JTarrou
2d ago
Been a minute since I looked at the floor schematics, but I'm pretty sure the room had multiple doors. Get teams with a shield up front and a ram, charge, breaching shotgun or Halligan on each entrance and go to work. If one team is pushed back by fire, the others can work on the other doors. Yes, some guys are probably gonna catch rounds, but with body armor and a shield, plus the perp is shooting through walls and metal doors, risk of death minimal.
I also want to say there were ground level windows in the room, which could have been covered by teams outside the building. As a tactical problem, this one was pretty fucking easy.
Keys. The fuck outta here.
JTarrou
4d ago
I believe rights come with responsibilities. If cops are going to get the benefit of the doubt in use of force because it's their job (as I believe they should to some degree), then they owe a moral debt to those they defend. Laws are thin and high, but I honestly don't know how this guy lives with himself. I'd have slapped that police chief in his bitch face and gone through the door, because I don't want to spend every night for the rest of my life wishing I had. Dying is easy compared to that. A reprimand is nothing.
The law cannot solve every problem. We have to enforce the norms we want to see. My words mean nothing in society, and relatively little in the more rarified air of professional violence. But I've seen my days. I've made those calls, and there's 0-5s no doubt alive today who can tell you exactly how well their orders worked when they ran counter to the mores and interests of my team.
Every man on his worst day should be judged by his peers. For those cops, I am their peer. If there be any honor in violence, surely it is from the defense of the weak. Sixty armed men listening to children die? Utterly contemptible. Every single one should do the honorable thing, it should never have come to a court case. They should lacquer their badges into the floor under the urinals of the school. Their children should take their mother's surname. Their parents should cut them out of every family photo.
In the hierarchy of violence known colloquially as "honor", these men are the lowest of the low. Cowards who shirked their duty when it mattered most. I'd rather have a hitman for the cartels at my dinner table than one of the Uvalde cops. All who train for that terrible day that probably won't come gaze in horror, pity and contempt at those whose day came and who failed the moment. Complete moral collapse. Dishonor.
Today, we do not hold our men of violence to such standards. Which is why we are policed by dishonorable cowards.
JTarrou
5d ago
It may not matter legally, in court, but it absolutely matters to society at large. Any criminal justice system will be ragged around the edges, all states are organized violence. It matters what group the mistakes and violations run against in general.
If the cops unjustifiably kill someone with forty felonies, run the legal process, but don't ask me to give a fuck. Society is better off no matter how cruel or unjustified the actual police behavior is. That has to be balanced against the costs imposed by the dead criminal.
If the cops unjustifiably kill some random law-abiding productive citizen with a family and community, that's much worse. It not only means that the police are poorly trained, but that they are being aimed at a part of society they shouldn't be. Mistakes will happen, but it isn't difficult to make the judgement between these sorts of cases.
Of course, in the media we are constantly told that the second scenario is happening, which on inspection turns out to be the first.
Except for the violence, peaceful.
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