“They did engage immediately. They did contain him in the classroom“
Direct quote from Steven McCraw, Head of “Public Safety”. Emphasis mine.
Through inaction of direct action they drove him into a classroom full of children (again, they had THREE opportunities to stop him), then waited 30+ minutes while they could hear gunfire. That’s when you charge into the room. That’s when you break a window. That’s when you penetrate the roof. That’s when you do anything other than stand around jawing about what you should do.
Precisely. Their tactics failed, their courage failed, the State failed, the Feds failed and the entirely predictable outcome is that a classroom of children are dead. I’m not interested in giving an inch. The media, social networks and even corner of the Internet forums like BBS need to be calling this for what it was: cowardice that allowed babies to be murdered.
Especially when police unions – the only unions right -wingers like – go on ad nauseam about how cops need sweet compensation deals because they put themselves in the line of fire.
Hell, we are a pediatric office and we do active shooter drills, with the assistance of local law enforcement. I seriously doubt these guys never participated in such drills. The fact is it is really scary to have to do your job under pressure. Tough. They (and I) chose a job where that does not happen every day, but it will, predictably, happen. If you cannot handle that, Get. The. Fuck. Out!!
With every tragedy they ignore, it should become clearer to the public that greed is the main motivator of conservatives in power. If the cops aren’t paid for this, then there should be no real outcry at plans to defund them, right? The average taxpayer believes they aren’t getting what they’ve paid for, and the average cop gets paid but has no real obligation to do the job.
Meanwhile, TPTB are using cops for their own ends - controlling marginalized groups and monetizing injustice systems. They don’t see any of it as a problem until their lives and profits are at risk. This is why we see a marked difference in policing based on what laws they are being asked to enforce, and who is on the receiving end of that force.
Ok, I think I see where the disconnect is. I think you’re angry (and rightly so) that they’re bragging about containing him in a classroom like it was a win.
I’m saying that it doesn’t seem clear that they had anything to do with him going into a classroom. That’s where he wanted to be, to kill children. It seems like they ineffectively shot in his direction as he went to where he wanted to go. I’m angry for the same reason I think you are, I’m just also angry because it seems like they’re bragging about literally doing nothing.
“It was reported that a school district police officer confronted the suspect that was making entry. Not accurate. He walked in unobstructed initially. So, from the grandmother’s house to the bar ditch to the school, into the school, he was not confronted by anybody. To clear the record on that. Four minutes later, law enforcement are coming in to solve this problem,”
but…
“Four minutes later (four minutes!!!), local police departments, Uvalde Police Department, the Independent School District Police Department are inside, making entry. They hear gunfire, they take rounds, they move back, get cover. And during that time, they approach where the suspect is at,” Escalon explained.
These officers were not able to make entry initially, Escalon said, “because of the gunfire they’re receiving.” They called for backup and additional resources, while the evacuation of children and teachers in other classrooms was underway, he added.
So someone was shooting at them from inside a school and their response was to back away. I count at least 6 LEO organizations at this point, at least three present within minutes.
But they did! They let him slip past numerous armed officers into a classroom full of children and then did nothing for AN HOUR! Instead of trying to intercept him, they pushed him deeper into the school until he was “pinned” inside a classroom.
I’ve been wondering about this. It seems like school kids have to do more active shooter drills than LEOs, based on the responses.
Do the drills involving LEOs include the hour long “fall back” while they put up police tape and fend off desperate parents? What are the kids and teachers meant to be doing while the cops get their outfits all sorted out?
And I don’t mean to come across as snarky or flippant at all I’m just fucking heartbroken and completely confused about how this is the way things are.
I agree 100%. I think it’s important to emphasize the lack of a legal duty to protect, because it’s something that isn’t as well known, and if you learn about it in the abstract, it’s easy to think of it as, “Well, you can’t sue the cops for not tracking down a serial killer fast enough” as opposed to “It is completely acceptable from a legal standpoint for cops in body armor carrying long guns to sit outside of a school, listen to gunfire, and do nothing.” It’s a truth that shows the bullshit alternative solutions to be the lies they are.
