“Someone tell me what to do”
www.texastribune.org
Across the country, states require more training to prepare students and teachers for mass shootings than for those expected to protect them. The differences were clear in Uvalde, where children and officers waited on opposite sides of the door.

The accounts of law enforcement’s actions during one of the worst school shootings in history are among a trove of recorded investigative interviews and body camera footage obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE. Together, the hundreds of hours of audio and video offer a startling finding: The children in Uvalde were prepared, dutifully following what they had learned during active shooter drills, even as their friends and teachers were bleeding to death. Many of the officers, who had trained at least once during their careers for such a situation, were not.

  • yesman@lemmy.worldOP
    01·
    11 months ago

    Other missteps have not been as widely scrutinized. In Las Vegas in 2017, two officers stayed on the hotel floor below a shooter instead of rushing upstairs to confront him as he spewed bullets into a crowd of concertgoers. The next year in Thousand Oaks, California, officers attempted to confront a shooter within minutes of arriving at the scene. Some retreated after he shot at them. Police did not reenter to engage the shooter again for more than 40 minutes, even as victims remained inside.

    Active shooter training, which emphasizes rushing into danger flatly contradicts all the other training and police culture that emphasize officer safety.

    The Supreme Court has constantly ruled that police have no duty to protect life, enforce court orders, or uphold the law. In one of these cases, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, during oral arguments, Justice Ginsburg wondered aloud “what are police for”.

    The police are guardians of property of the wealthy: slave catchers, night watchmen, and bodyguards who’ve been socialized so that the powerful can share the cost with the very people being regulated. Fuck the police.