Uvalde shooting: Steve McCraw: Misinformation leads to failure
In an exclusive interview, the DPS director stated that law enforcement was not provided with accurate information following their response to Robb Elementary.
Tony Plohetski and Nate Chute, Austin American-Statesman
When you’re the top cop in Texas, you can leave whenever you want.
Not amid the cries of desperate families from Uvalde, but to the applause of those gathered in Austin for the graduation of the newest class of Texas State Police officers.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s Friday announcement of Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw’s retirement is not the resignation Uvalde parents demanded two years ago, when the department’s failures and misrepresentations surrounding the deadliest school massacre in Texas history were painfully exposed. But some still found McCraw’s departure comforting.
“It was about time!!,” Brett Cross, who lost his son Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia in the Uvalde shooting, wrote on social media on Friday about the DPS director’s resignation. “Good to see him gone.”
Still, it is a meaningless echo of the Uvalde tragedy, a neatly packaged conclusion to McCraw’s career that brushes aside the responsibility that the grieving families deserve.
Holding those responsible accountable would have required a comprehensive public investigation into the actions of the 91 DPS officers who stood largely idly by for over an hour on May 24, 2022, while a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
Instead, DPS is stonewalling. The agency continues to fight a court order to release records of the shooting, and McCraw refused for 18 months to hear the appeal of Texas Ranger Christopher Ryan Kindell, one of only two officers fired for the Uvalde operation (the other officer retired).
With hundreds of police officers from multiple agencies arriving at the scene, the culpability of any one officer is up for debate. But as I wrote in January, the blocking of Kindell’s appeal prevented a public hearing that would have subjected the entire DPS response to scrutiny. Any hope of such a reckoning was dashed earlier this month when McCraw quietly reinstated Kindell.
The Public Safety Commission would also have held McCraw to account for his promise to resign in 2022 if DPS bore “any fault” in the botched response. Instead, incredibly, commissioners praised McCraw last year by giving him a $45,437 raise, bringing his annual salary to $345,250.
Somehow, McCraw was rewarded with a 15 percent raise, even as a Texas House committee found “systemic failures and blatant misjudgments” and the U.S. Department of Justice documented “cascading failures” by law enforcement in Uvalde.
That raise, granted exactly one year ago, increased McCraw’s average of his three highest-earning years, which will translate into a higher monthly pension when he begins collecting his retirement pension.
“We are really fortunate to have someone of the caliber of Steve McCraw as director of the Department of Public Safety,” Steven P. Mach, chairman of the Public Safety Commission, said last year. And on Friday, Abbott praised McCraw as “a leader, a visionary and the epitome of the law enforcement officer that Texas is so famous for — with his big white cowboy hat and all.”
Wow. Good thing our DPS chief looked the part.
I understand that McCraw spent 15 years leading a massive agency that was tasked with demanding tasks, from running Abbott’s Border Patrol Operation Lone Star to leading the highway patrol to managing the state’s heavily overburdened driver’s license offices.
“There is no more important responsibility in government than ensuring the safety of our citizens,” McCraw wrote in his letter announcing his resignation. Leading the DPS, he added, “has been the greatest honor of my life.”
The tragedy in Uvalde was not McCraw’s entire term in office. But the failed response and false narratives are indelibly etched into his legacy, even if there is no mention of them in the official resignation announcements.
Texans will not forget, and the Uvalde parents who buried their children two years ago will not give up. Nineteen families of the victims sued the DPS and 92 police officers in May, hoping the courts will impose much-needed accountability.
McCraw may be hanging up his distinctive military cap of his own accord, but his story is not over yet.
Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours by emailing [email protected] or X at @bgrumet. Her previous work can be found at statesman.com/opinion/columns.
