So today, 20 months on from one of the deadliest school shootings in US history, families have received the government's official report into what happened and what went wrong in the police response.

It found that the police response was a failure that should not have happened. Here are the key things we learned:

• There were a series of major failures, including in the leadership, tactics used to apprehend the gunman by police, the Department of Justice said
• Attorney General Merrick Garland said victims were trapped in a classroom and it took 75 minutes before officers entered
• There was confusion among officers while the shooter was inside the classroom, he said - with officers arriving and not knowing who was in charge
• He said the most significant failure was officers treating the scene as a "barricade" scenario rather than "an active shooter"
• Garland also said that some responders lacked "any active shooter training at all"
• The chaos continued as people were rescued, the assistant attorney general added - saying officers had no plans how to triage victims, with people who had died being taken to hospital in ambulances and children with bullet wounds put on school buses
• Some of the bereaved families have responded to the report. "I hope the failures end today," said one mother who lost her son, while other families have called for police officers to be held accountable.
• What next? An investigation into whether there are any criminal charges to be brought is currently ongoing - so we'll wait to hear from that sometime this year.

To read our latest write-up, that's here.

Josh Koskoff, one of the lawyers representing 17 of the families affected also spoke to reporters earlier in Uvalde.

He said the families appreciate the attorney general's commitment to seeing the investigation through.

"For families in this situation, transparency and comfort and knowing that your government or your state is listening to you and are concerned about what you and your family has been through is critically important."

"There are limitations though. These families didn't need a 400-page government report to learn that law enforcement failed them in a historic way.

"Some of them were there as their children were being killed while law enforcement was paralysed."

Angelica Casas
San Antonio, Texas

Image source, Getty Images

Everyone in Uvalde knows someone who died or lost a loved one in the shooting.

Most residents have lived there their whole lives or retired there, escaping the fast tracks of city life. To the town’s dismay two years ago, the sense of close-knit community meant the grief would resound loudly.

“The little girl that they found yesterday was my neighbour’s granddaughter,” one woman living down the street from Robb Elementary School told me when I went there after the shooting.

“It’s hard to explain to your kid that someone he used to play with won’t be there anymore,” another mother, Monique, looking down at her son Joaquin, said. “It’s hard to explain evil, it’s hard for them to understand.”

The findings in this report are for them too.

One of the questions that have since been asked is whether there will be any action taken to hold the officers in charge of the response to the Uvalde school shooting accountable.

The report does name officers who were in leadership positions at the time. Uvalde's former school police chief and four other police officers lost their jobs since the shooting.

A criminal investigation into the police response by the Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell is currently ongoing and will continue into 2024.

It is anticipated that Mitchell will eventually present her findings to a grand jury, according to CBS News, the BBC's US partner.

"My office will continue our independent review for any potential criminal charges," Mitchell said in a press release earlier.

Brent Cross, whose son was killed at Robb Elementary School, says that he want the officers named in the report to be held accountable.

"It is hard enough waking up everyday and continuing," Cross says.

It is harder, he adds, to walk down the street and see an officer that "you know was standing there while our babies were murdered".

Cross says that he hopes the report will put pressure on District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is currently conducting a criminal investigation into the police response.

"Do your job," Cross says.

The mother of one of the Uvalde shooting victims has given an emotional response to the report's publication.

Kimberly Mata-Rubio lost her daughter Lexi Rubio, who was 10-years-old.

Image source, Getty Images

Joe Biden has said that reforms to gun ownership laws are necessary to ensure mass shootings such as the one at Robb Elementary School does not happen again.

In a statement issued after the Department of Justice report into the shooting, Biden recalled travelling to Texas in May 2022 and grieving for the "21 students and educators senselessly and tragically gunned down".

Among the changes in law Biden is proposing is universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

"The families of Uvalde - and all American communities - deserve nothing less," he says.

Members of the public also attended the news conference earlier - and several were seen with tears in their eyes as they listened to the attorney general and his colleagues.

Families and those affected by the shooting have had a long wait for this moment.

An earlier report by Texas lawmakers in 2022 reached similar conclusions, that police of failed to "prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety", but the families of victims will still have to wait for a criminal investigation into the police response that will continue into 2024, according to Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell.

Family members are speaking to reporters now - we'll bring you the lines from that very shortly, or you can watch by pressing Play above.

Gupta went on to outline how the reunification process for families after the shooting was also "chaotic" and "deeply painful".

Families received unclear information, and many waited hours at the school without status updates, not knowing where their children were or if they were even alive.

Some were sent scrambling to different places across town to learn the fate of their loved ones.

"Some of these details are gut-wrenching," Gupta says. "Families hearing about the need for autopsy results as the first indication that their loved ones may not have survived."

Gupta adds this inconsistency in communication "only made things worse".

The news conference is still going on - and we're just catching up on some comments made by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who spoke after Garland.

The report, Gupta says, lays out the "cascading failures" over the course of 77 minutes of when police officers first arrived to when the gunman was apprehended - but she adds that the failures do not stop there.

Upon entering the classroom, officers had no plan to triage the 35 victims that were rescued, many of whom who had been shot.

