Robb Elementary Report: Read It For Yourself
The Texas House committee investigating the Uvalde school shooting released a preliminary Robb Elementary Report, first to the families then to the media.
A Texas House investigative committee released a preliminary report Sunday on the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre that left 21 people dead in May.
The report describes “shortcomings and failures of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and of various agencies and officers of law enforcement,” and “an overall lackadaisical approach” by authorities on the scene.
Read the Robb Elementary Report
Robb Elementary Report
Just the executive summary ought to be enough for a lot of people to loose their badge’s for dereliction of duty. At best they should now all resign. None of them deserves the respect of that community.Report
Random thoughts:
1) It might be useful to scan social medial platforms for people who have the nickname “school shooter”.
2) The school clearly took it’s security very loosely. Partly that’s because they’ve had 50(ish) lockdowns in the last 2-3 months because of illegal immigrants escaping. Partly it’s because the typical school might have a shooting once a thousand or so years.
3) This wasn’t mental illness.
4) All this swarm of red flags is with knowing exactly what he was after the fact. I’m not sure anything actually should have counted before except the nickname. Now his friends are on a French social media platform so none of them may have ever met him or each other.
5) In a lot of ways this one is the stereotype. He was clearly and openly motivated by fame. He knew of a local “soft” spot to attack that would attract media attention. He did so.
The school and the police weren’t very competent at avoiding this because it’s something they never thought they’d really have to deal with. A little more effective hardening might have stopped him because he wasn’t very good at this… although if they’d had more hardening he might have done something else.
6) He invested many months of planning and his life savings.Report
And #6 suggests people saw some pets of what he was doing and dismissed them. That’s not a mental health issue but it is a community awareness issue.Report
On the contrary. Having selected for a successful shooter, we’ve also selected for someone who practiced decent information security. It suggests the community is aware.
His internet friends, who knew enough to label him “school shooter”, knew he had a history of posing with fake guns and thought he was doing it again. Everyone knew he was a loser. He was pretty isolated from his family.
One or two people had hints he was starting to get into guns but they didn’t know he was spending thousands of dollars.
A few people knew he was planning something big but they thought he was going to turn his life around.
In terms of harm reduction, having the community aware is a really good thing, but it’s not going to always work.Report
So here is my hot take.
*veronica puts on her dormant libertarian hat*
In a free society, you’re actually allowed to call yourself “school shooter” without legal harassment. Moreover, if you spend any time on “edge lord” internet forums, you’ll find tons of people who act that way — to be fair, literally calling yourself “school shooter” is of course uncommon, but there is tons of edgy, self-indulgent nonsense in these spaces, so “school shooter” really doesn’t stand out, until of course that person actually shoots up a school.
We’re constantly talking about identifying these people and then intervening. But how? What happens exactly? Do we arrest them? Track them? Somehow deny them the rights that everyone else has? Except you’ll have to apply this to basically any young dude who goes through a black metal phase. That’s a lot of young dudes (and a few trans girls who at that point in their lives seem like dudes).
So yeah, that was me. Except I never shot anyone. I just did drugs and quit high school.
We had this same conversation after Columbine. The “chattering class” was all talking about trench coats and goth and being a loner. I found that odd because that described me and all of my friends. (Well, except I never committed the fashion crime of a trench coat, but still.)
Everyone who talks about “we should have seen this” — but how exactly? And if so, what do we do — institute a “future crime” division? There has been some scifi exploring that theme. I don’t think it will work out.
“Get them counseling.”
Mandatory? On what grounds? Who pays? Are we really going to force counseling on every young adult with a Mayhem album in their collection? Good luck with that.Report
Yes. All that exactly.
Everything about this kid put together probably says “there’s a problem”. However no one had the full picture and no one knew enough to act unless we want massive, stupid levels of false positives.
The gun store owner knew he’d made a sale.
The school knew he’d dropped out of school.
Everyone knew he was a mess and his mom did drugs.
His GF dumped him and he didn’t take it well.
His internet friends knew he liked to lie about him having guns.
His family knew he had big plans he was going to announce later.
The only time he seems to have told anyone that he was going to go shoot up a school was 15 minutes before he did so, to a 15 year old in another country in what was probably a text message they may not have seen until afterwards.
The one tiny red flag was “school shooter” wasn’t a name he’d picked for himself, it was something his online “friends” forced on him. So maybe they saw something or expected something that hasn’t been in the media yet… but that has a ton of “maybes” and I’m not hopeful.
Worse, lets say they drop a dime on him… in France, and this comes back to the cops in his home town (same 6 cops at the school), and they look into it. They’ve got a punk with anger issues who doesn’t have guns who has a toxic nickname online.Report
This sounds amazingly like the excuses offered by the 378 cops in Uvalde.
Who could possibly have foreseen this, how could anyone prevent it, this problem is just bigger than anyone can possibly fix and any solution will almost certainly be worse.
No, however unfortunate the regularly occurring deaths of dozens of children may be, we must learn to adapt and accept it.Report
What, exactly, is your alternative?
Did I miss a way to pick out this guy before he started shooting?
Do you have some way to get criminals to follow the law? Or maybe you have some way to get criminals+everyone to disarm?
RE: The cops
It would be nice if we could insist on competence at all times from the gov, but that seems unrealistic. It would also be nice if we could fire some of them.
Like it or not, this is what we have to work with. Whatever law you want passed, those are the guys who will enforce it.Report
Back in the 70s when crime was at its peak, there were a rash of vigilante movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish.
A staple of those movies and the TV cop shows that followed would be a scene of a punk getting “let off on a technicality”.
And there would be some bleeding heart lawyer smugly delivering a lecture on civil rights and however terrible it was that your daughter was raped I’m sure you will agree that the price of living in a free society is the exclusionary rule.
Out of that time of chaos came our militarized and unaccountable police force that behaves like an occupying army.
Point being, when the public order is upset by agents of chaos, a civil society has to construct something other than platitudes about liberty.
Veronica isn’t wrong and neither are you.
What you are doing though, is rejecting a vast middle.
There is a world, many of them in fact existing right now, where people enjoy both civil liberties and the ability to exist without the slaughter of children.
We don’t live there because many Americans prefer this one.Report
No, I’m an engineer asking for details on your proposed solution.
In Dilbert I’d be the guy pointing out that if your plan requires you to get a gallon of milk from an ant, it won’t work.
Your “vast middle” requires you to disarm the entire population.
That’s going to be very hard and require extremely ugly tools be used in ugly ways.
Dogs don’t swim like dolphins because of the history of their ancestors.
