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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. ยง 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 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.
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
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Yes they are!
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.
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