Half a Million Bucks Given Green Light to Investigate Police Actions During Oxford School Shooting

Oakland County’s Board has given the thumbs up to $500,000 needed to launch a totally independent review into how emergency services responded to last year’s Oxford High School Shooting. The entire board agreed it was a must to fork out these funds and call for a detailed examination of the deadly event, which saw four students lose their lives and another seven, plus a teacher, injured back on November 30, 2021.

Board chair, from Royal Oak, and the minority caucus chair from Oxford, teamed up and came up with a resolution. This document stated that it’s super important to complete a careful, unbiased review to examine the reaction to this violent incident. This is to score how well emergency management, law enforcement, and Fire/Emergency Medical teams effectively handled things and to learn any lessons for future planning.

The process involves hiring a third party through a process requesting bids. The chosen party will give an impartial analysis of the response and recovery efforts, looking at how well law enforcement, emergency services, and others who were involved, worked in sync. The party will also give advice for betterment of safety measures, recovery, and response procedures.

The firm’s tasks will be to collect data, hold interviews with key players, analyze the recovery and response efforts, and create an in-depth report including practical suggestions that will help improve public safety and strategies for emergency responses.

It’s critical to inform any policy changes, training programs, and how to reallocate resources with the results of this review. This way we can aim at preventing similar tragedies in future and boost community safety. Right now, no independent review of the emergency response to the Oxford incident has been done. Usually, an outside agency conducts this kind of review to learn from the actions taken by police and their partners during such situations.

The approval of the funds and the one-time payment will come from the county’s available funds. The money will go to the Emergency Management and Homeland Security Department to find an independent firm with the right experience for conducting this kind of review of similar incidents. They have said the final report will be made public by the independent firm.

The board chairman said he’s continuing to draft a policy that will require all incidents involving mass shootings in Oakland County to undergo reviews. He also said he wants all mass shootings to be reviewed independently, including an incident back in June 15 at a water play area in Rochester Hills.

One of the fathers of the Oxford attack victims said he welcomed the review of the police and emergency response. He added he still had many questions that remained unanswered nearly three years later. He wants to know when the ‘all clear’ was given. Could emergency medical services have arrived sooner? He said it wasn’t right to think that victims would be upset at such a review. He added that he’d like to know the full story, stating that improvements can be made from learning from these tragedies.

Value disagreements between a county homeland security official and Oakland County Executive Dave Coulter’s office were said to have occurred. The sheriff’s office denied declining to participate in the third-party review. Guidepost Solutions did carry out their own review, but it was only about the school district’s reaction and role in the incident, not about emergency services response to the attack.

In saying this, discussions around the delay of dispatch times to the scene were brought up by two area fire chiefs. One of them actually privately called for a review of the possible delays just days after the incident. The sheriff’s department found these concerns to be unfounded.

After the vote, the County Executive said that he appreciated the county board approving the funds for the review. “These reviews help us to improve these plans to have the best possible resources for our residents and communities when emergencies happen,” he stated. One parent whose son was shot at the school said he welcomed the review. “I would like to know if the departments that were not notified believe they could have saved lives,” he said.