54
votes
United States Justice Department report finds ‘cascading failures’ and ‘no urgency’ during Uvalde, Texas, shooting
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- Title
- US Justice Department to release report on halting police response to Uvalde school massacre
- Published
- Jan 17 2024
- Word count
- 619 words
I’ve said before that whenever I read articles on mass shootings there is always one particular detail that utterly devastates me.
Here it is for this one:
Also, in case anyone needs to know: there have already been three school shootings in 2024 in the US.
EDIT: And seventeen mass shootings.
I wasn't there, but of all the stories I have seen about mass shootings since Columbine, Uvalde was the one where the immediate and recurring consistent impression was that law enforcement were cowardly, lazy, disorganized and incompetent. I have read about a few shooting responses where the response seemed heroic or especially efficient or intelligent, but most ordinary : ( mass shooting stories do not fall below a certain threshold of competence by first responders. There were interviews at the time about how the cops had been trained. The Uvalde cops didn't match their own training standards according to those reports.
Uvalde was a tragic, tragic story.
And not just Uvalde cops....there were county, state, and feds there too.
Uvalde is the gold standard that demonstrates that in a real emergency, you might be better off relying on the redneck with a shotgun nextdoor to sacrifice themselves for the greater good over the people being paid to ostensibly do so.
As always, Some More News did an excellent deep dive on the failures as well. The most relevant section
List of law enforcement by agency:
And yet, when people say "abolish the police," the response is always, "what are you going to do when there's a gunman running amok." The police at UValde actually prevented parents from going into the school and threatened to arrest parents who actually wanted to help.
The police were a net negative at UValde. If Zeus himself had struck every cop on the scene down with lightning, fewer children would have died. A disorganized posse of random civilians could have been rounded up and dealt with the attacker far quicker than the police.
Why exactly are we keeping all these fools around anyway?
Not just parents. They actively prevented one of the officers, Ruben Ruiz, from entering to save his wife. His wife, Eva Mireles, was one of the teachers in the room the shooter entered, and she'd called him to tell him she was shot. Initially there was a lot of criticism towards him because some early footage released showing him in the halls checking his phone, which had a Punisher background. In reality, he was checking for messages from his wife. She eventually died.
It's one of the most infuriating parts of the whole response to me. One could potentially argue that stopping the parents was justified since that could lead to more civilian casualties, but they prevented an officer from entering. The fact that one of their officers had his wife in active danger and confirmed to be shot didn't add ANY urgency to their response. And it just makes Mireles's death worse, because her husband SHOULD have been in a position to save her, but was actively prevented from going after her. She likely had met multiple officers who had restrained her husband and allowed her to die.
If not even a fellow officer's personal stakes was enough to spur them into action, why the hell would they care about total strangers?
For the record, Ruiz resigned later that year. I can't blame him, since his colleagues willingly allowed his wife to die.
If it’s really down to having the bravery to risk your life then I think you’re right, some 2nd amendment nut is going to do a better job than most cops. But a hostage situation isn’t exactly the kind of scenario where a random untrained civilian running in with a shotgun sounds like the right solution.
Yeah, there's a reality where we're selective about maintaining law enforcement as public servants with sufficient training and skill to handle the situations they claim to be experts at. This reality would see the fewest deaths. It would be far better than some rando with a gun trying to play hero, which in and of itself would be better than what happened at Uvalde. In this case, a nutcase would have been a better response, but it's not an either-or situation; we could just demand more from our police.
What sucks if we started asking more from our police and now across the country they’re crossing their arms, dragging their feet, and generally doing less than before (not just heresay, a retired cop neighbor said that’s their new MO).
This was super evident after the Freddie Gray death in Baltimore. Baltimore police literally just stopped doing their jobs because they didn't want to get blamed for killing people anymore.