If you want to tackle a much bigger problem that doesn’t require changing the Constitution, just convince every American to properly secure (or get rid of) their pool.
That would save 300x times as many children, even if we don’t see them on TV.Report
Like I said, you prefer the status quo to any possible alternative.
You define the American status quo as being akin to dogs not swimming, that is, that our levels of violence are just somehow in our intrinsic nature. Fixed, unchangeable, hardwired into our national DNA.
Funny though, how no one accepts this for other things.
Like that video of a guy shoplifting.
Oh, you think shoplifting can be fixed? It can’t!
There is something essentially American about grabbing things that don’t belong to you- whether it is indigenous land, or the labor of Africans, there is a deeply embedded part of American culture that prizes theft.
I’m open to solutions, but so far everything I’m hearing just infringes on civil liberties.
Far better I think, to just accept shoplifting as a cost of business.Report
There are strong arguments that this is more of a problem with the freedom of speech than firearms. He wants fame. Get rid of guns and he’ll use a different tool.
Are you willing to give up your freedom of speech to fight this?
Or is this an issue which must be fixed by other people giving up their rights, yours are too important.Report
You keep inflating the problem, defining it in unsolvable terms- that to solve it requires dictatorship, or a Constitutional change, or a re-wiring of the human soul or something.
Again, rejecting the already working model in place throughout the civilized world.
“No Way To Solve This, Says Only Nation Where It Happens”Report
In the past, you’ve suggested house-to-house searches for guns.
Is that something that you think would work?Report
The working model is to have a very different culture where there never was a civil right to firearms.
You don’t have a way to redo culture. If you ever get a way to restructure culture gun control isn’t our most pressing cultural problem.Report
Notwithstanding the fact that yes, American culture HAS changed, dramatically in just the last few decades. On religion, LGBTQ issues, tobacco, and marijuana there has been a sea change on what we’re once regarded as inviolable positions.
And it has changed specifically with regard to gun culture. The number of people who hunt or sportshoot is changing, and the demographics of who owns guns and why they own them is changing, and the publics attitude towards them is also changing.Report
I don’t see a gun control sea change from this graph.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/9D81/production/_124912304_optimised_us_gun_laws-nc.pngReport
Now there’s this one: Percent of households owning a gun. https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/images/blog_gun_ownership.jpg
So over the very long timeline that might work out for you. But it’s weird that political support for gun control is flat.Report
You present a graph showing that 87% of Americans want either more strict or as strict gun laws, (The laws that Republicans desperately beg SCOTUS to strike down) as part of an argument that gun control would demand a complete cultural makeover?
Wouldn’t it just require our government servants doing what the people want?
Here’s what I’m seeing. The number of hunters and gun owners is declining steadily, but the number of guns is increasing, and the size of arsenal per gun owner is increasing.
So fewer and fewer gun owners fit the demographic of “responsible gun owner” and more and more fit the demographic of “Loony gun nut”.Report
“The working model is to have a very different culture where there never was a civil right to firearms.”
There’s never been an actual time in American history when the concept of all-out gun rights pro-gun people talk about actually existed. The OK Corral was a gun control situation.Report
Support for gun rights was so high that the 2ndAM was passed. The basic ideal was all male adult non-slaves would have guns.
You can call that the high water mark if you want, but “enough support to change the Constitution” is an amazingly high bar to pass. We don’t have enough support for gun control to get rid of the 2ndAM.Report
“Changing the Constitution” in 1789 required the support of oh, about a dozen members of the political elite, and the support was arguably to allow citizens to form groups which would be strictly regulated by the local governments.
There was never a point in American history when it was normal and acceptable to just walk around with a gun. Doing that was, quite rightly, a sign that there was danger and the threat of deadly violence.Report
“Out of that time of chaos came our militarized and unaccountable police force that behaves like an occupying army.”
Looking at Uvalde, seems like the problem is a militarized and unaccountable police force that refuses to behave like an occupying army.Report
No.
Read A Bright Shining Lie by John Paul Vann about his experience with the ARVN.
Or any other accounts of how the police and military behave in authoritarian regimes.
The common thread is that these regimes are both incompetent and brutal.
Capable of brutally suppressing a strike or march, but unable to catch a pickpocket.
Unable, because they don’t value the core mission- or rather, they understand that their core mission is to terrify and suppress, not protect and serve.
Once again, it is that whole administrative state thing that reactionaries abhor.Report
Are you certain you mean the ARVN?
Because the wikipedia page talks about them doing stuff like “actually shooting their guns” and “dying while trying to do stuff”.
That’s not what happened at Uvalde.Report
Keep reading.Report
Will we eventually get to a place on the wikipedia page where children are being shot and they refuse to do anything about it?
(If you recently read a book, there are easier ways to brag that you’ve recently read a book than by making a bad analogy.)Report
Do whatever they do in Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and other developed democracies and don’t assume that Americans are just a bunch of barbarians that would rather live with constant bloodshed.Report
What they do is never let the gun-ownership-is-a-civil-right genii out of the bottle. Thus they never get a culture that backs this.
The 2ndAM is a problem not only legally but because it’s an indicator of the level of cultural support that existed for gun ownership historically.
That level of support has gone down, but it still exists at levels way higher than other countries ever had.
OK, no problem.
I’ll just assume we can easily get rid of the 2ndAM because it has no cultural support. So no one will object. Then I’ll assume everyone will just hand in their guns without exception and there will be no push back or ignoring of the law.
Well then there is no problem. You’re right, we’ll just make it happen.Report
We have a principal-agent problem.
This isn’t going to be fixed without addressing that.Report
Good luck getting cops interested in policing.Report
I’ve suggested firing them but I was informed that they have a union. When I suggested getting rid of the union, I was informed that the union was essential to protect us against tyranny.
Seems to me that police that refuse to do their job is a recipe for vigilantes (for example, Angeli Gomez and Jacob Albarado in Uvalde).
We either need to accept that vigilantes will be part of the solution or we need to get cops interested in policing. The latter will involve touching the union, though.Report
I’ve actually come around to being willing to fire them.
But that’s the easy part.
What do you propose replacing them with?Report
I would suggest stuff like this. Not all at once and not all at the same time but come up with a measure of police departments that are failing and then, when we find one, exercise the Camden Option.Report
Right.
So the solution is not merely firing cops, but constructing an efficient, effective and disciplined government agency that accomplishes its mission of serving the public.
This can be done! It has been done!
The history of how it can be done shows that there are a lot of important prerequisites which need to be satisfied before the happy outcome is realized.
