Texans Outraged After Uvalde Report Released Only in English: ‘Slap in the Face to These Families’

Sarah RumpfJul 18th, 2022, 2:03 pm
 

Families of the victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas are frustrated with the delays getting information about the attack, with government agencies taking weeks to release video evidence and interim findings, and a key report being published only in English.

The population of Uvalde, Texas has been nearly 80 percent Hispanic for decades, and Spanish is the primary language for many families of the 19 children and two teachers who were killed in the May 24 attack. So when a Texas House investigative committee released their interim report on this weekend only in English, family members were “visibly upset” at the latest obstacle to getting information. The report describes “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” that contributed to the tragedy that day, including nearly 400 law enforcement officers who were on the scene but did not engage with the shooter for more than an hour, due in large part to the failure to follow incident command system procedures, in contravention to police training.

CNN and other networks aired a press conference from Uvalde where the committee presented their report and answered questions from reporters and members of the community. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin was questioned by a reporter about the lack of a translation for the report.

REPORTER: Mayor, there were a lot of families in the audience today that were visibly upset at the fact that the report is only in English, and you have a predominantly Hispanic —

MCLAUGHLIN: Well, we will get it for you. I mean, I didn’t write that report.

REPORTER: But is there anything you can do —

MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah. We’ve already asked them. They said they would get one written in Spanish.

REPORTER: But in two weeks.

MCLAUGHLIN: Well, we’ll see if we can speed that up. I’ll ask.

The suggestion that grieving families should have to wait two weeks for the report to be translated into Spanish was met with swift outrage, with many pointing out the very obvious fact that Spanish is a very common language in Texas and there is no shortage of qualified translators, and that the families had been having trouble getting information in Spanish from the beginning of this tragedy.

I lived in Austin for five years, and it’s normally common to see government resources and communications provided in both English and Spanish. The state’s official website at Texas.gov easily toggles back and forth between the two languages with a button in the top right corner.

texas official state website in spanish

Screenshot via Texas.gov.

While I was watching the press conference from Uvalde on Sunday, the families’ frustration upon hearing a Spanish translation would take up to two weeks was obvious. I texted John Eakin, an Austin friend of mine and he shared my disdain at that time frame. I sent him a link to the PDF of the report that the Texas Tribune had posted and he replied, “Standby.”

Less than two minutes later, he sent me a Spanish version of the report created by Google Translate.

Google Translate is an imperfect solution, to be clear, but it is a start. We’ve posted the document on Google Drive and Scribd (also embedded below), in the hope that people who are fluent can refine and improve it to help get some answers to the families in a shorter time frame than two weeks.

SPANISH TRANSLATION Uvalde … by Sarah Rumpf

Watch the video above, via CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

Tags:
Sarah Rumpf - Contributing Editor

Sarah Rumpf joined Mediaite in 2020 and is a Contributing Editor focusing on politics, law, and the media. A native Floridian, Sarah attended the University of Florida, graduating with a double major in Political Science and German, and earned her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the UF College of Law. Sarah's writing has been featured at National Review, The Daily Beast, Reason, Law&Crime, Independent Journal Review, Texas Monthly, The Capitolist, Breitbart Texas, Townhall, RedState, The Orlando Sentinel, and the Austin-American Statesman, and her political commentary has led to appearances on television, radio, and podcast programs across the globe. Follow Sarah on Threads, Twitter, and Bluesky.