The situation at Uvalde is evolving. That’s a polite way of saying that everyone involved is rushing to get their stories straight and blaming everyone else.

That said, the local cops keep looking worse and worse.

When specially equipped federal immigration agents arrived at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, the local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman who had opened fire on students inside the school, according to two officials briefed on the situation.

The agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at some point between 12 p.m. and 12:10 p.m., according to the officials — far earlier than previously known. But they did not breach the adjoining classrooms of the school where the gunman had locked himself in until a little before 1 p.m. Members of the federal tactical team killed the gunman.

That’s according to the New York Times. The story may keep changing, but the accounts that we’re hearing now remain quite damning.

A girl who was inside one of the classrooms where the gunman opened fire called 911 several times during the siege, Director McCraw said. “Please send the police now,” she said at one point.

The authorities now say that local officers first entered the school at 11:35, two minutes after the gunman, and that there were 19 officers in the hallway by 12:03 p.m., but that they did not breach the door and kill the gunman until 12:50, even as they continued to hear him firing.

We’ve all heard accounts from parents and bystanders. Some police were conducting rescues and clearing the school, but leaving the gunman alone with students for this period of time is shocking, but as discussed previously, not surprising. This has happened a number of times and not just in the United States.

Law enforcement has become heavily bureaucratized and the one thing movies and TV shows do get rights are the pointless turf wars, the amount of effort put into controlling the scenes versus directly intervening. 

But it increasingly sounds like Uvalde cops were obsessed with controlling the scene, but had no plan for bringing the attack to an end.