More armed cops in schools? - Why, they don’t have a legal duty to do anything, and in practice we’ve seen repeatedly that they don’t take action reliably.
Arm teachers? Have everyone open carry everywhere? - Why, do they have some duty that police don’t? Because if you think they do, that’s fucking absurd.
Our response to gun violence is broken. Our system of policing is broken. When they interact, they don’t do the thing that we all naturally expect them to do.
If you can’t expect cops to risk their lives to save others, you can’t expect private citizens or teachers to do so in the same situation. You can’t use “they put their lives on the line” as an excuse when they shoot a black kid holding a toy gun within seconds of arriving on the scene. You can’t pretend that the solution to gun violence is more guns when you don’t have an expectation that people should use them to protect children. You can’t refuse to try to control guns and at the same time refuse to hold police accountable when they fail at their moral duty. You have to solve at least one of these problems, and right now we have a major political party committed to absolutely not solving either one. And it’s well past time to call them out on that.
taking into account cops’ tendency to shoot bystanders they “mistake” as threats I would be hesitant to send in the cops myself lest they kill more kids…
“Hm, this person is three feet tall. Not sure if this is a bystander.”
Somewhere in the vast unimaginable time between “4 minutes” and “an hour later” humanity died.
Our school district removed SRO during the virtual year and did not bring them back this year. We had a single kid shot with a ghost gun during a dispute at a planned meeting between two kids in a high school.
Some disagreement gone bad. Social media blew up with calls to bring the SRO back. That while they clearly would not have been in the bathroom with the kid or been able to do anything to stop it. They would “build relationships” and “know who was trouble”, like some armed SRO is the perfect counselor or super spy. I’m going to say that in minute 5 when they didn’t continue to engage or immediately reengage they’ve completely confirmed that the SRO isn’t helpful for anything.
PS: The kid denied being shot at first. The school hero was the nurse who used a blood clotting pack to stop the bleeding and saved his life. Without her quick response, he would have died.
I don’t. It’s the only thing they are actually trained and equipped to do. If they didn’t intervene in this case, they can go jump in a lake in full body armor.
Okay, so 40% of the small town’s budget is spent on cops. They actually have an f’ing swat team. There was a campus officer who saw the guy crash his car into the school and try to enter the school while holding a rifle - and he “engaged” (whatever that means - talked to him?) - or not? with the shooter but didn’t do anything to stop him from entering. More cops show up and do nothing for an hour, letting children who could have been saved bleed to death inside and the killer continued to kill. The cops reportedly took their own kids out of the school and then tased parents who tried to enter. Eventually border patrol took the shooter down.
I think we can now definitively put an end to the idea that more cops/armed people on campus are remotely a solution. (The fact is that more cops on campus is shown to increase the abuse and criminalization of children.) I guess this is why the ever-helpful GQP is now pivoting to a proposal to turn the buildings of the schools themselves into physical death-traps as a solution instead. Sure, it’s nonsense, but when one’s slightly less absurd proposed solutions totally fail, you have to go full gibberish.
Leaving aside the kids bleeding out during the “golden hour” for treating gunshots, the killer absolutely continued to shoot after the cops showed up. In fact, at one point, according to survivors, the cops asked survivors to call out if they needed help. They didn’t give it, but that alerted the shooter to hidden kids, and he then shot and killed them. So yeah, the cops were actually being worse than useless.
The cops own version of events is pretty damning for them, and they always spin - and lie - about events to put themselves in the best possible light. In this case it’s turning out to be so much worse than that.
Even cops do poorly in that situation, though. They tend to miss their targets (and hit bystanders) and they already have a gun on their person (and usually already out before engaging in a situation); a gun locked in a drawer is another thing. And they have, you know, extensive training for exactly those kinds of situations. A teacher in that position is more a liability than anything. (And all that is besides all the other reasons it’s a bad idea, such as being liabilities during all the times there are no shooters.)
Aren’t they always? I do wonder what happened there - if the shooter had his gun pointed at the officer before he could take his gun out or the cop just didn’t want to start shooting for some other reason… shooting a teen because you think they’re a danger would be a difficult thing if you’re not a sociopath.
