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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.
Shout-out to the Nashville officers - Jeffrey Mathes, Rex Engelbert, 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".
I see roughly three levels of response for professionals. You can fail to do your duty. You can do your duty. You can be heroic. I will admit that the lines are not always very clear.
It is easiest to recognize clearly heroic actions. The unarmed street vendor who rushed that Australian beach shooter. The civilian running into a burning house without protective gear to save another.
But there is no clear line separating heroism from doing one's duty. If you abandon your MG nest because the enemy is firing rifles towards your trench line, that might be seen as a dereliction of duty by most -- a soldier who curls up behind cover any time there is lead in the air is not very useful, after all. If you get hit, I would personally consider your duty to man your post discharged, and consider a decision to continue to fire (and likely learn how many more shots it will take to disable you really soon) as going beyond what can be expected. (If I would consider it as 'heroic' depends on the specifics, most warfare conduct being roughly zero sum.)
Of course, different cultures have different expectations there, and some did and do expect people to have a duty to engage in suicide missions.
And in the military, where most state-sponsored gun use tends to take place, a failure to do your duty is generally seen as worthy of criminal punishment. Historically, pretty harsh too, especially when your self-preservation instinct got a lot of the wrong people killed.
I will grant you that cops are not soldiers and we actually require them to have a vast skill set to employ outside of Rambo violence, and that even most militaries today are very reluctant to actually hang someone for cowardice even if they caused deaths on the wrong side (though I would imagine that Ukraine would be a lot more willing to do so than the US in GWB's oversea wars).
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Moral philosophy draws a distinction between ethical actions which are expected of you (i.e. which you will be condemned for failing to carry out), and supererogatory actions, which are "beyond the call of duty" (i.e. you will be praised for carrying them out, but no one will blame you if you don't do so). Obviously, which category a given action falls into varies from person to person, depending on their skills and responsibilities. If someone suffers from a medical emergency in front of me, obviously I should put a sweater under their head and try to keep them comfortable, but it's not really expected of me to do more than that. But if I was a doctor, rendering proper medical assistance to that person is my responsibility, and failing to do would be a serious derelection of duty.
Likewise, if you're just a private citizen, an ordinary civilian, no one expects you to intervene in the event that an active shooter scenario erupts in your vicinity. Elisjsha Dicken deserves praise, commendation, every honour that his government can bestow on a civilian: his courage in the face of extreme danger is awe-inspiring, breathtaking. But I don't think anyone would have held it against him had he failed to intervene and ran for cover: he did more than could reasonably be expected of him, because it wasn't his responsibility.
It is a cop's responsibility. While police officers who intervene in active shooter scenarios will receive praise, this is really just a courtesy masking the fact that, for a police officer, intervening in situations like this is not a supererogatory action: they will be condemned for failing to do so, and deservedly so. Being a hero is the job you signed up for. If you weren't willing to put yourself in harm's way to protect vulnerable people, what the hell did you become a cop for?
(The same argument applies, obviously, to the Secret Service agents who could be seen cowering behind Trump while he was being fired upon. "Interposing the principal between an active shooter and yourself" is pretty much the exact opposite of a bodyguard's job.)
Maybe criminal conviction would be too harsh a punishment, although maybe not: imagine some other hypothetical in which 21 children were killed as a result of an adult's derelection of duty (e.g. a schoolbus driver who literally fell asleep at the wheel and survived a crash while 21 of his passengers were killed) – I find it hard to imagine no criminal convictions would be sought in such an instance.
Either way, none of these men are fit to be police officers, and should be forced to resign.
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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.
No, it should never be a crime to fail to act. Otherwise would be literal slavery, simple as. Justify your knee-jerk vengeful reaction to dead children all you want. Yes conscription is wrong too.
I don't care how much training he had. Don't care that he was on premises. I could have training myself. I could have been passing by myself. Don't care who was signing his paychecks.
It should never be a crime to not act.
An air traffic controller who fails to stop two planes from colliding will merely have failed to act.
A teacher who keeps his mouth shut about the sexual abuse of a kid merely fails to act.
A doctor who does not render assistance merely fails to act.
A lifeguard who falls asleep and lets a kid drown merely fails to act.
A truck driver who fails to hit the brakes when someone is standing in front of him merely fails to act.
In Germany, we have a general duty to rescue. If on my way home, I see a car crashed into a tree, and decide that I will not miss the start of the Tatort for some stranger, I could go to prison for up to a year for that. I can report that I do not feel very enslaved by that rule.
should be fired and subject to penalties that were articulated and agreed to beforehand, not dragged to prison and killed if he resists being dragged to prison.
