‘We Have Too Many Police Departments in This Country’: CNN National Security Analyst Calls for Consolidation in Wake of Uvalde Report

CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem voiced support for consolidating law enforcement agencies in rural areas on Sunday, in response to a report by a Texas House investigative committee that flagged multiple “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” that led up to the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde that left 19 children and 2 teachers dead.

Media outlets obtained a copy of the committee’s interim report, which sharply criticized the botched response from law enforcement agencies and failure by the school to follow active shooter protocols and maintain door locking mechanisms. One key finding of the report was cataloging the nearly 400 officers who responded to the scene, from 20 separate agencies including Border Patrol, U.S. Marshals, Texas Department of Public Safety, Uvalde Police Department, and the Uvalde school district’s police department.

CNN Newsroom anchor Fredricka Whitfield brought on Kayyem and Andrew McCabe, the network’s senior law enforcement analyst, to discuss the report.

She asked McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, about how leadership and communication is supposed to be established and managed during active shootings, to coordinate between the various agencies and hundreds of officers on the scene.

He replied that the Department of Homeland Security had established an “incident command system” or ICS, that was “actually a very well communicated and understood system all across the country,” including educational materials and training.

This system was comprised of “some very basic steps” to set up incident command, McCabe continued, including physically setting up a command post with an incident commander for leadership from all agencies on site to “gather together so they can all understand the situation, with the same information, and they can make decisions quickly and direct their own troops,” nominating a “tactical commander” to be the designated person inside the school to direct the officers “where to stack up, what equipment they should have, and telling them to go assault the classroom.”

“None of those things happened here because it was a complete failure to follow the incident command structure, which, again, is something that is trained to every level of police department across the country,” said McCabe.

Kayyem agreed with McCabe’s analysis, describing ICS as a system that is supposed to be “plug and play,” even if you have “20 jurisdictions who have never met each other before.”

In Uvalde, Kayyem continued, the report showed there was an “initial failure” to establish an incident command post and incident commander, leading the officers to “believe that they were in a barricade situation rather than an active shooter situation,” and with no one in charge, “no one steps forward and says, essentially, ‘what the heck, what is going on here?'”

“And what’s clear to me” from the report, she said, “is that failure of anyone coming forward sort of bred more and more failure to come forward…they cannot get ahead of that original failure.”

After a commercial break, Whitfield asked Kayyem, a former DHS assistant secretary, what role she thought the federal government might play in “assessing what went wrong here” and “what will be the better approach so that all these agencies would be able to coordinate and work together, heaven forbid something like this is to happen again?”

Kayyem remarked that many of the law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting had been interviewed, and “you do get the sense that a lot of them did know better,” that the “incident command system had broken down from the beginning, you just didn’t have leadership.”

There was a “strong deferential allegiance to the local first responders, and then state, then federal, that’s just the way we think about it,” she explained, and you end up in a situation where you have “20 law enforcement agencies in this small little community in Texas.”

“One of the reasons why training is failing,” Kayyem said, “is because, honestly, we have too many police departments in this country.”

In Uvalde, she said, there was “a school district police department that is asserting its own authority, it has its own incident command, there are six members of it.”

“Does each small school district actually need its own school department?” Kayyem asked, as a separate jurisdiction from the local police department. That might make more sense in a large metropolitan area like Los Angeles or New York, she argued, but not in a small town.

During the Uvalde shooting, she recounted, “no one asserts the incident command post, no one asserts incident command, and nobody says ‘this is broken, this is just absolutely broken.’ All of those things might be fixed by greater integration rather than 30, 20, whatever, jurisdictions showing up at this small community.”

“That’s one of the takeaways I think we should consider,” she concluded. “Are these police departments too small and therefore the training’s not good, the professionalism’s not as strong, and things like that.”

Watch the video clips above, via CNN.