The Uvalde Shooting and responses to it
 

The classrooms the Uvalde shooter barricaded himself in may not have been locked, but even if they were, police had a tool that would have opened them: report

"Uvalde has hired a private law firm in an effort to suppress body camera footage and other records surrounding the mass shooting, Motherboard reported last week. In a letter, the city’s private lawyer argued it should be exempted from releasing records in part because they include “highly embarrassing information” and may cause “emotional/mental distress.”"

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7z...shooter-report

It's become obvious that the reason why the Uvalde police failed so miserably is not because they have not enough cops, but too many cops: with multiple law enforcement agencies in a tiny town, no one was even clear on who would be in charge.

During a press conference today the Texas DPS stated that video evidence shows Uvalde and school police never tried the door handles on the classrooms occupied by the gunman to see if they were locked - which they definitely weren't, because evidently the doors can't be locked from the inside.

Link

The "Thin Blue Line" is looking pretty ******* thin right now. Like it's only got one dimension at this point.

Forbidden!

BBC article on the police response at Uvalde that just gets worse the more information comes out:

Uvalde shooting: Gunman could have been stopped within three minutes - safety official

Yeah, we are about five revelations away from finding out there was no shooter and the whole thing was a wrong-address SWAT raid that went way off the rails…

Likewise but

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/21/u...nse/index.html

I can't stand to hear the news about this today. How absolutely heartbreaking.

How the hell are the people in charge at Uvalde still in their jobs?
God, I hate Texas. Just one piece of idiocy after another.

(Stolen) .. The next song goes to brave servants at the Uvalde Police Department ..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r679Hhs9Zs

And it gets worse:

Police officer husband of slain Uvalde teacher detained, disarmed after he tried to save his wife

Sadly, in the absence of relevant State laws, police in the US don't have a duty to protect or help anyone. Texas has no such law so there probably isn't even a valid civil case let alone a criminal one.

It's not just the cops at this point. The whole city government are circling the wagons in order to preserve their power. They know exactly how short the distance is between blaming the cops and blaming the people who hired the cops.

There's something corrupt as hell going on.

it's fear, pure and simple.
Cops make it a point to retaliate against individual people who dare to attempt to reduce their budget or hold them to account for anything.
City Officials are not paid enough to trade an attempt to take the PD down a peg for lifelong harassment of them and their families.

I don't know about the whole city government. From the linked article above, the mayor seems to be on the war path.

And now the school is to be demolished.

Plus some bi-partisan gun control legislation may happen. Though what effect it will have is open to discussion as it doesn't seem to affect current gun owners.

When they rebuild the school they can save money by putting only one door in. It will be much safer too.

(Sarcasm intended)

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Biden talked about demolishing the school when he visited; they tore down Sandy Hook Elementary afterwards and there are plans to demolish the building at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High when the shooter's trial there is finally completed. There is even discussion of tearing down Columbine High because it has become something of a morbid tourist attraction.

as long as the cost of rebuilding comes out of the police budget...

I'm starting to think it should come out of that *after* their pension fund.

That might wipe out the police budget.
But then you seem to want to get rid of the police altogether.
Don't get me wrong, I think the whole police force in Uvalde should be fired and a new one built from the ground up.
But you will never convince me that police are somehow unesscary.
And you seem to , franky, have a real hatred for them that goes way beyond ligitimate criticism.

If you believe at all in Fiscal Responsibility, most US PDs should get gutted to the bone.

Never before have so many Americans been so happy to shovel so much money into a part of the State that year to year provides lesa and less of what they are supposed to do.
One look at the process rate of Rape Kits proves that most PDs are not interested in actually solving crimes.

I repeat: You either have a police force or you have Vigilante Justice. No other options.
You seem to hate the very idea of a police force.
That might go over big in left wing discussion circles, but among most Amereicans, not so much.
One of the reasons "Progressive" have political difficluties is they seem to have no idea how dumb a lot of their rhetoric sounds to people who are not the political left.

Nothing in the quoted post supports your wild accusation

Because it seems that they are all *****.

They have to pay for the armoured cars and assault rifles somehow.

When the police are the enemy of the people then there is only one choice.

There are other options. I have said this before and will no doubt say it again. The biggest problem with US policing is the huge number of micro police forces with uneven recruitment standards, training, resourcing, communication capacities, equipment and oversight.

My Australian state of Victoria has a population of 6.6 million and a force of 23000. It’s not perfect but is well run and is generally respected. It still has local presence without the need of hundreds of forces in the state.

I’d really like someone to defend micro police forces.

Here's a pretty good bit of citizen investigation. You may have heard that the school's police chief was elected to the city council shortly before the shooting. No surprise, he's not been showing up for meetings, and decided to request a leave of absence, which the council was apparently ready to grant. However, a local citizen discovered that if the chief misses three consecutive meetings (this was his second) that the other council members can vote him out.

She swayed the council and they decided not to give him a leave of absence. :)

And you are repeatedly and objectively wrong.

There is nothing sacred about the Police that makes them exempt from cost/benefit analysis.
It is ia fact that as PDs have gotten bigger, the number of crimes solved has gone down. We are simply not getting our money's worth out of policing in the US, and many cities regularily have to settle with victims of police brutality for millions.
If you had any sense of the Police as a Government Service instead of a Holy Cow, you would see that it needs a "rightsizing" and reorientation to actually "Protect and Serve".

This is not left-wing ideology, it's.common sense fiscal conservatism.

Indeed. Something like eighteen thousand organisations with police powers in 2008 - it's not actually clear if anyone knows the actual figure.

12,000 police forces

6000 ten or fewer officers

2000 one officer

It's a recipe for inefficiency and lots of opportunities for corruption due to lack of oversight.

For comparison

The UK has 45 territorial police forces and 3 special police forces (Civil Nuclear Constabulary, Ministry of Defence Police, British Transport Police) and the smallest force (the City of London Police) has 811 officers.


There is a lot wrong with UK policing, but at least such a structure is tractable.

Time for some Merger & Acquisition.

A new school can be built to take into account the latest research in pedagogy, such things as curved corridors to reduce sightlines for shooters, firedoors used to isolate areas at the touch of a button and concrete wings to provide barriers for schoolchildren to hide behind. https://www.dezeen.com/2019/09/05/fr...mass-shooting/

I suspect this is a sarcastic post too. But in the small case it isn’t, the other solution is to ban semi automatics.

The US has been down this road before. It turns out it is cheaper to build new anti-tank weapons than it is to build more survivable tanks. I think by making our schools more defensive, we are ceding the initiative to the shooters. Automatic weapons for students is clearly the only alternative.

or we could do something about gun ownership

Sounds like a repeat of the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre. People bled to death while the perp was standing in the window awaiting suicide by cop. The SWAT sniper was told to wait until a police Lieutenant got to the scene- 15 minutes later. Coroner's reports were edited to read "death by gun shot wound" rather than "exanguination due to gunshot wound". I knew a guy in the clean up crew, he said blood was pooled two inches deep.

Uvalde cops harass reporters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media...ned-by-police/