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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19967 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 don't think it is reasonable to expect cops to put their lives on the line in a society that affords them no additional respect. As the saying goes, "you get what you pay for", and I mean "pay" holistically in cash but also in social status and respect. The left wants cops to be culturally conversant therapist mental health experts fluent in six languages, the right wants them to be warriors ready to give up their lives in an instant, but most cops are just people that wanted a job. We could hypothetically get warrior poet therapists willing to lay down their lives at the drop of a hat but we would have to pay them exorbitantly and afford them enormous social status in order to attract the rare person able to fulfill those qualifications.

I think of some of this stuff like an RTS game or something where a society can choose how to allocate its units. And as a society we definitely aren't allocating (through incentives) the kind of hyper-competent people necessary to fulfill the left and the right's fantasies of cops to actual police work. So as I said, you get what you pay for. So yea, this cop is shitty, but I don't blame him, that's just the caliber of person we are choosing to allocate to policing.

Cops in most places (almost certainly including Uvalde) get shitloads of "additional respect". Uvalde ain't Minneapolis or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle.

It may be afforded some additional respect at a low level, but it isn't really afforded prestige, maybe that's a better word for what I'm driving at. If you came from a wealthy, elite family and attended Phillips Exeter or something, would "cop" be considered a valid and respectable career path your family would be proud of? Not really. Tech, finance, doctor, lawyer, academia, those would be considered prestige jobs that would be acceptable for a son of the elite. So while police officers get some ground-level respect at the local diner, it's not really a high prestige. Nobody with a son at an elite private school is saying "I hope he grows up to become a police officer!" And basically the same goes for the military, of course it wasn't always this way but it is now.

Upper class cops are FBI agents.

It honestly depends. You are talking about rank and file. But most elites wouldn’t be embraced about having a military son who is an officer that goes up the ranks (eg colonel is still very prestigious). But a sergeant? That’s low class.

Most would probably see a local cop as kind of low status. But an FBI agent that moves up the ranks? That’s prestigious.

Aside from the fact that ‘military officer’ is perhaps the single most acceptable career for elite young men, most people are not and never will be elites. Cops get some additional respect, and that’s all they need.

Military can still be high status but it’s far more narrow today. In WW1 from what I’ve read the British elite took a lot of military deaths. If you go into Special Ops - Seal Teams/Delta it has a lot of respect. Lesser Green Beret. Some of this is fitness bro respect. I guess this is dated now but the Pritzkers and the governors brother is a colonel (also a tranny now). It’s more narrow now but there are some paths with military prestige.

If you're a cop, you can beat up people in tech, doctors, lawyers, academia, judges, and well, pretty much anyone else with impunity. Maybe not politicians. You may not have the prestige of a top doctor, but you have deference from the legal system and respect from the community. This is certainly more than enough to support being required to actually do your job when it involves the sort of things that would actually justify that respect.

What? From article

“Raffaele says he was struck when he came upon officers wrestling with a man wielding a pipe.“

So you can hit a judge if you’re a policeman if the said judge jumps into a fight when a dude is beating you with a pipe. But to be clear you can’t as a policeman just pick a judge and beat the shit out him.

Speaking as a German, I have a relative who became a cop and I am totally fine with that. It is an important job and we need qualified and well-adjusted people for it. I would be much more reluctant to admit to admit having a relative working in marketing or yellow press journalism, actually. (Of course, Germany might have a different police culture than the US. While I did have unfortunate interactions with police, on the whole my experience is that they are generally friendly and competent.)

American cops are also generally friendly and competent. They’re rarely particularly bright or outside the box thinkers, but the cops killing people makes headlines because it’s so rare(and most of those killings are justifiable and well within the range of normal police behavior in Western Europe). Our police are genuinely less likely to randomly beat the shit out of people than euro cops, though.

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