Etc.
Driving a truck is not inaction, come now. This isn't hard.
My brother let me stop you right there. German law is not the standard for morality. I could take rhetorical cheapshots and point to its history of laws. Or I could point to the heresy laws that are on its books now.
Okay, so. Where are the goalposts going now? May I suggest attacking my use of the word "slavery"?
Come on. Two (small!!1) World Wars, one reference-class-defining genocide and now we are the bad guys forever?! Most of us were not even born back then, and the ones who were had absolutely no idea what that guy and a handful of his followers were (allegedly!) doing, should we be really blaming a whole people for a few bad actors, etc.
(I jest. As a left-leaning German, I am perfectly fine with Germany firstly being known for being crazy genocidal for the next 10 billion years or so. I would slightly prefer for us to be known for having been crazy genocidal but become civilized (and strongly prefer for that distinction to continue to hold, naturally), but I will take what I can get.)
Nasty old § 166 (warning: Kraut WP), yes. Some 15 convictions a year, apparently. Should we get rid of it? Totally. Does it mean that German law, or the French/Continental tradition of law in general, is ipso facto not a standard for civilized people and not worth more moral regard than the mutilation rites of some cannibal tribe? I think not.
Physically speaking, it is. Well, not going up to speed. But if you let go of the gas once you see the kid, you should be in the clear. In your frame of reference, you are at rest, and the kid is recklessly approaching you at 100km/h. Not applying any force and having your truck follow Newton's first law of motion seems like a textbook example of inaction.
The thing is, society restricts the use of trucks. Once you have started up a truck, you are obliged to take further action to keep it from harming bystanders, a process known as driving. While driving, you can and will go to prison for mere omissions of action.
Likewise, there is a widespread understanding that ending up in charge of a baby (either through your or your partner giving birth to one and not giving it up for adoption or through adopting one) will force you to take some actions on pain of imprisonment. "Oh, I simply did not feed her, can't punish me for not doing something" will not convince anyone.
Or in countries which do have a draft (which includes god's own country, in theory), you can take a young man and make him perform all sorts of dangerous and morally questionable actions on pain of imprisonment. (I'm not personally a fan of that one, but it is widespread.)
Or consider the Kindergarden teacher who goes on record "yes, I saw Kevin play with a fork in the power socket, but to be honest he was the single most annoying kid in the class, so I merely watched and made sure that none of the other kids were touching him. Smelled terrible, though. Anyhow, good thing we don't punish omissions, right?"
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To steelman this position - there are certain situations (which bear a passing resemblance to this one) in which failing to act (and actively restraining others from doing so) could be the right decision. For example, in a situation where someone has rigged the school with lethal traps, not entering (and preventing parents from entering) would be the right decision, even if you can hear him actively executing the children within. Likewise, a situation where the shooter has hostages (and is being negotiated with) is a fairly well known one, and one where it would make sense to keep bystanders away even when it seems like the cops are doing nothing. Likewise, a situation where it is guaranteed lethal or nearly so to enter (I'm thinking the hallways flooded with a poison gas or similar) would also justify not acting. I'd also say that a situation that falls far outside normal training and expectations is one in which the cops should be given the benefit of the doubt on not acting (like, hypothetically, if sorcerers took children hostage, I don't expect police to throw their lives away against literal magic that they have no idea how to handle).
I think the problem here is that this situation doesn't come close to falling into those buckets - it's a situation we expect cops to handle routinely (aka, armed person attempting to threaten harm to innocents). And the solution of firing them and giving them a dishonourable discharge feels inadequate to the magnitude of the action. So in addition to feeling like they had a gross dereliction of duty, we also feel like they betrayed the societal covenant of "you are given the right to use violence, but in exchange you must protect us."
And more personally, I know that this would never be respected in any other situation; if I'm a nuclear plant engineer, and I decide to not check up on the error code that I'm seeing and the plant explodes causing a second Chernobyl, there is no chance in hell that I'm getting away with just a firing. If I also lock the error manual away and physically restrain my coworkers from checking on it, I'd be lucky to get away without treason charges, let alone life in prison/the death penalty.
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I have to admire the jump straight to reductio ad absurdum when I professed to believe in any kind of principle at all.
You all have been great sports, truly. I know I’m coming off as aggressive but I truly don’t know how to argue any other way. I love you all and I love this place!
Well yeah, it's a bad principle. Dereliction of duty should be punished.
