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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Ex-Uvalde Officer Found Not Guilty of Endangering Children in Mass Shooting (NYT link, worked for me without an account)

Adrian Gonzales, the first officer to arrive at the school, was facing 29 counts of abandoning or endangering children, 19 for the dead and 10 more for survivors, after seven hours of deliberations Wednesday.

During the three-week trial, prosecutors argued that Mr. Gonzales, 52, failed to stop the gunman despite a witness alerting him to his whereabouts moments before the assailant stormed two connected classrooms.

Defense lawyers persuaded the jury that Mr. Gonzales had done the best he could with the information he had and that at least three other officers had arrived seconds later and also failed to stop the gunman. They also presented evidence that Mr. Gonzales had rushed into the building minutes after arriving, but retreated with the other officers after shooting began.

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 followed all 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 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.

You seem very certain of yourself and like you have experience so I'd like to ask you, what were the police supposed to do when the door was locked and the suspect was firing through it whenever he heard them messing with it?

There are close quarters combat protocols for how to go through a doorway as team. That's dangerous but with training you can minimize the danger. But what's the protocol for trying to open a door when bullets are coming through it? Are the men, unable to live with themselves if they don't act, supposed to line up by the door and take bullets until the shooter runs out of bullets, or someone manages to break it open?

AFAICT, the reason they were able to breach it is because a Border Patrol agent came on scene and was just a lot more effective at finding the master key and opening the door. Maybe he was much smarter and more competent and took his oath more seriously, but he also could have had the benefit of coming in very late with a fresh perspective and no chain of command diffusing his own sense of responsibility.

In the meantime the police were looking for keys and stealthily trying them out and none worked. It seems they got confused about locating keys and keeping track of which they tried. Everyone thought someone else was apparently on it.

This strikes me as systemic idiocy that comes up in crises, not individual cowardice. But I say this as an armchair QB.

The standard protocol would be to destroy the door.

Honest question: how? Doesn't using, say, a shotgun on the lock risk collateral damage? Doesn't trying to use a contact tool mean whoever volunteers for that is going to get shot at?

As I understand it, if you find a need to breech a locked door in a rough and messy sort of way, you're going to use a shotgun, fired extremely close up, but also at a downward angle so as to not hit any potential friendlies.

whoever volunteers for that is going to get shot at

Well, yes. That's what they're getting paid for. Slot in the level 4 plates and get to it.

the harder and more massive a projectile is, the worse the risk of collateral damage. Hard projectiles retain more energy from a penetration or deflection, larger projectiles have more energy.

Shotguns fire shot, ie lots of small, soft projectiles. These have low individual energy and are bad at retaining the energy they do have through an impact. Dedicated breaching rounds generally use something like compressed lead dust to greatly minimize the chance of a ricochet, but even with buckshot the danger is much, much lower than that presented by an active shooter.

The short version is that any reasonable risk assessment would have held that breaching the door was a good idea, even if they didn't have dedicated breaching rounds on-hand.

It's... a little more morbid than that.

At 12:21 p.m., 48 minutes after the subject entered the school, the subject fired four additional shots inside classrooms 111/112. Officers moved forward into formation outside the classroom doors but did not make entry. Instead, presuming the classroom doors were locked, the officers tested a set of keys on the door of a janitor’s closet next to room 112. When the keys did not work, the responders began searching for additional keys and breaching tools. UCISD PD Chief Arredondo continued to attempt to communicate with the subject, while UPD Acting Chief Pargas continued to provide no direction, command, or control to personnel. After another 15 minutes, officers found a second set of keys and used them to successfully open the janitor’s closet. With working keys in hand, the officers then waited to determine whether a sniper and a drone could obtain sight of and eliminate the subject through the window. Those efforts were unsuccessful. At 12:48 p.m., 27 minutes after hearing multiple gunshots inside classrooms 111 and 112, and 75 minutes after first responders first entered Robb Elementary, officers opened the door to room 111. A team composed of BORTAC members, a member of the U.S. Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit (BORSTAR), and deputies from two local sheriffs’ offices entered the rooms, and officers killed the subject when he emerged shooting from a closet. The subject was killed at approximately 12:50 p.m., 77 minutes after the first officers entered the school and after 45 rounds were fired by the shooter in the presence of officers.

