Where Is the National Outrage Over Uvalde?

[Celerity]

Almost 50 days later, attention is moving on, but officials still haven’t explained how police failed so badly. George Floyd’s murder changed how Americans view law enforcement. The Uvalde massacre could have its own impact on policing and guns, and yet we still don’t know why the police response went so wrong.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/where-is-the-national-outrage-over-uvalde/670501/



Unexplained Failures

Around this time two summers ago, Americans were marching in the streets of cities across the country to protest the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Almost two years to the day after Floyd’s death, a gunman at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 students and two teachers. This past weekend, hundreds of family members of victims and their supporters marched in Uvalde. It was a lonelier protest. Already, national attention has started to move on, including to the July 4 massacre in Highland Park, Illinois. (To be frank, I had to check to make sure I wasn’t forgetting any other major mass shootings.)

Floyd’s murder and the Uvalde massacre are two horrors in which police are at the center, though in completely different ways. In Minneapolis, police used excessive force; in Uvalde, everyone seems to agree, they failed to use force as soon as they should have. These are extreme examples of a familiar dyad of overpolicing, which includes pretextual stops (when officers find an excuse to stop someone, in the hopes of uncovering a more serious offense) and brutal enforcement, and underpolicing, in which citizens feel abandoned by law enforcement.

In the Floyd case, junior officers were convicted for failing to intervene as Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck. In Uvalde, officers did not act for nearly 80 minutes as they waited for an order. Experts say criminal charges in Uvalde are unlikely—prosecuting officers for inaction is even harder than prosecuting them for things they did—though civil suits are possible. Pete Arredondo, chief of the school-district police, has stepped down from a city-council seat and is on leave from his police role but has not heeded demands to resign.

Both cases are also unusual in that they have attracted widespread condemnation from other police officers. Yet nearly 50 days have passed since the massacre, and the public still knows vanishingly little about why the police failed so badly in Uvalde. But as we've learned from past incidents, civilians should be skeptical of official accounts, especially early on. The initial police report about Floyd’s death infamously stated that “officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress.”

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[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Honestly, part of it is because I think people believe that mass shootings are just something we

have to accept now. Not even police can stop them.

I think as well that people think passive failure is something that can be fixed with more training and money, that the Uvalde police could have succeeded if they just trained on the right things, while Chauvin murdering a man was something they could blame on his personality, a racist cold-hearted SOB, rather than his badge. The failure is policing itself, across the board.

ETA: Once nothing was done after Newtown, it was clear to me that nothing would ever be done. Uvalde is the result, and nothing will be done after Uvalde, either.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. I mean, the Uvalde department got a budget increase the other day. Even after sustained protests,

the Minneapolis PD got a budget increase. People are willing to keep throwing money at the problem; it makes them feel like they're doing something.

[maxsolomon]

3. Hard to be outraged when you're numb.

We are all aware that nothing will stop the next 18 year old who wants to acquire an MSSA.

I'm not outraged that small-town cops were overwhelmed and dithered taking action, because I'm not surprised.

[hlthe2b]

4. Numb and depressed.

[maxsolomon]

5. Yes. I'm that.

The awfulness is just overwhelming right now, and it all stems from a choice other people made in 2016.

[AkFemDem]

8. I think larger cities that train as both individuals and special ops teams

To use strategies similar to combat training, should host comprehensive, hard core, training for small departments everywhere. For example, we saw in Las Vegas officers physically laying on top of victims to protect them from further injury and dragging victims from the active scene while others worked in the chaos to find where the shooter was actually shooting from.

In a large number of school shootings, the shooter commits suicide as soon as police show up. But there are also plenty of examples where they hang in there and attempt to shoot it out with responding officers. Small town cops don’t think it will really happen in their little corner of the world- but I think statistically mass school shootings actually happen MORE in the burbs and small towns than in major cities.

[Chainfire]

6. Outrage has morphed into deepening depression.

A feeling of helplessness to deal with the increasing violence of our society. What kind of nation that stands by, and allows children to be murdered by the dozen, in their schools? How do our lawmakers come to terms with that? We know it is going to happen again, yet we don't even try to address the real issue as other nations have successfully done.

The only real job of the Government is the security of the people. Our government is a failure. Japan had a gun murder and it made world news for days. We lose a kindergarten and it is just another day in the land of the free.

[Novara]

7. Part of the numbness comes from each new revelation of failure

Every time something new and horrible about the police non-action is revealed, it's soon usurped by another revelation that they could have and should have done something to save children. It's mind-boggling.

I mean, the horror of an 18 year old mowing down children in their classroom is awful enough, but each new thing we learn about how the police totally bungled it only adds to the despair. There probably has never been a more fucked up police response and 19 children are dead, when they could have saved some of them if they just acted. I can't EVEN imagine how the parents feel knowing how badly this was handled.

[JackSabbath]

9. Everywhere

Are you not seeing it? What do you think it should look like?

[milestogo]

10. Uvalde has been getting a lot of press.