Questions persist as the Justice Department reviews police response to the Uvalde shooting

Judy Woodruff:

Let's return now to the aftermath of the shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and some of the questions the country is grappling with.

As we reported earlier, there will be funerals and memorials for the victims over the next two weeks. As the community and families grieve, many are asking about the police response on that day, and what should be done next.

That's where Amna Nawaz picks up our own conversation tonight.

Amna Nawaz:

Judy, over the weekend, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it is launching an investigation of the law enforcement response to the Valdez shooting.

To understand more about why that's important. I'm joined by Juliette Kayyem. She's a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. She's also the author of a new book called "The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters."

Juliette, welcome back to the "NewsHour." Thanks for being with us.

This Department of Justice probe now, we think, will start soon. Why do we need it? What are some of the key questions they're going to try to answer?

Juliette Kayyem, Author, "The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters": Well, notably, this is being done by a community office that deals with policing services.

So, this is an office that really deals with trainings and grants and best practices. And what they're essentially going to do technically is just review, what was the public safety response? And why did it clearly, at least now, seem to fail so miserably?

See, almost every police officer, and certainly this jurisdiction, is well aware of what active shooting protocols are. They are to rush in. And you have a rapid response. You're not weighing different pieces of information. We simply know now, 20 years after Columbine, that the best way to address an active shooter is to eliminate the threat, is to essentially shoot back and try to eliminate the threat.

Everything else can happen after that.

So, there was clearly a breakdown in that protocol. Was it a justifiable breakdown, or what happened that led to this?

Amna Nawaz:

What about for each family who lost a child or a loved one? What can an investigation like this offer them?

Juliette Kayyem:

So, we say in disaster management that the lessons are written on the headstones, and that we have to listen to the dead.

And I think that's really important right now, especially with 19 children dead and, of course, also two teachers. Each of them has a story to tell about what happened in that room.

And this is incredibly painful, and it will be incredibly emotional. Not all of them died in a single moment. Not all of them died in the same place. And to get that — essentially, that chronology of what happened in that room, so that we can learn for the next time, because, unfortunately, there will very likely be a next time.

We — our standard in disaster management is, could we have made things less bad? We don't pretend that a situation in which a person who wants to shoot children in a classroom is in any way good. But could you have made the response less bad?

And I think it's important to focus on that, because, in the end, while it's essential that we look at the public safety response, we have already failed miserably our children. We cannot lose sight of the real problem here, which is a gunman wanted to and successfully entered a classroom that would kill children that quickly, that horribly, so — and just on a random day in America.

Amna Nawaz:

Juliette, the more we learn about the gunman here, we saw that there were warning signs that were missed.

When we talk about concrete steps — you heard President Biden say he's going to meet with Congress — what kinds of things could be done to avoid this happening again?

Juliette Kayyem:

Well, there could be the legal solutions, right, which would be whether there's national red flag laws.

These are laws that permit family members to come forward and to tell officials that a person is in trouble or that they may be a harm to society, so that their guns are not accessible to them. It could be universal background checks or changing the age at which you can purchase weaponry like this from 18 to 21. Those are the legal solutions.

The societal ones, though, are also out there. It is that these people live in communities, they are online in which they are expressing their desires. They are not hiding it. And, in this case — in the Texas case, this is also true. We need people to be able to — we need people to feel confident to step forward, to understand that these are not jokes, and to have social media platforms monitor this better to know that how anyone could joke about this at this stage in American history is sort of beyond question now.

We need to come forward and to assert agency over this kind of activity. Otherwise, it's going to keep happening.

Amna Nawaz:

That is Juliette Kayyem, formerly of the Department of Homeland Security, now with Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Juliette, thank you.

Juliette Kayyem:

Thank you.