With master keys in hand and confirmed to work, the BORTAC commander paused on the room entry so that a sniper and drone could attempt to get a visual on the classroom. If successful, the sniper could have mitigated a great deal of risk posed by a gun battle inside the classroom. The sniper or drone could have provided valuable intelligence on the layout of the room, location of victims, and the shooter that would create a great tactical advantage for the entry team. However, assessing these options added 10 minutes to the overall response time.

And separately:

“Though the entry team puts the key in the door, turns the key, and opens it, pulling the door toward them, the CIR Team concludes that the door is likely already unlocked, as the shooter gained entry through the door and it is unlikely that he locked it thereafter”

There's a variety of failures, here, and it's very much a 'porque no los dos' situation. But the other side's more overt:

In some instances, outside the school and near the funeral home across the street, officers also used force to keep concerned parents from approaching the school or funeral home, where some of the evacuated students had been taken. One mother was handcuffed by the U.S. Marshals, who accused her of being uncooperative regarding where to park her car and remaining outside the law enforcementperimeter. As soon as she was released from the handcuffs, she ran and got her two children out of the school and to safety. She indicated that law enforcement “was more aggressive with keeping us parents out than going in to get the shooter.” In another instance, one family member who was very upset on the scene, trying to get information on the whereabouts of their child, was thrown to the ground by law enforcement and threatened with a Taser when they tried to go to their child.

Ah, but those were just the untrained, and as laudable as their bravery or desperation might have been, they could have been killed or caused further harm. Surely the officers in command didn't stop other poli--

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steven McCraw said that [Officer] Ruiz tried to save his wife, but was barred from doing so. State Rep. Joe Moody said despite what surfaced in the video, he confirmed that Ruiz had tried to engage the shooter but was disarmed.

The flip side to heroic responsibility is that once you start prevent other people from being heroes, you've picked up a lot of responsibility.

Yikes. The cringe, it's too much.

The flip side to heroic responsibility is that once you start prevent other people from being heroes, you've picked up a lot of responsibility.

Especially when an armed pack of parents would almost certainly have been much more effective than the police.

EDIT: Thinking about how much better a job motivated and armed parents would have done, I wonder if trying to train Uvalde police mopes made them more incapable of acting, not less. You have to follow the procedures! You have to listen to the chain of command! Everyone struggle to remember what you were taught. With adrenaline! If a kid dies when you did the wrong thing, it'll be your fault! Wait is this a barricaded shooter situation or a hostage situation or something else? Where are the tools? The protocols man, the protocols!

Whereas parents would just be like, do some of us have guns? Good, let's go.

Absent being inside the officers heads instead of what written down, I’m going to assume the officers froze or at best had decision paralysis. If we have an alternate mirror universe where the door was fully unlocked and open, we can then contrast and compare, but froze is froze, and others (that Nashville school shooting showed that) didn’t freeze assuming essentially the same training.

I remember saying to a friend that those cops were lucky to live in pretty much the only type of society in the long history of humanity that would permit them to live after a failure of this magnitude. In any other, either they would have been executed, or the social shame would have been so great they would have killed themself. But more to the point, they likely would not have abandoned their duty so flagrantly in the first place.

Good post. Reminds me of this comment from @KulakRevolt:

After the battle of Cannae the roman citizenry hounded and tormented the survivors who ran. Their families were hounded, they were reduced to penury and begging in the streets as citizenry who recognized them spat on them and their children.

Finally when Rome took the fight to Carthage, these men begged, pleaded, that they be permitted the honor of a suicide mission, some inevitably fatal horror that might certainly kill them but restore the honor of their families that their surviving children not starve. The roman senate, in a moment of uncharacteristic mercy, permitted them to die so.

These officers should be begging that they be permitted to join some press-ganged penal battalion in Ukraine. That they might atone for their cowardice by having their half burnt ashes scattered in the wind of Russian artillery.

Your periodic reminder that KulakRevolt is a fabulist who outright makes shit up, especially about the ancient Greeks and Romans. He is not a historian or a classicist. He embellishes history to make the ancients sound bloodthirsty and psychotic, just as he does for the Founding Fathers.

