AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Texas state police chief who was saddled with a hesitant response to the 2022 Robb Elementary school shooting and has overseen Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s aggressive efforts to stop migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border said Friday. he will retire at the end of the year.
Col. Steve McCraw has served as director of the Texas Department of Public Safety since 2009. He announced his retirement while addressing the new class of state troopers at a graduation ceremony in Austin.
McCraw did not explain the decision to resign in his speech. In a letter to the agency’s employees, he praised their courage but did not mention Uvalde or other specific police actions during his tenure.
“Your courage and willingness to face danger head on has earned the admiration and support of our leadership, our legislature and the people of Texas,” McCraw wrote.
McCraw was not present during the May 24, 2022, school attack in Uvalde that killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. He called the police for a response “reasonable failure” but resisted calls from victims’ families and some Texas lawmakers to resign after the shooting.
About 90 state troopers in McCraw’s ranks were among the nearly 400 local, state and federal officers who arrived, but waited more than 70 minutes before confronting and killing the shooter in the classroom. Shocking state and federal investigative reports catalog “consecutive failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, said McCraw should have been forced out shortly after the massacre. McCraw’s soldiers were “armed to the teeth” but “stood around and couldn’t engage the shooter,” said Gutierrez, who blamed him for the delay.
“McCraw’s legacy will always be a failure at Uvalde, and one day he will be brought to justice for his inaction,” Gutierrez said.
At a news conference a few days after the shooting, McCraw choked back tears as she described the 911 calls and texts from students in the classroom. He blamed the police delay on the local schools police chief, who McCraw said was the scene commander in charge of the response.
Former Uvalde School Police Chief Pete Arredondo and former school police officer Adrian Gonzales have been charged with multiple counts of child abandonment and endangerment, but remain the only two officers facing charges. Both have pleaded not guilty.
Arredondo has said he has been “scapegoated” for the police response and that he should never have been held responsible as the police officer that day.
Last month, McCraw reinstated one of the few DPS troopers disciplined for the Uvalde shooting response. A group of Uvalde victims’ families has sued for $500 million over the police response.
DPS has also been at the center of Abbott’s multibillion-dollar “Operation Lone Star” border security operation, which has deployed state troopers to the area because the National Guard has arrest powers, transported migrants to Washington DC and placed buoys in Rio. Grande is trying to prevent the migrants from crossing.
The agency also led a police crackdown earlier this year on the University of Texas campus over the Israel-Hamas war.
Abbott called McCraw “one of the most respected law enforcement officers in the country” and called him “the quintessential lawyer that Texas is so famous for.”
