Perhaps the greatest rebuttal to calls for confidence in police is the conduct of law enforcement officers at Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. There, on May 24, 2022, almost 400 cops not only stood around while a lunatic murdered children and teachers, but they prevented parents from stepping in to do what those in uniform wouldn’t. Now, new reporting gives greater insight into the depths of the officers’ inaction that day, and just how unwise it is to rely on them for protection.
Documented Police Failures
The failures of police officers in Uvalde aren’t open to dispute.
“At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety,” concluded a report by the Texas House of Representatives Investigative Committee on the Robb Elementary Shooting.
A U.S. Justice Department review similarly found “failures in leadership, command, and coordination.”
The police chief, who was supposed to assume control of the situation under written plans for such events, did not do so, nor did he transfer his responsibilities to anybody else. No real command post was established. For over an hour, 376 law enforcement officers stood around trying to decide what to do as the one shooter in the school rampaged. Finally, a tactical team operating on its own amidst what the Texas report described as “chaos” breached the classroom in which the shooter hid and killed him.
Since then, a media consortium has pressed a lawsuit to gain access to records of that day. Finally released, they offer heartbreaking details about the events in and around Robb Elementary School.
“The records offer the deepest look yet at the previously documented response failures, the lack of cohesion between law-enforcement officers and the trauma inflicted on a community,” write Elizabeth Findell and Ginger Adams Otis of The Wall Street Journal. “In one 911 call, between a dispatcher and a child inside the actual classroom, the little girl can be heard counting bodies, shushing other crying children and begging for police—who were just outside the door—to help.”
Even as they milled around, police prevented parents from assisting their children. Videos taken that day “show officers stopping parents from rushing into the elementary school where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers,” the San Antonio Express-News reported days after the incident. “The officers at the scene were ready to use tasers on parents and onlookers.”
No Duty To Protect Individuals
In May, the city of Uvalde agreed to pay $2 million to the families of victims for its officers’ failures.
This summer, former Uvalde school police Chief Pete Arredondo and former officer Adrian Gonzales were indicted on multiple counts of child abandonment and endangerment charges for the roles they played—or refused to play—at Robb Elementary School. That’s remarkable: Police officers are almost never held accountable for failing to act. As Richard Dahl noted for FindLaw after the Uvalde fiasco, “criminal charges against police officers who fail to protect the public are extremely rare” because of court decisions holding law enforcement officers to vague, general responsibilities.
“The duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists,” the District of Columbia Court of Appeals held in the 1981 case of Warren v. District of Columbia.
The U.S. Supreme Court reinforced the point at the national level, ruling that “serving of public rather than private ends is the normal course of the criminal law” in Castle Rock v. Gonzales.
Standing around letting kids get slaughtered is, perhaps, a step too far even for a criminal justice system generally prepared to absolve law enforcement of any duty beyond cruising in patrol cars. But those indictments don’t bring back the dead—and their rarity may not deter future inaction.
Misplaced Confidence
What’s remarkable, though, is that despite the massive, well-documented failure of law-enforcement officers at the Robb Elementary School (and elsewhere), confidence in police is actually rising after a dip in recent years, and even as faith in other institutions continues to erode.
“Americans’ confidence in the police increased eight percentage points over the past year to 51%, the largest year-over-year change in public perceptions of 17 major U.S. institutions measured in Gallup’s annual update,” Gallup revealed last month. “The slim majority of U.S. adults who express confidence in the police includes 25% who say they have ‘a great deal’ and 26% ‘quite a lot.'”
Admittedly, 51 percent isn’t a lot, but the only other institutions in which majorities reports confidence are small businesses, science, and the military. It represents an increase in confidence in police over the 43 percent recorded last year or 45 percent in 2022—low numbers following the tensions of pandemic restrictions and riots after the killing of George Floyd and others by police.
It’s difficult to imagine just what police officers have done to earn such renewed confidence. And the records released by the media consortium reveal that rising trust to be badly misplaced.
“We’re having trouble doing a command post because we need the bodies to keep the parents out—they’re trying to push in,” The Wall Street Journal‘s Findell and Otis quote from one exchange recorded among officers that day a half-hour into the attack. “We have a large number of parents heading to the northwest corner. A couple of them are armed parents.”
Only You Can Be Relied on To Protect You
Read that again. Rather than act to stop a murderer, police officers blocked parents upset and ready to intervene because law enforcement seemed unprepared to stop the ongoing crime. There’s a lesson there about the different priorities of government employees collecting paychecks, no matter how well trained and equipped they are, and people who have personal stakes in the circumstances around them.
Shortly after Uvalde, pollsters for Trafalgar Group/Convention of States asked, “what do you believe would best protect you and your family in the event of a mass shooting?” Maybe the shock of events made Americans more realistic than in the recent Gallup survey. Only 25.1 percent of respondents answered, “local police”; 41.8 percent chose “armed citizens.”
If you want something done right, do it yourself. That includes protecting family, friends, neighbors, and you.
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