"One adult victim was placed on a walkway, on the ground, outside to be attended to," Gupta says. "She died there."

She says "it is hard to look at the truth" of what unfolded on 24 May, 2022: "That a lack of action by adults failed to protect children and their teachers. But we cannot look away from what had happened here."

Angelica Casas
San Antonio, Texas

This report from the DOJ confirms what the community in Uvalde has known for 20 months - that law enforcement could have done better and more lives could have been saved.

Uvalde, a small town not more than 80 miles from the US border with Mexico, was used to a heavy law enforcement presence prior to the shooting.

Border patrol agents and officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety would mingle with local and school police there.

More than 370 officers from these various departments responded to the shooting that day. Their response has been categorised as a failure.

In the months that followed, the police response in Uvalde angered residents and sent a ripple of fear to parents and students throughout the US.

In one specific incident in San Antonio, just an hour from Uvalde, hundreds of parents stormed a school when it went into lockdown after a false shooting threat.

“Uvalde has put a fear in our hearts,” Christina Morales, a mother in San Antonio told me. “My confidence in the police - it’s not there.”

While trust in police won’t grow overnight, the US Justice Department hopes the report will offer some validation to the families in Uvalde and beyond.

“The work of healing is only beginning,” says Attorney General Merrick Garland.

"First and foremost, the 19 children and two teachers should be here today," Garland continues.

"They never should have been targeted by a mass shooter," he says, adding that people must not forget the shooter's "heinous" actions.

"And the survivors should not have been trapped with the shooter," he says.

The families and survivors deserved more, and so did the community, he adds.

The attorney general wraps up his remarks by saying that although the review is finished, "the work of healing" in the community "is only beginning".

Garland gives some reasons behind the "chaos and confusion" at Robb Elementary School on the day.

He says some responders lacked "any active shooter training at all", while others had inappropriate training.

"Some lacked critical incident response training, and the vast majority have never trained together with different agencies," he adds.

Here's US Attorney General Merrick Garland just moments ago, saying there were failures in leadership, tactics, communications, training and in preparedness - and as a result 33 students and three teachers were trapped in a room with the shooter.

Garland says that it took 75 minutes before officers finally entered classroom 111, where the shooter was inside with a group of students and staff.

When they did so, the gunman fired at officers, who then fired back at him.

After 45 rounds of gunfire and 77 minutes later from when officers first arrived to the shooting, the gunman was killed.

"The massacre at Robb Elementary shattered families throughout this community and devastated our country," he says.

He adds that 19 children and two teachers were killed, and an untold number of teachers, students, and police officers were injured.

Garland says there was confusion among officers on who was in charge of the response, all while the shooter was still inside the classroom with victims.

Garland says the priority of law enforcement must be to immediately enter the room to stop the shooter with whatever weapons and tools officers have.

That's the approach officers first employed, but within minutes, officers transitioned from treating the scene as an active shooter situation to a barricaded subject subject, he says.

"This was the most significant failure," says Garland.

It meant that victims remained trapped with their shooter for more than an hour, he says.

In his remarks, Attorney General Garland spells out the lengthy response by law enforcement to the shooting.

He says the victims that were trapped in classroom 111 and 112 were waiting to be rescued at 11:44 that day, 10 minutes after the first group of police officers arrived.

He adds that they were still waiting at 11:56, when an officer told his colleagues that his wife, a teacher, was inside the classroom and had been shot.

At 12:10, a student inside the classroom called 911 for help, Garland says. That student, he adds, stayed on the phone or 16 minutes.

Students and staff inside were still waiting to be rescued by 12:21, when the gunman fired four more shots inside the classroom.

And they were waiting another 27 minutes after that, he said, when "officers finally entered the classroom and killed the subject."

During this time, Garland says there was confusion among officers on who was in charge of the response, all while time passed by with the shooter barricaded inside the classroom with victims.

Garland continues by declaring that the law enforcement response on both the day of the shooting and the days that followed was "a failure that should not have happened".

He then goes on to detail the events of the 24 May in 2022.

He says within minutes of the shooting beginning, 11 officers arrived inside the school.

Hearing gunfire, five officers immediately advanced to the classroom, and shots were fired which resulted in two officers being hit with shrapnel, who retreated, he says.

A single officer then made an approach to the classroom, but then no more attempts were made to enter the classroom for another hour, Garland adds.

Image source, DOJ

Attorney General Merrick Garland has begun speaking.

He says he met with families of victims last night to tell them that his department has finished conducting its review into the police response to the Uvalde shooting, and "to provide guidance moving forward".

"The department's review concluded that a series of major failures" were made by law enforcement in their response, he says, including in leadership and tactics used to apprehend the gunman.

He adds he told the families how "deeply sorry" he is for the losses they have lost that day, "and every day since".

"What I hope is clear among the hundreds of pages of this report: their loved ones deserved better."

Attorney General Merrick Garland and other officials from the US Department of Justice are about to hold a press conference from Uvalde, Texas.

It starts at 11.00 local time (12.00 ET/17.00 GMT) - and you can watch along by pressing Play at the top of this page when it starts.