Chief among the is societal trust and cooperation, and a willingness to cooperate.Report
Chief among the is societal trust and cooperation, and a willingness to cooperate.
If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?
Note: “I shouldn’t have lost it! It’s their fault!” may be on the table as a salve to make yourself feel better but it will not do anything to regain the trust and may communicate that you are not interested in regaining it to those who are interested in rebuilding.Report
Yes, building trust is very difficult.
There are examples. South Africa after apartheid, East Bloc countries after Communism, American Reconstruction, postwar anywhere.
Some are exemplars, some are cautionary tales.Report
So your plan is to bring up South Africa, Eastern Bloc countries, and American Reconstruction?
I think that that plan will fail.Report
Like I said, you guys prefer the failure to success.Report
I have a handful of suggestions about how societal trust and cooperation can be increased.
But none of them come from the starting point of “We should be like the American Reconstruction after the Civil War.”
Indeed, I’ve always been told that that was a failure.
I’m surprised that you haven’t heard that.Report
Why do you think Reconstruction was a failure?Report
Because it took a century plus for the desired cultural cramdown/unification to happen. The split and lack of trust took a long time to heal.Report
Does “cultural cramdown” mean “getting white people to accept black people as equals”?Report
Sure. There were vast cultural differences in terms of what to do and how to behave. And it took a century to resolve them.
So… how is it that you’re going to speed things up this time? Because thus far I’m hearing a total lack of awareness that cultural differences is even a problem here.
To the degree it even comes up you just say “people prefer dead children” or I shouldn’t just assume it can’t work.
There has also been a weird avoidance to say you’re actually trying to get full disarmament.Report
Because of stuff like this, this, this, this, and this.
Why was it one of the first examples to pop into your head for what you should do to regain the societal trust and cooperation you’ve lost?
Perhaps we could ask the other lefties on the board.
Hey! Lefties! Do you guys consider American Reconstruction to be an example that should be followed in the current year?Report
Use your own words not other people’s.
Why do you think it failed?
Should it be used as an exemplar, or as a cautionary tale?Report
Actually, Chip. No. I have provided scholarly evidence for the argument that Reconstruction should not be used as a template for how to rebuild trust in a society.
I believe that I have shifted the burden of proof enough to get you to defend your position that Reconstruction provides a positive example of how to move forward.
How’s this? I will let you use other people’s arguments for why Reconstruction was “good enough”.
Or, heck. Maybe you could enlist some of the other lefties on the board who could explain why Reconstruction was good enough and people who don’t think that it was ought to explain why it wasn’t.Report
OK, so here are your arguments, in order, taken from your links:
1. “President Andrew Johnson believed in states’ rights and allowed many southern states to govern themselves after the Civil War”
2. Reconstruction “failed to acknowledge and address the deep racial animosity and class conflict of the postwar South. ”
3.”…the idea of Black people enjoying American freedom so offended white nationalists they overthrew Reconstruction by waging war on them and it”
Every one of your links is recent, and they all make the point that Reconstruction did not fail, but WAS failed by the white nationalists who overthrew it with riots and violence.
And every one of your links connects the overthrow of Reconstruction to current events like Jan 6 and issues a warning for us in our time to learn from the overthrow of Reconstruction and not repeat the mistake of allowing the white nationalists to win the battle.
So I go back to my point that yes, in order to build trust in America, we need to reference Reconstruction and learn from past mistakes.Report
So your argument that Reconstruction provides a template is that “it didn’t fail, it was failed by the agents in the principal-agent problem that they were working with”?
So now it’s “reference” Reconstruction.
Well, let me repeat myself: “So your plan is to bring up South Africa, Eastern Bloc countries, and American Reconstruction? I think that that plan will fail.”
My original question was “If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?”
And you’re going to “reference” Reconstruction.
What are you actually going to *DO*?
And, let me say this part again
Note: “I shouldn’t have lost it! It’s their fault!” may be on the table as a salve to make yourself feel better but it will not do anything to regain the trust and may communicate that you are not interested in regaining it to those who are interested in rebuilding.Report
Yes, Americans can decide to trust each other, and reject the racist appeals of the white nationalists or not.
There doesn’t exist any “plan” to get Americans to trust each other. They either decide to do it or they don’t.
But we can point to past failures. When people right here, right now, on this very blog talk about “returning issues to the states” we should reference Reconstruction and call that out for the failure that it is.
When you say that something “will fail” what you really mean is that you believe the American people will make a choice to fail.
And you might be right. But it isn’t preordained; We can still make a different choice this time.Report
See, this is the fundamental problem.
I originally asked this:
And so I am asking you:
“If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?”
WHAT IS YOUR PLAN TO REGAIN THE TRUST THAT YOU HAVE LOST???
Hope is not a plan.
“Yes, Americans can decide to trust each other, and reject the racist appeals of the white nationalists or not.”
Fair enough. You’re planning on failing, then? And blaming the people who don’t trust you for not trusting you?Report
We can only offer the white nationalists the vision of a harmonious multicultural America.
We don’t have any power to compel them to accept it.
You should read your links. They all make that very same point.Report
Let me repeat my question:
If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?
And, again, let me repeat this part:
Note: “I shouldn’t have lost it! It’s their fault!” may be on the table as a salve to make yourself feel better but it will not do anything to regain the trust and may communicate that you are not interested in regaining it to those who are interested in rebuilding.
If your position is that you don’t have to do anything, that’s fine!
But if you don’t do anything then you will fail.
Additional note: Doing something will not guarantee success. But doing nothing will guarantee failure.Report
For a guy who talks endlessly about trust and negotiation, you really don’t seem to have a grasp of how it works.
Demanding that one party “regain the trust” of the other party is, well, so absurd that to state it is to refute it.Report
No, I’m not demanding that one party “regain the trust” of the other party.
I am asking: If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?
Note: “I shouldn’t have lost it! It’s their fault!” may be on the table as a salve to make yourself feel better but it will not do anything to regain the trust and may communicate that you are not interested in regaining it to those who are interested in rebuilding.
If your position is that you don’t have to do anything, that’s fine!
But if you don’t do anything then you will fail.
Additional note: Doing something will not guarantee success. But doing nothing will guarantee failure.Report
Your question is absurd, based on flawed and unexamined assumptions.
Why do you think that liberals have lost the trust of the white nationalists?
What evidence is there that this is even a matter of trust?
Are you open to other possibilities, that the white nationalist just don’t like the liberals, and reject their humanity?
Seriously, you need to actually read the links you provide because, damn right now you are quoting the Dunning School verbatim.Report
Why do you think that liberals have lost the trust of the white nationalists?