Almost half the town’s entire budget is cops. The town has a SWAT team. To be fair though, they were probably busy serving a warrant for a low-level drug offense, which is what they’re usually used for.
I mean, there’s that, but the nature of a shoot-out isn’t like a Hollywood action movie where people run around and charge gunmen. There were three shootouts and they all worked like gunfights at that range normally work. Engaging in a gun fight doesn’t mean it’s likely to actually stop anyone. In reality you stay behind cover and try to keep the other person pinned down, which isn’t a particularly effective strategy, especially when the person who is shooting at you isn’t motivated by a desire to live, but a desire to kill as many people as possible before they die.
I suspect that in most cases where the cops successfully stop someone who has a gun, the cops either fired first or fired at someone who was running away. Actual shootouts can last for hours and thousands of rounds fired without anyone being hit.
I think it’s useful to view it not as an excuse, but as the reality. We expect cops to do things that either they can’t do or that they don’t expect of themselves (and thus they don’t); ring-wing policies based on that misunderstanding are thus necessarily going to fail, and this needs to be pointed out at every opportunity Conservatives want to treat cops like Hollywood action heroes, but they f’ing aren’t, at all. Acting like cops are “protectors” undermines defunding efforts. Cops just aren’t the entities that copaganda would like us to believe, and the right-wing narrative is 100% based on bullshit. Acknowledging the reality allows us to change the conversation and start to grapple with the problems that are going unaddressed.
Don’t get me wrong, the cops obviously fucked up in a lot of ways here - as human beings, as public servants, specifically as cops - but ultimately society fucked up by pretending armed police were remotely a solution to the problem of ubiquitous guns. Just as it’s fucking up by pretending they’re a solution to most of the problems they’re proposed as a solution to.
Well, they don’t get training* in most of the things they do on a regular basis (which is why they’re the worst possible people to ask to do those things usually), so…
*Or, worse, they do get training, but from right-wing groups that teach them the worst possible ways to do things.
Yeah, the cops are active in perpetuating this myth about what they are and what they do because they want to be seen as something they aren’t, and get rewarded for it no less.
That was literally the cops in this situation. The cops were the ostensible “good guys with guns” already at the scene, saw a guy with a rifle trying to get into the school to murder people and who totally failed to stop anything, despite having, unlike random yahoos with lethal weapons, actual training. The “good guy with gun” argument is fucking dead.
And in this case fulfilling all the requirements of that role - they were already at the scene, aware of the guy with a gun trying to get into the school to murder people, and they did nothing to stop it.
Yeah, there’s been a lot of confusion, but it’s clear they’ve not exactly been honest about what happened in a lot of ways; they’ve been covering their asses something fierce.
The cops shoot a lot of bystanders they aren’t aiming at.
Fair enough. But I maintain that, based on police responses for similar recent mass shootings like at Parkland, it wasn’t an unusual level of cowardice. (That doesn’t mean it’s excusable)
Sure, but the reality is that they could have made different choices that saved lives, and they did not. I think it’s far more important to continue to point out the contradictions in the language, laws, and the actions of the police and how little is actually represents justice in the world.
Which I’ve said here, over and over and over again, only to be told the exact same thing about the “realities”… Well, fuck that. I’m sick of this being the “legal reality”.
I mean… maybe? Part of what I’m trying to get at is the thing is, once you get to that position, once someone like that has an assault rifle and is starting a massacre, people will die, and the cops aren’t always going to be effective in doing anything about it. Even the cops doing everything “right” aren’t necessarily going to stop the shooter before he’s done what he came there to do.
I see conservatives making the argument after these school shootings: that the cops failed to do their jobs, and that’s why it happened. The “good guy with a gun” model works, they say, but fallible individuals failed to properly enact it. I suggest that the failure was expecting guns to protect us from guns in the first place. Even when the cops want to be the he-man action hero who charges in and saves the day, reality often doesn’t allow that fantasy to be fulfilled. Because it is part of the gun fantasy, ultimately. (And yes, a fantasy the cops themselves perpetuate and should be taken to task for.)
The average taxpayer believes they aren’t getting what they’ve paid for, and the average cop gets paid but has no real obligation to do the job.