“Slavery is okay if I really care about what should be done” is not an acceptable substitute for my principle.
The bar is finding where the actor in question agreed affirmatively to imprisonment if he fails to act to a certain standard. That will change my mind!
You throw around the word “duty,” so it shouldn’t be hard to find terms of the duty.
I think you're using the word "slavery" in a nonstandard way. The fact that someone will be punished for inaction doesn't imply that they are therefore owned by another individual.
I don't understand why you're demanding that an actor must affirmatively agree to do something in order to face punishment for failing to do so. This isn't how we treat crimes of commission ("well we found Bob standing over Carol's corpse holding a bloody knife – but he never explicitly agreed not to murder anyone, so legally our hands are tied"), so why should it be the case for crimes of omission? This sounds like some sovereign citizen nonsense: the laws of the country in which you reside apply to you, whether you approve of them or not.
If Alice knows that Bob is planning to kill Carol and does nothing to prevent it (say, reporting him to the police), that obviously implies that Carol's murder could have been prevented had Alice acted. The fact that she didn't personally stab Carol doesn't make her any less party to the crime. The fact that she never explicitly agreed to report any instances in which she had foreknowledge of a murder doesn't either.
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While I agree with you on most of your scenarios that there should be repercussions, there is a distinction between crime and legal repercussions (which could be civil lawsuits).
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There exists zero jurisdictions in which it is a crime to not be a police officer. Police officers are not drafted. Being forced to do your job, that you volunteered to do and get paid to do, isn't slavery.
Once you've signed up to do certain jobs, not doing those jobs should certainly be criminal. If you call 911 and the EMTs show up just to watch you die, I'd certainly be in favor of a legal regime that sees them charged with something.
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UCMJ Article 99: Misbehavior Before The Enemy
Is a thing.
Also
The 15-year-old German girl who knew the Uvalde shooter's plan and failed to alert the authorities was prosecuted for her inaction. She was found guilty of "failing to report planned crimes," she was issued a warning and required to undergo "educational measures".
That's a neat law but it's not a rebuttal. I'm not like some lawyers here to spin a mile-long yarn about how incredibly nuanced I find this whole situation. I now this is nails on a chalkboard to those who love hair-splitting and reading 300-page pdfs to point out a single contradiction, but my views on this are relatively simple and they don't rely on laws.
Clearly.
Your views seem to be ought rather than is, as clearly there are at least some situations where failure to act is a crime.
Your claim that this is literal slavery seems a bit thin on evidence.
The 'payment' received making this not slavery in this incident is the literal salary collected by the officer and the participation in online social media and instant messages with strangers by the German girl. Both had other options. Not being a cop, not talking to weirdos on the internet. Both of those come with potential obligations to act.
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The military has dereliction of duty - if you refuse to perform your duty or are willfully negligent, that's a UCMJ charge. I think you could apply a similar argument to police. This is not slavery or conscription. A soldier who voluntarily signs up for the military, knowing what it entails, can do a significant amount of harm by simply refusing to do their job in a critical moment. The time to make that call is before enlisting, not months or years later when lives are on the line. By commiting to performing an action and then intentionally failing to perform it in a way that cases harm, that creates liability, potentially criminal liability.
Another good example is fraud. If you pay someone $10k to fix your roof, and two weeks later they "refuse to act" and keep the money, that's a crime. This case is less black and white obviously, but police officers receive pay and benefits in excess of comparable jobs because of the potential danger. Police officers who defect on this social contract should be punished accordingly, whether that's administratively or through criminal charges in the most extreme cases.
You and Walruz make a good point.
I obviously don’t believe that if a man rips open another’s throat and puts his hands in his pockets to watch him bleed and insists that he’s being prosecuted for “doing nothing,” that he’s innocent, but the thing is he wouldn’t be prosecuted for the nothing, but the ripping.
So your position must be that police officers are conscripting themselves to battle whenever they agree to join the force. That’s a defendable position but it’s not one I think I agree with.
They’re being paid to respond first, but they don’t hold moral powers beyond civilians. They can only use force if it’s confirmed ex post that it was a valid arrest. They can only use deadly force in fear of grievous harm to them. These also hold for civilians (even if judges will be much harsher about valid arrests). The only difference is that they’re compensated and dedicated actors to these functions. But I don’t think that rises to a solemn covenant to do battle on pains of imprisonment.
I would change my mind if you could find some affirmative vow among the force agreeing to consequences if they fail to act in some situation. All I know of is an oath to the law.
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So... abolish "criminal neglect" as a concept?