Speaking of flawed and unexamined assumptions!
Anyway, remember the assertion that was the starting point for this particular sub-thread?
And remember my question in response to it?
“If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?”
It seems to me that, in practice, what you plan on doing is calling anyone who disagrees with you a “white nationalist”?
For what it’s worth, I think that the failures run deep and the loss of trust is a reasonable response to the failures.
For example: Chesa’s recall.
He tried to blame that on racist republicans (among others, of course).
Here’s what I think:
I think that you are not willing to do an honest accounting of the failures that resulted in the loss of trust.
This unwillingness to do an honest accounting is, in this case, manifesting as accusing others of being the reason that the trust is not there.
One of my assumptions is that you actually have to do something other than blame other people to increase trust.
What evidence is there that this is even a matter of trust?
Well, this goes back to the comment that got this ball rolling.
Chief among the is societal trust and cooperation, and a willingness to cooperate.
“If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?”
Are you open to other possibilities, that the white nationalist just don’t like the liberals, and reject their humanity?
Gotta say, the go-to argument being “the people who don’t trust me are bad” strikes me as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
And if you are hoping for a system where trust and collaboration is increased, you’re hoping for something that your actions are actively undercutting.Report
So, no evidence of why you leap to assumptions, and no openness to any other possibilities than Liberals Are To Blame Somehow.Report
Chip, my argument is that trust has been lost and that liberals are going to have to work to regain trust too.
And my question remains:
“If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?”
“HOW COME YOU’RE NOT ASKING THEM?”
Because I’m not talking to them. I am talking to you.
“If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?”
Your argument is that you are flawless and that all the blame resides in your negotiating partners?
Imagine being a therapist for a couple that is there for couple’s therapy and Person A says “It’s all the other person’s fault, they’re a racist, I don’t have to change at all.”
As a therapist, what is your immediate response?
I tell you this right now. Mine is not “I trust this person to have an accurate read of the situation”.
Your own moral authority is not legible.
Your appeals to your own moral authority are laughable.
Your attempts to position yourself as being in the good and right because, hey, at least you’re not a white supremacist are transparent.
So I’ll ask again:
If you have lost the trust of your negotiating partners, what do you plan on doing to regain it?Report
Have we list the trust of the conservatives?
You keep insisting that without any evidence.Report
Oh, I don’t think it’s a binary. A 1 or 0.
I think that it’s a gradient where above a certain point it will work well and, below that a grey area where some stuff will work but other things won’t, and below that, another point below which nothing will work.
And I think we’re in the grey area and moving in the wrong direction.
Which brings me back to that question that I keep repeating and you keep not answering…Report
I mention trust, and you immediately leap to the assertion that liberals have done something to lose the trust of conservatives.
And then keep demanding that we offer a plan to regain it.
Can you not see the absurdity of this?
Here let me try to illustrate it.
“Man, American society needs higher levels of trust.”
“Yeah black people really lost the trust of white people. What is black people’s plan for regaining the trust of white people?
And they should present this plan to me so I can tell them whether or not it will work.”
Do you see the illogic at work?Report
So the argument is that liberals have done nothing wrong (at least to the point where the burden of proof is on the white supremacists)?
This goes back to the note that I kept writing underneath the question that I kept repeating.Report
So we started by asking how to build trust, and you immediately leapt into accusations that your hated outgroup the liberals have done something wrong, and now you’re playing the Grand Inquisitor demanding we confess our sins?
This is not the clever persuasion tactic you think it is.Report
This siht is stupid. The both of you.
Both of you are arguing from premises that are unstated and unshared with the opposite party. And worse, retreating and reiterating the same unsubstantiated premises when called out.
In an alternate universe, Jaybird could be “right”, since in our political culture at this moment, the Right has the trust of the grassroots in ways that the Left doesn’t, therefore Chip’s carping about why doesn’t the Right have to gain somebody’s trust if the Left does, that’s just disingenuous and irrelevant. As that goes double for issues like policing.
Be that as it may, Jaybird has never tried to substantiate this, I’m not even sure he believes it. So he’s just as bad.Report
My belief is that we do not currently have a “high” level of trust and not having a “high” level of collaboration follows from that.
We’re somewhere around “medium”.
I also believe that we are on a vector in the bad direction. Like, we’ll have lower trust in a decade than we do this decade (and we have lower trust this decade than we did last decade).
And to turn things around will require, among other things, an accounting of Things That Went Wrong.
Like, you know the 12 Steps? I’m talking about #4, baby. Some light #5 sprinkled in there too.
And if we are unwilling to do that, then trust will continue to travel in the bad direction and arresting how bad it gets is the best we can hope for.
(Of course, when I game this out in my head, this ends in Divorce or War. This place is as good a place as any to get indicators of how willing “liberals” are to do the whole Fourth Step.)Report
That’s your belief, but at least as far as this post is concerned, you’ve done nothing to substantiate the proposition that your belief has any meaningful close relationship with reality.
And Chip has his beliefs, and the story is the same there. Between the two of you, you’re stuck like a broken record.Report
That’s your belief, but at least as far as this post is concerned, you’ve done nothing to substantiate the proposition that your belief has any meaningful close relationship with reality.
My goodness. I admit that I thought that “not having a high level of trust/collaboration” was one of the things not in dispute!
For example, I could point to the lack of collaboration between the two main political parties as a smaller measure and, for larger measures, I could compare to countries that we agree have high trust/collaboration.
“Which countries are those?”, you may ask.
Let me copy/paste this from a comment of Lee’s on this very page:
“Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada”
Perhaps we could look at stuff like “Nationalized Health Care” as one measure of “High Collaboration”. Perhaps “Robust Social Welfare System” as another.
And, in comparison to those “High” countries, I’d say that we do not qualify as “High”.Report
Well yes, that tends to be one of the things you find out when to try to resolve mindless repetitions like this, is that certain things which you thought weren’t in dispute, or maybe even shouldn’t be in dispute, are in fact in dispute (not trying to speak for Chip here obv).
Or at least as likely, the way you meant a certain proposition, like this one, is much much different than somebody else interprets it.
Yeah you could have but you didn’t (heretofore).
Or in another case, what happens when Ellen and Keith go the marriage counselor? Why do we think this is a useful metaphor for the failure of meaningful police reform in America? Among other things, Chip has a point. If we don’t know anything about Ellen or Keith, why should the lack of trust be the libs’ fault, assuming lack of trust is the heart of the problem. It could just as easily be the Red Team’s fault.Report
Koz, believe it or not, I honestly thought that “we don’t have a high level of trust/collaboration” was one of the things that had been hammered out (and quite flat) over discussions over the last… oh, let’s say “since Trump” (though we could easily argue “since Obama” or “since Bush II”).
