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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.
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.
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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