Also does the combination of refusing to act, while also forcefully preventing others from acting not strike you as deeply perverted?
Central examples of criminal neglect usually refer to reckless driving or a doctor incompetently misdiagnosing a patient to catastrophic effect. Would you convict the doctor in the next room over who could have prevented it by eavesdropping and intervening?
What? I'm unfamiliar with the particulars of the Uvalde shooting response. Did he turn his gun on his colleagues and order them to stop? If he did something like that, shouldn't that have been more central to our discussion here, and not job expectations?
Central examples of criminal neglect are parents refusing to feed or otherwise take care of their children, or generally speaking - people refusing to take care of others who are under their custody. You could probably also find examples of neglecting the maintenance of buildings and machines being criminal.
Uh... then maybe lower the levels of confidence with which you are speaking?
It wasn't just him, the entire police force deployed to the location was forcefully preventing parents from entering the school to save their children. Some of the parents were armed, so they could have taken on the shooter.
Though I think one officer who wanted to enter was also prevented from doing so.
As a reminder, here's the comment I responded to originally. It in turn is responding to "Is the binary really criminal or national hero?" and "But convicting them of a crime seems too far."
I don't think it's terribly productive to add to the tragedy of a passed child by dragging the parents into prison, no. They've been punished enough. There's one example that comes to mind where the parents declined medical interventions for their sick child, who died. The state decided that children are actually the state's, and not the parents', and the state disagreed with that child-rearing decision, so off to prison. Yes I disagree with that. Yes I disagree with "turn this wrench or you come with us downtown."
Child handcuffed to her bed and starving to death? Sure send the boys in to liberate her. Is handcuffing inaction?
It's not like I'm opposed to other solutions or repercussions. I just think bringing the physical force of the law to bear on those who decline to do things is obviously wrong.
Did the parents have legal access to the property? If they did, did the police batter the parents to keep them out? If they did, were battery charges brought against any police? If there were, I don't think my statements about inaction would apply. Do you agree?
It's not much of a tragedy if they do it knowingly, and it's productive to deter other parents from acting the same way.
How about a child that's simply too young to leave on their own? Or even one that leaves, but just ends up being more abused by people they encounter on the streets?
And I'm saying you're obviously wrong. There are cases were people are obligated to act, under penalty of law, that's a good thing, and this case should obviously be included.
The access not being legal just confirms my point that the state was preventing parents from entering. In itself that's not wrong, but in doing so, the state assumes responsibility for what happened in the area they restricted. This is exactly what creates the obligation for the police to act against the shooter.
Yes, they were tackled, handcuffed, and pepper-sprayed.
I'm not sure, but I don't think so. Why would they? The police are generally allowed to batter uncooperative people in order to detain them.
I don't. I think you these questions are completely irrelevant to what you said about inaction.
Your comment was so extreme that whatever you responded to doesn't really matter. Again, you said: "It should never be a crime to not act", twice.
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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."
To be a devil's advocate (I don't morally agree with Gonzales' acquittal), we have the draft because it matters quite a lot to the continued existence of our country. Some kids dying in mass shootings is tragic, but rare, even when compared to other gun deaths, and it's not a threat to the nation as a whole. An invasion from a foreign power has much more serious consequences.
Now I'm just saying that's the platonic ideal of the draft. Whether in practice the military actually wages wars that are necessary for the survival of the US, that's an entirely different matter.
Of course, in fairness it must be said that we do not in practice have a draft either. Theoretically we do, but the last time soldiers were drafted was what, Vietnam? Long enough that many men in the US today will never have been at risk of conscription, even if they did have to register with the selective service.
Eh, there’s certainly a case that many of the soldiers in the GWOT did not want to join even if there wasn’t a formal draft.
I'm not sure what you mean, but on the face of it I'm extremely skeptical that we should care. If they were not forced, then they are responsible for their decision to join even if they later came to regret it. But perhaps there is some context here I'm missing.
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The only war that was existential for the US that I can think of is the Civil War.
The revolutionary war, a good chunk of the Indian wars, and the pacific theater of WWII surely qualify.
I am not an expert, but I am dubious. I mean, it certainly was existential for the US territory of Hawaii, but losing control of Hawaii (or even Alaska) would not have placed the US in an existential crisis. Did imperial Japan really have the manpower to take even California, never mind fight their way towards the East Coast at the end of a very precarious logistics trail?
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The war of 1812 felt existential at the time (once it became clear to the Americans that the British would actually fight back - something Madison had assumed they wouldn't), even if modern historians with access to British archives think it wasn't.
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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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