Is this one of those things where we’re not allowed to remember the discussion from last time, every time?Report
Jaybird, there’s plenty of high trust and high collaboration, except for all those jerks who go around betraying us all the time. You gotta be careful these days, because you can’t really be sure who you can trust and collaborate with…Report
Yeah, then in that case you should cite that and move on. And if that’s what Chip complains about, then you know where the problem is.
And this case, you also assumed without substantiating that:
1. Lack of trust is why we don’t have radical police reform.
2. Lack of trust is functionally equivalent to Chip and libs in general having lost trust.
3. Complaining about the other party is a copout.
Chip (rightly) is complaining about #2 here but if anything he’s even worse that you are. White nationalism and Reconstruction have nothing to do with the price of tea in China and Chip never even really tries to argue his case.
My guess is Chip is thinking about Reconstruction as an example of lack of power, and then he applies that to a situation that’s about the lack of trust, which isn’t really the same thing at all.
I’m pretty sure that’s right, but I can’t say for certain because neither one of you is making a good faith effort to be coherent.Report
I would argue that lack of trust is why we don’t have a lot of things and that includes, but is not limited to, “radical” police reform.
(Wait. What does “radical” mean? Like, getting rid of QI and that sort of thing? Firing police who screw up? Is that the definition of “radical”?)
Like, the lack of trust is why we have a problem with gun control or abortion as well.
On top of that, I clarified that it’s not a 1 or 0, but a gradient. I’m making the point that we don’t have high trust, not that we have no trust.
The whole argument of us moving from a relatively better place to a relatively worse one is one that strikes me as being fairly self-evident.
“Complaining about the other party is a copout”
I actually argued that it’s a salve to make oneself feel better but doesn’t move the ball forward.
When I want to know “What’s your plan to move the ball forward?”, I get answers like, and let me copy and paste this, “South Africa after apartheid, East Bloc countries after Communism, American Reconstruction, postwar anywhere.”
Now, let me say that using all of those examples seems to be an indicator of, at least, an acknowledgment that we are not in a high-trust situation.
But, sure. Let’s rebuild the wheel. Let’s argue that anybody who wants to change things needs to shoulder the burden of proof.
The only problem with that might be if we also want to argue that other people are arguing to keep the status quo at the exact same time. I guess it’s a good thing that we haven’t had *THAT* happen!Report
Ok, now you are making more explicit some things you should have spelled out ten comments ago. So, you and I are getting closer to a substantive discussion. That’s not exactly what I intended, but whatevs.
Like disbanding the Camden Police Department is radical. It could be good or bad, but it is definitely radical.
It’s also useful to point out that there are more possibilities circulating around than simply lack of trust. There is also a lack of desire, or political need. People are aware that crime was not as big a problem from say, 2005-2015 and municipal police departments were doing their thing back then.
There’s probably a lot of willingness among urban residents and others to return to that state of affairs.
My guess is, here you’re elaborating on something that was never the point of contention in the first place.
My guess is, Chip doesn’t see any need to move the ball forward. He’s content to sit where he is, and wait to cash his lottery ticket when his number comes in. And when that happens, ie some faction of Warren-ite GOP-hating lib Demos take over, he won’t have to worry about who trusts who to reform police. That’s just one of the things that will come out in the wash, along with white nationalism, Reconstruction and whatever.
Now, at a substantive level, that is obscenely stupid. But again, it’s just a guess because Chip isn’t any more coherent than you are.Report
Koz, please understand: I thought that this stuff had been made explicit over discussions over multiple years.
I do not mind making stuff re-explicit. These are not premises that I am picking up reactively in response to whatever argument the flavor of the news cycle happens to embrace.
Like disbanding the Camden Police Department is radical. It could be good or bad, but it is definitely radical.
Well, the question was asking “what would you replace the police with?”, I figured that the question was asking for a detailed plan and, well, I didn’t want to write about a detailed plan but figured that something that has worked in the past (like actually worked, not “Reconstruction worked” worked) could provide a usable template.
There’s probably a lot of willingness among urban residents and others to return to that state of affairs.
There’s also a discussion closer to the bottom of the page that discusses DAs who lean on Type I vs. Type II errors. Chesa provides a great Type II error kinda DA.
For what it’s worth, I agree that residents in a lot of high-crime areas would like the pendulum to swing back a bit.
My guess is, here you’re elaborating on something that was never the point of contention in the first place.
Koz, you said “Lack of trust is functionally equivalent to Chip and libs in general having lost trust.”
Now, there are different ways to parse “lost trust”.
One is “LOST ALL OF THE TRUST COMPLETELY”. This leads to assertions that one cannot believe that someone thinks that we don’t have any trust in society whatsoever.
The other is “moved down the gradient from a better place to a worse place”. By elaborating the way I did, I wanted to steer away from phrasings like “lost trust” to more precise ones.
My guess is, Chip doesn’t see any need to move the ball forward.
I would tend to agree. But I base that on his answers to follow-up questions (as well as his refusal to answer other ones).Report
Well yeah, this is an example of why at least sometimes is better to spell things out explicitly. Probably, you and Chip are on the same page, at least to the extent that the failures of American criminal justice, especially municipal police are severe enough to justify radical reforms.
For normie Americans, it’s not just that they favor the crime profile of 2010 over what we have today. It’s also that they understand that to mean empowering our criminal justice institutions, eg, police et al, to lower crime.
So even if normie Americans trusted you and Chip in some way, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they would support Jaybird-Chip Criminal Justice Reform because they formulate the problem in a completely different way.
Yeah, I don’t think that changes anything. From here it doesn’t seem that Chip is any more interested in marginally improving trust through climbing the trust gradient any more than he was interested in regaining lost trust.
Tbh, Chip is at least as much to blame here, probably more. What Chip means by trust is “Give me and my buddies all the political power in America”, which of course is not at all what trust means. And irrelevant beyond that even, as we’re in a circumstance now where American politics is running full throttle in the opposite direction.Report
Oh, if you want to know what my non-Camden ideas about police reform look like, you can read this lovely little essay from a couple of years ago called “Altering the Police Paradigm“. Oscar wrote it.
I would add a couple of things (asset forfeiture reform, that sort of thing) but, hey, the foundation to the reform that I think would make things better is in there.
