Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
Crime scene tape surrounds Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, May 25, 2022.
To the layman, it might seem strange to read an Associated Press story about how, when a mass shooter invaded an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the local police refused to attack him for about 40 minutes despite the urging of nearby parents. “Go in there! Go in there!” one said. The police instead waited for a tactical unit from the Border Patrol (which reportedly got another student killed by instructing them to call out for help before the shooter had been apprehended).
During the delay, parents even tried to rush in themselves. “Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” Javier Cazares said. The parents didn’t, but it seems only because the police stopped them. According to a cellphone video apparently taken at the scene, the cops threatened to tase desperate, screaming parents to stop them going in. Cazares’s child Jacklyn was killed in the attack.
Angeli Rose Gomez told The Wall Street Journal that she drove 40 miles to the school, which her two children attended, and begged police on the scene to intervene. Instead, federal marshals arrested her for “intervening in an active investigation.” After talking some local cops into letting her out of the cuffs, watching a second parent get tackled by police, and a third get pepper-sprayed, she snuck around the crowd, sprinted into the school, and brought out her kids.
But this horrifying story should come as no surprise. What it illustrates is simply the cowardly culture of American police in action. Contrary to the chest-thumping rhetoric of police unions, they are neither trained nor legally expected to protect citizens in danger. In the pinch, they frequently put their own safety above those they are charged with protecting—even elementary school kids.
As an initial matter, it should be emphasized that this school had done everything that conservatives and experts from the school safety consulting industry recommend. To comply with a 2018 Texas law passed in response to a different school shooting, the “district adopted an array of security measures that included its own police force, threat assessment teams at each school, a threat reporting system, social media monitoring software, fences around schools and a requirement that teachers lock their classroom doors,” report Suzy Khimm and Jon Schuppe at NBC News.
It didn’t work, and neither did police on the scene rush in to stop the killer. Now, of course this is the polar opposite of approved police tactics these days. After the Columbine shooting, where police waited outside for hours while a teacher bled to death, police are supposed to dash into the scene as fast as possible. They just didn’t do it. The reason is the powerful fear instilled by other parts of police training, as well as the overall police culture. Consider David Grossman, one of the most famous and influential police trainers in the country. Justin Peters took one of his “warrior cop” classes for a Slate article, and found a message that was equal parts hysterical exaggeration of the ambient risk in American society and creepy obsession with killing people. “Increasingly the police must face organized opponents armed with assault rifles and bombs,” says Grossman; cops face an “explosion in violent crime” and an “extraordinary rise in violence.”
Contrary to the chest-thumping rhetoric of police unions, they are neither trained nor legally expected to protect citizens in danger.
These assertions are complete nonsense. Despite a substantial rise in homicides over the last couple of years (and a very serious increase in some cities), that comes after a yearslong trend of decline, and the overall violent crime rate is still very much below the heights of the early 1990s. By the same token, policing was the 25th-most dangerous job in 2019; less than a fifth as risky as being a logger. During the pandemic, officer deaths have increased, but almost entirely because of the virus. (Indeed, because police are overwhelmingly conservative and hence exposed to right-wing propaganda, COVID-19 deaths among police increased 63 percent from 2020 to 2021 after vaccines became available.)
But this shrieking hyperbole about crime is necessary to justify Grossman’s perverted obsession with killing. He outlines a crackpot doctrine he calls “killology,” tellingly defined as “the scholarly study of the destructive act, just as sexology is the scholarly study of the procreative act.” Over and over, he darkly warns that any cop needs to be ready and willing to kill basically without thinking, suppressing any humanitarian instincts that might get in the way. But not to worry, in another training Grossman claims that after you kill someone you’ll have the best sex of your life, which he characterizes as a perk: “Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex … There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.”
To repeat, this depraved sicko is one of the most popular police trainers in the country. (If I were a police detective, I’d be examining his crawl space right about now.)
Grossman is something of an outlier, but as Isaac Scher writes at Insider, the basic outlines of his message are common throughout police trainings across the country, which have no national standards and are heavily based on junk science. By and large, cops are taught to be in quaking terror at all times, to view the local citizenry as infested with violent criminals, and to prioritize their own safety above all else. The overwhelming focus is on threats to the police themselves, not the public. There is virtually no time spent on diplomacy, de-escalation, or remaining calm under fire. (Living in constant self-imposed fear is a big reason why police have killed 406 people so far this year, which is in line with the trend from previous years.)
This message is powerfully reinforced by Supreme Court precedent. As Ramenda Cyrus recently wrote for the Prospect, in the 2005 case Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, a woman sued the local police department for “failing to arrest her husband, who had violated a protective order, resulting in the murder of her three children.” In an opinion written by Antonin Scalia, the Court ruled against her, holding that police have no duty to protect the public unless they have specifically promised to in writing. That impossible standard is why a New York City man lost a lawsuit against the NYPD when an officer failed to help him while he grappled with a knife-wielding assailant. As Cyrus writes, “the police do not have to act if someone is actively being harmed, they do not have to arrest someone who has violated orders, and they do not have any obligation to protect you from others.”
There’s a word for someone who walks around terrified of dangers that are almost entirely imaginary, obsessively fixated on being ready to kill people who appear threatening—but only to reduce the risk to himself. The word is coward. This is not some inborn propensity. At least some of the parents at Uvalde were willing to risk their lives to try to stop the shooter, without weapons or body armor. But then, they had not been trained as police.
All this undermines the notion that American police act like soldiers, heard from both Grossman and some of his critics. It’s true of course that police are not supposed to look or act like troops—bristling with high-powered weapons, outfitted in heavy body armor, driving around in tanks—and in more civilized countries like the U.K. or Norway, they don’t.
But the sad truth is that most American communities would likely be a lot better off if actual U.S. Army soldiers replaced their current police departments. Military training of necessity focuses on enduring mortal risk and remaining cool under fire as much as it does being willing to kill someone. You don’t want terrified hair-trigger Chicken Littles out there on patrol in a genuine war zone, because of the need for courage under fire—to engage the enemy, avoid a rout, rescue a downed comrade, and so on—not to mention the risk of friendly fire.
The horrifying massacre at Uvalde, then, is a graphic illustration of two of America’s worst problems: our epidemic of gun violence, and our plague of lawless, incompetent police departments. There really is a murder problem in many American cities, yet the police in most of them let the culprits get away with it half or more of the time. We’ve got far too many guns that are too easy to get, and we’ve got a sick police culture that needs to be torn out by the roots.