They didn't want to stop killing people, they just didn't want to get the blowback from the public for the killing. The departments themselves face very few consequences, but when the cops just stop working, some point at the increase in crime and say "see, that's why you shouldn't have defunded the police". Without realizing that no, or very few, departments faced budget cuts. Instead, most received more money, for less outcome.
I wrote "asking" first as well. We've been asking our police to do more.
We should be demanding now. If they want to continue to exist as an institution, they will have to show their worth. Police accountability now has far more weight for me when voting in primaries and has been a deciding factor for me in local candidates.
Clearly, police will not improve their behavior on their own recognizance. There is no motivation to outside of the rare impulse to do good. If they want to be treated as heroic knights errant, they need to act like it, and they can't be trusted to reform themselves.
I would much prefer trained responders. However, a mass shooting isn't a hostage situation and there isn't time to negotiate or wait for the shooter to get tired or hungry while they are actively shooting. A motivated vigilante would have been better for Uvalde than what actually happened. There are plenty of other mass shooting incidents where law enforcement lived up to their training and moved in quickly.
It very much is a situation where a few bad apples spoil the bunch.
Good cops exist. Are probably the majority even. But so long as they will not oust the bad apples, they are just as rotten.
What you are saying is generally true about police. They are corrupt and they protect each other.
Having said that, in most of the US mass shootings to date, they have performed exponentially better than the lazy cowards from Uvalde.
I mean, I did better than the lazy cowards at Uvalde. I at least had the decency to be over 1,800 miles away while doing nothing, and didn't prevent anyone else from doing anything.
Focusing entirely on the police response misdirects from the actual issue though. Yes, their response was terrible, but we should be addressing the inputs for that type of situation and preventing it from happening as best we can. Them not having to respond because a mass shooting didn’t happen in the first place is the ideal.
If we act like the police here were the sole point of failure, it turns the complex issue of gun violence in general, and mass and school shootings in particular, into a simplistic narrative that is good for generating outrage but does little more.
It’s telling that I’ve seen more discussion both here and everywhere making the police the villains in this story instead of the shooter himself. And this says nothing of all the other cultural and political factors that enable this to keep happening in the US. We are missing the forest for the trees if we keep our focus narrowed on the police alone.
The Uvalde shooting was a terrible, horrible tragedy — and a genuine part of that tragedy was the non-response of law enforcement — but it was also only a single mass shooting out of the hundreds we’ve had. The solution lies in stopping hundreds more before they happen — not blaming responders for failing to stop already-in-progress crises.
We could have a different discussion about what policy changes might be practical and culturally tolerable/politically feasible to reduce shootings, but I am still going to despise the Uvalde cops for failing to intervene to protect children and more for preventing the parents from intervening.
I'm a strong advocate for requiring gun licenses, comparable to drivers licenses. I'm also an advocate for an insurance requirement.
I wish urban gun control advocates could be disciplined and vocal about not threatening the use cases of hunters, farmers and ranchers and rural people generally for guns. The NRA has done a great job muddying the water around gun control. That guy in Arkansas got ridiculed for talking about wild pigs which are a real danger.
Given there's no constitutional requirement for USA cops to protect anyone, what criminal charges could be brought as a result of these findings, if any?
We'll find out.
A friend of mine linked this video and I think it really drives the point home.
When it's put this way, the only law enforcement I would ever trust to truly lay their lives on the line for the greater good would be military veterans, or people trained for military-style escalation (SWAT). The average traffic cop with a firearm, with 2 months of training, is a big threat to the community because they will freeze, and they will make the wrong decisions and cost lives because they have never really had to act under pressure.
In the immortal words of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, "I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested. If I was, I would like to think I would pass"
The only thing I'd trust a SWAT officer to do is shoot an innocent. Military behavior is not appropriate in civilian situations, and the amount of people who've been killed by overly aggressive and trigger-happy cops is obscene. The training they receive only reinforces the shoot-first, "everyone's a threat" attitude that's all too common in law enforcement.