Moreover, I think that the stuff in there will result in *INCREASED* trust (for the police, anyway).Report
I think it’s very fair to point out BSDI and it’s both sides fault.
Actually imho it’s the result of technological changes in communication and no one’s “fault”.
My proposed solution for low trust is easy: Nothing. Acknowledge it exists and move on.
That’s a very simple and easy plan. It also means we give up on policies that require very high trust.
Now imho “high trust” often means “the other side will give up their culture and accept my desired policies” so there’s that.
Now if you want to have high trust institutions & society, then you need another plan.
If you don’t have that plan then you’re stuck trying to implement extremely high trust policies (gun disarmament) in a society that is low trust and will never follow them.Report
Hey, you’re a Republican, right?
What have Republicans done to lose the trust of the American people, and what is your plan to recover it?
Be specific, and list the mistakes and moral errors that you all have done. We need a full and complete confession in order to grant you mercy and forgiveness.Report
Asked and already answered.
Root cause is technology (I’ll spare everyone my reasoning).
And we plan to do nothing to recover it. It’s much easier to just make plans that accept society as it is, i.e. low trust.Report
Pretty sure general Grant compelled Lee to accept a unified US at Appomattox.Report
I’ve always thought the lesson from the American Civil War was somewhat narrower: you can’t leave unless enough states give permission.Report
The lesson from the Civil War is Reconstruction.
That is, instead of holding the traitors accountable for their crimes, like a sort of American Nuremburg Trials, the leaders of the rebellion were allowed to remain free and valorized for their efforts.
Instead accepting their defeat like say, the Germans did after WWII, and pursuing a program of De-Confederate-ization, the Confederates rose up again and again in mob violence to where even federal troops were unable to contain it, and retreated.
The Confederates won a partial victory in 1876 when they were allowed to regain control over their territory and re-institute apartheid.
This is the lesson we need to grasp when looking at Jan 6.
So long as one group of Americans refuse to accept the rest of us as equal citizens, we can never trust them.Report
The implication of “wanting high trust” is you DON’T pass laws that large numbers of people view as a cultural cramdown and refuse to obey.
That means you never put yourself in a situation where you need door to door searches for guns on the third of the country that has them.
So no mass disarmament, we keep the gun as a civil right, and we live with the occasional mass shooting.
Or am I misreading this and you want both high trust and door to door searches for a cultural cramdown?Report
Again, you’re deliberately rejecting the possibility of success.
Today, as during Reconstruction, white nationalists reject the idea of accepting the majority of Americans as their equals.
And so the idea you’re proposing is to surrender to them, and allow them to strip the majority of American citizens of their Constitutional rights.Report
Chip, you are proposing that we strip vast numbers of Americans of their Constitutional right to a gun.
You are also claiming this will result in everyone trusting you? Or maybe it’s that if everyone trusts you it will work?
The problem is when you say you’re going to strip vast numbers of people of their Constitutional rights, you’re also saying that you can’t be trusted.Report
“Chip, you are proposing that we strip vast numbers of Americans of their Constitutional right to a gun.
You are also claiming this will result in everyone trusting you?”
Dare to dream, bro!Report
The vast majority wants gun rights to be restricted, remember?
Your own link shows that 87% want gun regulations left in place, with over 50% wanting more restrictions.
Yes Americans are very trusting of gun regulations.Report
You did a motte and bailey there.
“Gun regulations” is not “full disarmament with door to door searches”.
A third of the country lives in a household that has a firearm. What do you plan to do about that which is going to enable that high trust society you want?
I would suggest doing “nothing”. That’s easy and would help enable trust. It will also require we live with the occasional mass shooting.Report
YikesReport
I’m all for dissolving all public employee unions. Mostly because there isn’t a true adversary on the other side of the bargaining table, but also most of the employees in the union probably already have civil service protection.Report
Maybe if we made it really hard for the malcontents capable of getting weapons that could do a lot of killing than we wouldn’t have this issue. I mean we would still have socially maladjusted malcontents but their ability to kill dozens at a time would be gone. It might be a small improvement.
Provision of mental healthcare could be better provided if we had an actually functioning health care system supported by, gasp, taxes, rather than a tax supported healthcare system that basically seeks to deny care and get a bunch of insurance providers really wealthy.Report
This is naïve.
What we have is a series of copy cat crimes based on Columbine where the two had a budget of zero and guns were the best they could do. If I were going to do something like this I wouldn’t use a gun.
Please do not offer suggestions on how to maximize murder.
It’s like suicide. For all the involvement of guns with suicide, if we got rid of them something else would take their place. Japan’s suicide rate is roughly the same as ours and South Korea’s is higher.Report
You can’t predict crime generally. What you can do is have real gun control that makes it very hard for people to get guns. Gun nuts and own the libs types will argue until they are blue in the face that it doesn’t work but this defies the evidence of the rest of the world. The United States does have much more gun violence and death than most other places except maybe countries that are best described as failed states.Report
They were locking the school down because an someone escaped a detention camp? Seems like a school would be the last place they’d want to go. (Or any other place they stick out like a sore thumb.)Report
As a general practice if there is someone known or believed to be unsafe in the vicinity of the school, they do a lockdown drill to secure the perimeter and keep everyone indoors. Heck, we do this for bears.
It’s important to note that not all “lockdowns” are the same… we have four different types if memory serves. But the two primary ones are “Secure the perimeter to keep isolate the students/teachers from a suspected threat outside of the school but allow things to continue as usual inside” (kids often don’t even know this one is happening) and there is a “Secure against a suspected threat inside the school.”
The specifics probably vary but hearing that a school had lockdown drills due to someone escaping some sort of law enforcement detainment A) makes sense and B) probably had minimal impact on the school day. At worst, recess was cancelled/delayed.Report
If memory serves, what would happen is a car full of illegal immigrants would stop after a high speed chase and everyone in it would scatter. They’re technically criminals and so on and so on. So the school goes to lock down.
So the school has effectively had 50 false alarms in two months.Report
Boy who cried wolf, etc., etc.Report
“The school and the police weren’t very competent at avoiding this because it’s something they never thought they’d really have to deal with. A little more effective hardening might have stopped him because he wasn’t very good at this… although if they’d had more hardening he might have done something else.”
The police being incompetent at this because they didn’t think it is something they’d ever have to deal with is, simply, completely unacceptable. I don’t think you’re wrong… but I don’t think we should just accept that as an acceptable attitude for police officers.
