Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/12/uvalde-police-chief-resigns.html
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Where I live we have about a dozen RCMP officers to cover two large towns and multiple smaller communities. Aside from my work (at a homeless shelter) I see a police car about once a month.
Of course, most of us aren’t armed either, so the cops aren’t quite as terrified. Also most cops have to have a university degree in something like criminology to even have a chance of being hired (not 100% accurate but not far off).
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I guess there’s a smaller town than Uvalde that’s willing to give a job to yet another “bad apple” cop.
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He’s got name recognition, law enforcement and “leadership” background. He’ll run for Congress as the Hero of Uvalde.
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I did not read all the details but TAKE HIS PENSION! Start a scholarship whatever for the kids in the district but TAKE HIS PENSION!!
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This aspect is part(along with the screaming dead schoolchildren, obviously) of why the whole Uvalde thing rubs especially badly:
There are a fair few(and those quite common) situations where you look at a situation where people with little formal background and a fairly quick stint at police academy ending up doing some de-facto social work or mental health crisis intervention because it was the cops who were called or specialist services are overbooked; and it’s absolutely the case that you are pessimistic about the likely outcome; but also recognize the bad situation as a systemic problem(exactly how you wish to divide the blame between low hiring standards for cops; limited resources for non-cop interventions in acute mental health, homelessness, etc.) where it’s definitely bad that people who are some combination of underqualified and qualified in unhelpful areas are being tossed into tricky situations in the place of people better suited to handle them; but it’s hard to reasonably expect a better outcome without a significant change in who you are sending.
Uvalde, though(at least once it started); was a fairly straightforward case of something that, according to the self-congratulatory mythos, cops(or, at least, SWAT) are supposed to useful for; and they fucked it with a nearly unimaginable combination of incompetence, cowardice, and largely shameless indifference to the sheer magnitude of their failure.
This obviously isn’t to excuse the relatively tepid standards for policing; but, in terms of situations looking catastrophically bad, “we funneled a bunch of people whose CVs never suggested that they’d be good at this into it” often has a cop committing the proximate misconduct; but feels like more of a systemic problem; where “we sent a bunch of people in to do the job they purported readiness for; you would not believe how badly they did and how shameless they are about doing badly” hits differently.
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I used to think that the worst that could happen during a school shooting was that the cops would go in and shoot lots of children. I didn’t imagine that the cops would just do nothing.
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