The "Ghosts of Cannae" were not "hounded in the streets, spat upon, and families reduced to penury." They were banished to Sicily. Later, they were recruited by Scipio Africanus and allowed to serve again, on the front lines in Spain and Africa, but they did not "beg for a suicide mission" and the Senate did not vote on whether to allow them to serve.

Kulak's versions of history have about the same degree of verisimilitude as a Disney cartoon.

I disagree only in that I think rights do not come with responsibilities (and saying they do is a common way of vitiating rights, "You have the right to do X, you have the responsibility to only do X the way we say"), but privileges do -- and what the police have as a result of being police is the latter.

You want be a cop, you can't use "the criminals might shoot me" as a reason not to do your job in any given instance. You signed up for that.

I keep wanting to compare this to the recent ICE shooting, loathe as I am to discuss that more here. In that case "the officer should not have put himself in potential danger (standing in front of the car) so that lethal force wouldn't have been necessary" seems a common talking point (and I'm not interested in debating the specific facts of the case further). In the Uvalde case there seems to be plenty of ire that the officers did not place themselves in such danger regardless of the risk to the suspect, especially since it sounds like they were informed of a barricaded shooter, not a spree shooting.

Both sets of logic make sense to me in isolation, but I have trouble fully squaring them. "It's good that the Uvalde cops say around: if they had charged in someone (the shooter) might have gotten hurt" is plausibly true, but laughable. It somewhat works if you assume Good wasn't intent on ramming lots of pedestrians, but that isn't always true: there was a deliberate truck attack in New Orleans last year, for example. That driver didn't have priors, and we'd plausibly be having a similar discussion if officers had blocked the car and ended up shooting the driver there, 14 lives would have conceivably been saved.

Obviously the details are quite different, but I have trouble imagining generic bright lines that don't lean heavily on verboten characteristics: "of course the white woman wasn't trying to be a spree killer."

Why can't we lean on verboten characteristics? No middle aged white woman has ever killed a cop*, very few middle aged white women are good at driving SUVs in tight quarters and really know where their wheels are pointing at any given time.

*In the line of duty, some have killed boyfriends who happened to be cops

Name: Lynda Cheryle Lyon Block

Age at Crime: 45

Race: White

Incident Date: October 4, 1993

Victim: Sergeant Roger Lamar Motley, Jr. (Opelika Police Department)

Name: Cheryl Dawn Kidd

Age at Crime: 57

Race: White

Incident Date: April 22, 2011

Victim: Officer Chris Kilcullen (Eugene Police Department)

Name: Martha Donald

Age at Crime: 60

Incident Date: August 1, 2002

Victim: Officer Melissa Schmidt (Minneapolis Police Department)

There are a number of negligent homicides as well drunk / drugged driving, etc.

Obviously the details are quite different,

Yes they are!

but I have trouble imagining generic bright lines that don't lean heavily on verboten characteristics: "of course the white woman wasn't trying to be a spree killer."

The best place to stop her if she was a spree killer would not have been to stand in front of her vehicle. Ross did only fire after she had hit him (slightly, because she was not aiming her car for him). If she had aimed for him, he would have been under her SUV before he had fired her first shot.

A person sitting in a car, even a bloody SUV, is not a similar level of danger as a armed suspect entering a school. You do not need to rely on protected characteristics to tell the difference. Some suspects are an imminent danger to the public and it is reasonable to require cops to risk their lives to stop them if it decreases the expected value of innocents dying. Some are not.

If Goods had already injured someone with a gunshot, then entered and locked a classroom, and shots had then be heard from the classroom, I certainly would have wanted Ross to breach that classroom and shoot her if she threatens him, not assume that as a liberal middle-class middle-age woman, she was likely only firing blanks from a prop gun and not trying to hurt anyone.

I suppose my interest here is that the two are at opposite ends of the "justified use of lethal force" scale: there is probably broad, but not universal agreement that the Good case is at least a regrettable case ("justified" is almost certainly more split), and that the Uvalde case is almost unconscionable in its lack of use of force (although this jury declined to convict in this specific case).

I was hoping to use this to better pin down clear boundaries for the acceptable range of force, but I don't see clear choices there still.

Great post! I agree completely.

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.

Phenomenal take. I've never thought about police in this context of bravery/honor but I really like it.

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