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Oakland County allocates $500,000 to review police response to Oxford shooting

Gillberg
Oakland County allocates 0,000 to review police response to Oxford shooting

The Oakland County Board of Commissioners on Thursday approved $500,000 for an independent review of emergency response efforts following the 2021 Oxford High School shooting.

The board unanimously approved the funds as well as a resolution calling for a debriefing of the mass massacre at the school that left four students dead and seven others, including a teacher, injured on November 30, 2021.

Board Chairman David T. Woodward (D-Royal Oak) and Commissioner and Minority Leader Michael Spisz (R-Oxford) co-authored a resolution saying it was “imperative” to conduct a thorough and independent investigation to evaluate the response to the mass shooting, “to assess the effectiveness of disaster response, law enforcement and fire/emergency medical services, and to draw lessons for future preparedness.”

The review will be conducted by a third party contracted by the county through a request for proposal and will “provide an unbiased analysis of response and recovery efforts, including coordination between law enforcement, emergency services and other stakeholders, and provide recommendations to improve safety measures and response and recovery protocols,” the resolution states.

The independent firm will be tasked with collecting data, interviewing key individuals, analyzing response and recovery efforts, and producing a detailed report with actionable recommendations to help improve public safety and emergency response strategies, the resolution said.

The findings and recommendations of the investigation would be “critical to initiating policy changes, training programs and resource allocations aimed at preventing future tragedies and improving community safety,” the resolution said.

No independent debriefing of the emergency response in Oxford was conducted. The review is typically conducted by an outside agency to learn from the actions of the coordinating police agency and its partners during a mass shooting incident.

The developments come after the Detroit News reported last month on questions about possible delays in operational planning for the shooting.

Subscribers: Fire chiefs say rescue teams were sent too late to Oxford attack

The allocation of funds was approved unanimously by 17 board members. Two members were absent.

The one-time funding will come from the county’s fund and go to the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, which will contract an independent company with experience in reviewing similar incidents.

The commissioners said the independent company’s final report would be published.

Woodward said Thursday he is continuing to work on formal legislation requiring follow-up investigations of all mass shootings in Oakland County. He has said he wants to have all mass shootings independently investigated, including the June 15 shooting at a Rochester Hills wading pool that left nine people injured.

An Oakland County spokesman said the county will issue a request for proposals by mid-September to find companies capable of conducting an independent review of the emergency response after the attack.

Buck Myre, whose son Tate was killed in the attack, said Thursday that he welcomed the review of police and rescue efforts and that he had many questions about the attack that remained unanswered nearly three years later.

“One thing (Oakland County Sheriff Michael) Bouchard said was that they were still getting 911 calls about gunshots, so EMS didn’t enter the building. Normally they give the all-clear. I never received that information. I want to know when that happened,” Myre said. “Could EMS have come sooner?”

Myre said the notion that victims would be upset by an audit was incorrect. Questions from fire chiefs about response times also went unanswered, he said.

“I would rather know the whole story,” Myre said. “When something goes wrong in the professional world and there is an incident, we do a post-mortem. What could we have done better? What did we do well? That’s what I expect from the system. Here we failed. Here we did good. Ultimately, we have to learn from these tragedies.”

The News reported that Sheriff Michael Bouchard’s office declined to participate in a third-party debriefing, as requested by Oakland County Executive Dave Coulter’s office in January, according to a Coulter spokesman and a contemporaneous email from a county Homeland Security official. Coulter had requested the independent review.

The sheriff’s office denied that it had refused to participate in the third-party review.

Maj. Christopher Wundrach, a senior commander at Bouchard, had previously told The News that the office and staff had been fully involved in the independent investigation conducted by Guidepost Solutions, but that investigation and accompanying report were limited to examining the school district’s role and response to the attack, not that of emergency responders.

The News reported that two area fire chiefs claimed that Oakland County Sheriff’s Office emergency responders took too long to call them to the scene. Although the concerns became public last month, in the days immediately following the shooting, one chief privately requested a review of the potential delays, and the sheriff’s office concluded that the concerns were unfounded.

Anthony Asciutto, whose son John was shot at Oxford High School, said he wants a review.

“If (Bouchard’s) 911 system was down because of poor maintenance or underfunding, he should want to know that information. And he should pay all the taxpayer money to have a third-party report done… Children were murdered and my boy was shot. I would like to know if the fire departments that were not notified believe they could have saved lives,” Asciutto said.

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