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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 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.
My former boss was a part-time police officer for the town where he lived.
The amount of stuff people would do for him completely out of the blue when he had to drive the police cruiser was surprising. We're talking 'people paying for his meal in the drive through' level of surprising.
Nevermind the attention from women he'd get when out in uniform.
I've seen a little how the sausage is made, so to speak, so I'm not going to pretend that law enforcement has an easy job, but to say that society affords them no additional respect doesn't line up much with my experience.
Gotta double-check on that one. Their Hinge profiles are full of ACAB and I personally heard some woman I know talking about finding out her date was a cop and getting the ick.
It's about hit rate, not miss rate. If 90% of women are ACABers and 2.42% are badge bunnies, then their dating pool has
tenfive women per man (better than college, which is around 1.5). As long as the selection effects aren't too severe (and the numbers are anywhere close to my wild-ass guess), that sounds pretty good.See also serial killers. They are unattractive to the vast majority of women, but still massively outnumbered by female fans.
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