has reached out to the Uvalde Police Department for comment.