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Ex-Uvalde Officer Found Not Guilty of Endangering Children in Mass Shooting (NYT link, worked for me without an account)
My immediate thought, having read about prosecutions of police officers before, was that they found the special prosecutor version of Ralph Wiggums to ensure an acquittal. However, Bill Turner appears to have been the elected DA for Brazos County from 1983-2013, so it's hard to say. Many elected DAs have little trial experience and can be ineffective compared to a regular assistant DA who grinds 4-10+ trials per year, but maybe he's been getting some trial experience since 2013.
It's an interesting disparity that many people have commented on before: officers receive all kinds of "training and experience" (as they will brag about ad nauseum when testifying or in a pre-trial interview), but when it really counts and they fail to make effective use of that training and experience, it won't be held against them. They will instead be given infinite benefit of the doubt, as can be seen when officers are sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 lawsuits (heavily slanted law review article, but it correctly describes the reality of trying to sue for excessive force violations).
It takes a few minutes, but it's not hard to find examples of people with no training or experience engaging a mass shooter. Or officers who did so when they were off-duty: example 1, example 2.[1]
It seems to be one more piece of the overall modern American problem of failing to hold people accountable for high-profile failures because they had the correct credentials and merit badges. It's the brain on bureaucracy that 100ProofTollBooth notes below. "So-and-so had the correct credentials and followed the correct procedures, therefore no one is to blame for this terrible outcome." And then they might not even be held accountable when they don't follow those procedures, like here.
If
the rule you followedall the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?[1]Incidentally, this one is a fine example of wikipedia's slant on defensive use of arms. If you track down the shooter's post-arrest interview, he says he dropped his gun because he saw armed people approaching him, but wiki presents some witness statements to try to make it sound like he dropped his guns and the guys approaching with guns played no role in stopping the shooting.
I see what you did there, friendo.
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Shout-out to the Nashville officers- Sergeant Jeffrey Mathes, Officer Rex Engelbert, and Detectives Michael Collazo, Ryan Cagle, and Zachary Plese - who were true heroes. They went in without hesitation, clearly ready to stop the shooter or die trying, and they earned the Medal of Valor for it. The body-cam footage is amazing. The way Mathes enters is exactly the kind of bravery all men should aspire to. But that's kind of the thing, isn't it? Is the binary really criminal or national hero?
That doesn't seem quite right to me. When someone is given the chance to be a hero and doesn't take it, they should feel deep shame. If it's part of their job, they should be removed from positions that expose them to situations requiring valor, or they should lose their job altogether. But convicting them of a crime seems too far. With this though, if being a hero is not the expectation you are not treated as a hero for just having the job. I have similar feelings about "public-servants".
No, this guy was a police officer. If he didn't want to risk his life in that situation he shouldn't have become a cop- there's tons of other careers available. Notably, they don't involve carrying guns.
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At the same time, we have a draft. It's not foreign to our country to have a concept of, "We will force you, at the penalty of a worse fate, to do something dangerous and heroic for the benefit of society."
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The missing middle option is "don't become a police officer." For the civilian in the Greenwood Park mall shooting I linked to, I would totally understand him having feelings of shame had he been carrying and chosen to retreat instead (not saying that action would be shameful, but that I would understand the feelings). But retreating wouldn't be criminal.
For someone who has signed up for a job where they get treated as a hero for just having the job (plus an incredibly cushy pension in many states), then perhaps it really is binary: engage in the risks that you have been trained for and paid for (both financially and with social status), or risk the criminal prosecution.
Elisjsha Dicken, the 22-year-old civilian at the Greenwood Park mall shooting, struck the shooter with 8 of 10 shots at 40 yards with a Glock 19 while underfire.
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I'd be more afraid of being demoralized - and less dramatically, constantly annoyed and frustrated - than killed and maimed, as a cop. The engagement with parts of the public most of us can just walk away from. I'd be eager to take a desk job as soon as possible, actually.
From watching way too many body cam videos, my biggest fear that would keep me being a cop is having to deal with nasty smelly hobos and druggies and their bodily fluids.
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But is that what happened in Uvalde?
The excuse for ignoring all that was that the cops supposedly thought the shooter was barricaded in there alone, not with children, hence they were in no rush to assault the shooter and were free to assault the kids' parents instead.
Interesting.
According to this timeline of events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timeline_of_events
They originally thought this and began the barricaded shooter playbook. But then they were informed there were kids inside and failed to process the update and switch tactics.
Replying to myself, having read the timeline, can we all just recognize that the off-duty Border Patrol agent came on scene, saw how retarded the Uvalde police were, ignored their command structure, asked a school administrator for the master key, opened the door, and then organized a breach party in like 5 minutes? Bro got shit done.
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One of the unspoken assumptions about our legal system is that it isn’t illegal to be bad at your job. The defense made a decent argument that the officers initially thought that the suspect went into the school to flee from the cops. This was a bad assumption with massive downside risk in the event they were wrong (which they were), but it was still explainable as a good faith mistake.
He wasn't 'bad at his job' he didn't do it in the first place. We punish people for criminal negligence all the time.
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Actually, it can be illegal. A doctor whose defense is "Yes, so I confused milligrams and micrograms and so injected the patient with 500x the maximum dose, silly me" will end up in jail. So will a civil engineer who miscalculated a bridge because he assumed that a bus would weigh no more than 50kg.
Nor is this limited to academic professions. A truck driver going 80km/h in a 30km/h zone and running over a kid will go to jail. So will a lifeguard at a swimming pool who falls asleep on the job and lets someone drown. (I will grant that both of these examples are of criminal negligence or recklessness.)
My gut feeling is that if 30% of your profession would have made the same mistake (e.g. not tested for a rare disease, not spotted a badly visible tumor in an MRI image, failed to take a life-saving shot or missed that shot), we can not really send you to prison for being subpar and unlucky (unless you were doing something illegal at the time, like going above the speed limit).
OTOH, if 99% of your profession would have made your mistake with a lower frequency than you would, then it is less of a "you got unlucky to get into that situation" or "you got unlucky and made a mistake that anyone might have made with a small probability" and more of a "the victim got unlucky by having someone so incompetent as a professional", and I generally have no problem with punishing people for that. (This is assuming that 1% of the professionals in most professions have a grossly inadequate skill level, which in my experience is a conservative estimate.)
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I mean, of course they wouldn't be held accountable- for the credentials exist solely to front-load accountability (and act as a form of corporate welfare for the class of people who work for the organizations that bestow them). So...
...sure, maybe doing that is destructive, but it justified the education-managerial complex for a while and that's what actually matters.
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If they followed the correct procedures, they should be held blameless. Although that should often mean the people who created the procedures should be blamed. (And if the situation could not reasonably be anticipated by even the people who created the procedures, nobody should be blamed, though the procedures should still be fixed.)
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When something bad happens, it allows the organization responsible to say, "well, we have a training program in place, so we did our due diligence and are not responsible." See also diversity and sexual harassment training sessions. At worst the organizational fix is to just hire a new set of training consultants to revise the training program.
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