As you indicate, schools routinely practice for these sorts of situations. This school had 50 such “practices.” I know people shudder at ‘lockdown drills’ becoming a routine part of school life. But we do fire drills so why not do lockdown drills? And if you are worried about “scaring” the kids, it isn’t so hard to just call them “Safety Drills” and explain that sometimes you are safest leaving the building and sometimes you are safest staying inside. How do I know? This is how I do it with my kids. Hell, “fire drills” as a term is scary as crap for many kids. And guess what? Fire drills works! A little Googling tells me that less than 3% of schools experience a structure fire per year… but that on average just one person dies in ALL (3000+) school fires each year. And that has A LOT to do with fire drills. There are other factors as well… such as fire doors and construction and what not… but still… that’s a pretty damn effective process. Why can’t we do the same for lock down drills? For schools AND the G-D police? After Sandy Hook, the local police came and did an after-hours walk through of our building to familiarize themselves with the facility. After Parkland, NYPD officers came and did a similar thing. If this isn’t standard, why the heck not? Sure, these are exceedingly rare events… but it doesn’t take a ton of practice to develop a switch you can flip when the poop hits the fan. How do I know? Because in addition to safety drill training and practice, I’m also required to take First Aid/CPR practice every two years. It’s usually a 4-hour session that we try to get through as quickly as possible. And yet… I’ve successfully performed abdominal thrusts on two choking children to clear their airway and witness another teacher successfully perform CPR on a child who had a seizure. For both of us… we didn’t even think about what to do or try to remember our training… because regular practice helped us develop a switch, we could flip it and we saved lives. And I’m not going to pretend to be a hero… that was my job and I did my job.
We need entering schools with active shooters to be part of police officers’ jobs and we need them to be trained so they know what to do and can quickly and decisively snap into action.
If we can mobilize America’s school personnel to evacuate buildings to the tune of 1 fire casualty per year, we sure as heck can mobilize America’s police officers to respond more effectively to active shooter drills in schools (and elsewhere).Report
We’ve selected for the police dropping the ball, so we’ve got the police dropping the ball. Something else is the typical cop will need to deal with this maybe once every 100,000(?) years or so. This is a lottery rare event.
Most illegal immigrants aren’t serious criminals. They’ve effectively had 50 false alarms in 2 or 3 months. Call it one a day.Report
Are they heroes or not?Report
How often will teachers need to deal with it?
Why are we trained and prepared but the police aren’t?
It doesn’t even need to be school-specific training. Did they have active shooter training? Do they have a quick-and-easy way to bring up the floor plans of large buildings in their community?Report
These teachers got written up in the what-went-wrong report as routinely using rocks to prevent doors from closing and only locking doors during active inspections right before the inspector came.
The cops were there three minutes after the shooting started. Closed+locked doors would have saved a lot of lives, maybe everyone but the shooter.
Further the shooter stopped shooting right after the cops showed up. The expectation that the cop’s delay got people killed is reasonable but it will be a minority of the victims (maybe even zero).
These teachers got more people killed than the cops did. They had the training, they never expected to be in this situation.Report
I’m talking about what happened once the incident started. Yes, how we handle security doors is important but that is a separate conversation.
The cops saying, “Well, we didn’t really know what to do,” is simply unacceptable. That is my point. Do they or do they not have active shooter training? If the answer is that they don’t, why the hell not? If the answer is that they do, why the hell didn’t it kick in?Report
It really isn’t. The number of dead people created by the cops’ clownish behavior might have been zero.
If we’re trying to prevent dead bodies, teachers leaving the door open for the killer is the low hanging fruit.
I think the stated reason is he’d stopped shooting by the time they were there and they thought they were dealing with a enclosed hostage situation.
A more reasonable answer is the point guy, who was the chief and in charge, made a series of bad calls… which look suspiciously like they were made to avoid responsibility and/or avoid charging a gun.Report
I think the “Keep the doors locked” plan is more complicated than most folks realize. Which is why it is so often undermined by the very people it is intended to protect. Who have to balance their minute-to-minute needs against protecting against what you correctly identify as a lottery event.
The “Keep the Doors Locked” Plan (KTDLP for now) ignores how school life actually works. When most people propose some version of a KTDLP, they argue for a single access point that is secured and monitored.
This presents MANY issues for teachers and students. Imagine a Kindergarten teacher who takes his 25 students out to the playground in the back of the school. He is alone with his students. He walks them out through the main door, it locks behind him, and he walks his group around to the back of the building.
What happens if someone needs to use the bathroom? Or someone gets hurt? He can’t just send them in to the bathroom or the nurse because the only accessible door is all the way around the building. So… he props the back door open. Because the odds of a child getting hurt on the playground when he’s helping escort the child to the access door is so much higher than the risk someone accesses the building in the interim. So… we prop the doors. Not because we are lazy or want to allow shooters into our buildings… but because it is the best way to address day-to-day issues that arise and which directly impact student safety and well-being.
Other KTDLPs rely on teachers being able to open doors with key cards or proximity readers. These are a much better plan. But they cost several thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the specifics (e.g., which system, how many doors). Who is going to pay for that? Some back of the envelope math says we could buy the necessary equipment for every school in America (this doesn’t include pre-schools, day care centers, etc.*) for $1.3B. Then you add in install costs. That isn’t terribly cost prohibitive but… who is going to pony up the dough?
The other KTDLP relies on classrooms having better ratios than 25:1… making sure that second number is always greater than 1. Well, now you’re talking about hiring hundreds of thousands of teachers at a time when people are fleeing the profession. So… while that would have some amazing benefits beyond safety and well-being, we sure as poop ain’t about to invest the trillions of dollars it’d take to actually improve our teaching corps.
So… yes… keeping the doors locked would have saved lives in Uvalde. But it also would have had negative consequences each and every day a shooter wasn’t approaching the building. So… what is our cost-benefit analysis there?
If we want to pony up the $1.3B or so it’d cost to put in proper security doors at every school in America, let’s do it. Who will sign up to help foot that bill?
* I did a bit more sleuthing and if we included every type of day care center, we’d be looking at an additional $8B.Report
You’re making risk trade offs and not valuing [dead kid] at infinity. You think totally restructuring your life and work to drop that already low chance to zero isn’t workable.
That’s sane, that’s sensible, we do that for cars, pools, dogs, lightning, and so on.
When I say restructuring society to eliminate this risk is unrealistic, I’m pointing to the behavior that you’re showcasing.
Teachers aren’t willing to do their part to drop this risk to zero. You shouldn’t expect vast numbers of people to turn their lives upside down when you’re not.Report
You shouldn’t expect vast numbers of people to turn their lives upside down when you’re not.
Unfortunately, the people who are unwilling to turn their lives upside down over this include the cops.
