Steve McCraw, throwing Uvalde shade

Steve McCraw has thrown the first DPS trooper under the bus over Uvalde. The DPS head has yet to say if larger DPS instructional problems were any part of the cause for someone like Sgt. Juan Maldonado not taking over in the first place. Of course, it's easy to throw underlings under the bus when you continue to stonewall the media (and others) by refusing to release public information. In some degree of fairness, the Monthly notes that Uvalde County DA Christina Busbee Mitchell, a Republican whose responses to various post-shooting issues have drawn hatred from both the Republican identified mayor of the city and the Democratic state senator, wants an airtight lid on her investigation that not only may, but probably will, indict nobody, and could be a whitewashing in its own right without any prodding from McCraw or Strangeabbott.

Here's Forrest Wilder on that possibility:

If the lawsuit fails, one possible scenario is that Busbee ends up not prosecuting any of the cops, or fails to secure a conviction. In either case, the Uvalde records could fall into a legal black hole, never to see the light of day. That’s because a provision in open-records law allows officials to block the release of records when a criminal investigation doesn’t result in a conviction, including in cases in which the suspect dies. (Which explains why it’s often referred to as the “dead-suspect loophole.”) The intent of the law is to protect the innocent, but over the years it has been twisted to shield police from scrutiny in high-profile cases, such as the 2019 death of Javier Ambler while he was in the custody of Williamson County sheriff’s deputies. 

It’s possible, then, that the truth about Uvalde died with the gunman, Salvador Ramos.

Interestingly, her LinkedIn notes that she's an active Catholic. Surely this is part of what's playing out in the fracturing of Uvalde's Sacred Heart, as blogged here recently, if she's a member there.

Wilder then notes that enforcement of the state's Public Information Act is in the hands of Kenny Boy Paxton. He politely avoids stating is like the fox and the henhouse.

Update: Uvalde parents called for him to resign. His response? An Overton Window shifting on what circumstances would lead for him to resign.