Uvalde parents had reason to expect more from police
It’s hard to imagine a more righteous anger than that of the parents being kept at a distance from Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. A gunman was inside the building with their children while police were outside, holding them back. Any parent can explain the often-irrational anguish that comes from being unwillingly separated from their children. That the immediate barrier between them and their kids were police, the people entrusted to keep the kids safe, must have been fully enraging.
What’s still not entirely clear is the extent to which that anger was justified. There were police outside, managing the crowd, but there also appear to have been police inside the school. Parents were furious that the police outside weren’t acting to protect their families, but they couldn’t see what was happening within the school’s walls.
We can say with some confidence that the police outside the building may not have been communicating with those parents clearly, given the way the public story about law enforcement’s response has evolved since the massacre took place. We can also say with some confidence that the response did not reflect the expectations that residents of Uvalde likely had for their police force.
Again, our understanding of what happened at the scene still contains holes (in part because of the evolving stories from local and state officials). But what we know doesn’t comport with how we might expect police to respond to a shooting incident in the abstract.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-uvalde-parents-had-reason-to-expect-more-from-police/