The accounts of law enforcement’s actions during one of the worst school shootings in history are among a trove of recorded investigative interviews and body camera footage obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE. Together, the hundreds of hours of audio and video offer a startling finding: The children in Uvalde were prepared, dutifully following what they had learned during active shooter drills, even as their friends and teachers were bleeding to death. Many of the officers, who had trained at least once during their careers for such a situation, were not.
Other missteps have not been as widely scrutinized. In Las Vegas in 2017, two officers stayed on the hotel floor below a shooter instead of rushing upstairs to confront him as he spewed bullets into a crowd of concertgoers. The next year in Thousand Oaks, California, officers attempted to confront a shooter within minutes of arriving at the scene. Some retreated after he shot at them. Police did not reenter to engage the shooter again for more than 40 minutes, even as victims remained inside.
Active shooter training, which emphasizes rushing into danger flatly contradicts all the other training and police culture that emphasize officer safety.
The Supreme Court has constantly ruled that police have no duty to protect life, enforce court orders, or uphold the law. In one of these cases, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, during oral arguments, Justice Ginsburg wondered aloud “what are police for”.
The police are guardians of property of the wealthy: slave catchers, night watchmen, and bodyguards who’ve been socialized so that the powerful can share the cost with the very people being regulated. Fuck the police.
Conservative viewpoint: Killing someone who is threatening your property is fine. Damaging property because someone got killed is not okay.
Police exist to protect the bourgeois from the proletariat.
That’s it.
If you own land, or own a business, you contribute a far larger tax dollar than some petty wage slave that rents. Why, such a degenerate individual clearly must exist for the sole use of the state.
Uvalde county overwhelmingly re-elected the same sheriffs and politicians who did nothing while the kids died. They also voted Abbott. Any last shred of sympathy I had for that community evaporated after that. Why should I care about their kids and safety if they clearly don’t.
Why should I care about their kids and safety if they clearly don’t.
You’re kinda answering your own question.
It wasn’t ‘overwhelming’ if you look at the Commissioner elections. There was definitely a large proportion of the Ulvade population who did want change.
Every time I read something about this I regret it. I feel my stomach turn.
I work in education so this obviously hits close to home. However the video from inside the school with “the sounds of children’s screaming has been removed” at the beginning is still one of the most haunting lines. It truly makes me angry. That these fat fucking bastards sat out there. That they did nothing for an hour plus. That they could clearly hear children screaming if the camera can pick it up. The audacity of them to lie and say “the kids were so quiet we didn’t know they were in there.” When the video they released says otherwise.
What made it worse was the 911 call of the little girl in the classroom. She tells the dispatcher that there’s lots of injured kids. How she’s hiding by covering herself in the blood of other children to try and “appear” dead. You can hear the little girl telling classmates to stay quiet and telling them the police are there, but we know they don’t do shit.
This wasn’t a failure. A failure is something we could fix. All 116 officers need to be charged and held responsible. Parents of the dead and injured should be allowed to vote on what they think is fair punishment for all 116. This shouldn’t have happened, it shouldn’t have lasted as long as it did, and these lazy, pathetic excuses for humans that stood around and did nothing should be punished.
My only wish is that they would release the video with no editing. The people need to hear it. They didn’t do shit after Sandy Hook because they didn’t release the crime scene photos for fear it was too obscene. Clearly the American voting public wants dead kids, so they should be made to hear them and see them. Their inaction on gun policy lead to these actions in classrooms.
Oh, they knew what to do. They just decided it wasn’t worth the risk to their lives to save some kids.
I’d almost like to hear what an officer from another department thinks about these guys. Because you know that the next group to stand outside and wet themselves is going to get overrun by concerned parents. Or someone will distract them while parents go inside.