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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.
The job of a police officer is not to protect people. Their job is to enforce the laws of their jurisdiction. It's the ugly truth.
Plenty of good police officers have the instinct and desire to protect others, like the Nashville officers. But it is not in fact their job, and they have repeatedly been found not guilty for failing to protect people. This is not the first time a police officer or police department has been sued for not protecting someone. Even under the most unsympathetic circumstances for the officers they get found not guilty.
This should be an ugly reminder for people. Self defense is a personal right, but the government will not help you secure that right. They won't even help children who are incapable of responsible self defense secure that right.
I wonder how gun control advocates have responded to the fact that police have no obligation to protect anyone, if they have even addressed that at all. It's already bad enough that in the best case scenario, the police are only minutes away when seconds matter. But the fact that police can and have done nothing at all? I would be interested in seeing their counterargument for why people shouldn't arm themselves and have the ability to be their own first responder.
Mostly they ignore it. Warren v. DC comes up all the time in online Second Amendment discussions, but since the anti-gunners and the mainstream media are on the same side, they don't have to address it in public.
I imagine it's not a conversation they enjoy, since inevitably it would force them to address the fact that unless we increase the amount of cops by orders of magnitude, they simply cannot be there to protect people in many or most cases. Not that their policy choice cannot be defended despite this, after all the optimal number of children drowning in pools is not zero. But the gun control side puts a lot of effort in thinking around this, as it feels wrong in a primal way, especially for men (and blue tribe men are still men, they do feel the macho impulse to be providers and protectors), that they are not trusted with the tools to defend their family or themselves and need to rely on people who are not likely to be present when it counts. It's not great to have to go and acknowledge "Yeah, some people are going to die helpless without means to defend themselves, but such is the price of safety", the same way the opposite side doesn't enjoy acknowledging that "some people are going to get shot with guns being legal but such is the price of freedom and self-reliance".
We've already had cases where police were present and watching things unfold and did not intervene until the civilian in question had subdued the attacker.
So even if you increase the number of law enforcement in the field to a stratospheric number, that still doesn't mean they have to do jack all.
It was New York City, that guy should count himself lucky they didn't arrest him after all was said and done.
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