The reason we’re discussing teachers doing heroic things is that there have been so very many systematic failures that we’ve reached the point where “what if the cops refuse to do their jobs and, instead, prevent other cops from doing their job” is not a hypothetical.Report
That so many things had to go wrong is actually good news. When stuff works we don’t hear about it. Similarly I’m happy that major news media is mostly refusing to say his name.
Implication is we’re getting better and these events are getting rarer. Now I’d feel better if we had math saying that.Report
I suppose. But now we’re dealing with the aftermath of catastrophic failure and our go-to solutions seem to involve “what can we make teachers do?” rather than “okay, why in the hell do we have a police force that is more interested in handcuffing police that want to go in to stop an active shooter that has shot his own wife than in stopping the active shooter?”
Like, that second question?
That’s the interesting question.
“Should teachers carry?” is a question about Plan F or Plan G rather than something around Plan A or Plan B.
I mean, if we’ve reached the point where asking teachers to carry is on the table, IT MAKES SENSE TO GO TO GUN CONTROL FIRST.Report
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/03/the-lessons-of-valujet-592/306534/
This article has stuck with me ever since I read it 25 years ago. The contention is that even bad systems usually work. The problem is how can you change them once the flaws are exposed.
Dark Matter castigates Kazzy for not doing his part in making sure children are safe in schools. Kazzy says the existing security measures are inconvenient and easily circumvented. I would submit it in in all of society’s interest to ensure its children are safe no matter where they go. If a shooter has gotten to the door of the school unimpeded, the failure has already manifested itself.Report
I suppose that that’s a good point, but remember the security measures from when you were in school?
We used to have a society where those measures made sense.
Now we don’t.Report
I finished high school in 1981. Security measures back then were teachers hassling students about not having a hall pass. Back when the NRA was more interested in gun safety than ensuring any nutjob with a few bucks could lay his hands on a rifle.Report
“Teachers aren’t willing to do their part to drop this risk to zero. You shouldn’t expect vast numbers of people to turn their lives upside down when you’re not.”
Who am I asking to turn their lives upside down? I’m asking that all police be trained in active shooter protocols and that departments have plans in place should an incident occur at major facilities (e.g., schools, hospitals, malls) in their jurisdiction.
“We didn’t know what to do,” should not be an acceptable response from the police in this situation.Report
What this means practically is that we’ll funded departments will have training and a plan, and rinky dinks won’t, hence we will only see such tragedy in rinky dink places.Report
This is actually a really interesting point. I’ve been thinking about the security at my son’s preK (as I’m sure many sadly have been). They have lots of entrances with heavy, automatically locking doors, but all of the staff have key fobs. Indeed most of the class rooms have an exit directly to the outside, and of course good teacher student ratios. The result is it’s tough for an intruder to get in but also easy for people inside to escape.
Of course this is an expensive place, and as you note, probably not something many (most?) schools could implement.Report
It’s an expensive place AND it is a place that must market to parents and “safety and security” is often a top priority for parents when it comes to day cares. So… not only do they have the funds to put in place such a system, but they have specific incentives to do (potentially at the expense of other aspects of the program… which isn’t a knock by any means).
I’d love every school and child care center to have such a system. But… it ain’t free.Report
It also isn’t perfect.
At best it deters a shooter from going to [this place] and he goes somewhere else. Witness the Pulse shooter giving up the idea of shooting up Disney World and doing Pulse.
At worst they’re still vulnerable to higher quality plans and/or inside information. I.e. a former student targets it.Report
Well, we’re all going to die anyway one day so why do anything about anything?Report
In addition to a cost/benefit eval, we also need to have a decent understanding of the benefits.
It’s in the benefit of the school to not get shot up.
However the benefit to society may be zero. Disney’s security was successful, but only at transferring the problem to Pulse.
We can make the lottery harder to win, and should, but all this pearl clutching when it happens somewhere just encourages them.Report
This is true but it’s also worth remembering that a little bit can go a long way. Most of these people are not James Bond villain geniuses identifying and exploiting weaknesses no one else thought of. They’re crazed idiots who want to get caught or die.
So not every expense is worth it, but to draw a parallel to other low probability, high horror events, it was totally worth it to reinforce cockpit doors after 9/11.Report
Maybe I’m biased but I’d argue prioritizing the safety of children in a building they are more or less required to be in makes sense for society.Report
Responding further, DM, it does seem like there is something about school that draws these people out. Perhaps it is a media reporting bias, but we do seem to hear about more school shootings than mall shootings, especially when considering the type of mass shooting event under discussion. If it is a media reporting bias, that creates a really bad feedback loop.
But if these people are going for maximum carnage, it makes sense that they’d target schools. And as such, for this and the other reason I stated, it makes sense to invest a little bit of money (in the grand scheme of things) to make school perimeters harder without making school life harder or riskier.Report
Sure. I agree to all that.
“Success” bias too I would think.Report
“It really isn’t. The number of dead people created by the cops’ clownish behavior might have been zero.”
Was this written prior to the revelation that a police office had his gun trained on the shooter as he walked into the building but didn’t take the shot because he couldn’t get an order to?Report
That’s news. Link?Report
That was info from a couple weeks ago.Report
Wow. I didn’t realize it came out that long ago. Every excuse someone comes up to excuse the police goes by the wayside eventually in this horrific event.Report
Jaybird, my understanding is that it’s been established that the cop was looking at a sports coach, not the actual shooter.Report
I wish we had a news media that allowed us to say something like “they didn’t have a correction, therefore the story stands”.Report
Thank you, I hadn’t heard.
Hmm. 148 yards on a moving target, well past a football field, with no setup. That seems like a tough shot even without a school as the back drop.
Not sure how reasonable it is to think he should have made the shot.
Also not sure if there had even been shots fired at that point. Wasn’t the lesson of Tamara Rice that we don’t want them to shoot with imperfect information?Report
There’s a big timing difference between the 2.Report
The report up top found that the man the cop sought permission to kill wasn’t the shooter, but a gym coach.
“In a subsequent DPS interview, the officer in question described the person he saw not as ‘the shooter’ but as ‘a person in black toward the back of the school, but kids were behind that individual.’ DPS interview (June 13, 2022). These DPS interview reports do not include or support the detail suggested in the ALERRT report that a Uvalde police officer ‘observed the suspect carrying a rifle outside the west hall entry.’ Based on its review of evidence to date, this Committee concludes that it is more likely that the officer saw Coach Gonzales dressed in black near a group of schoolchildren than that there was an actual opportunity to shoot the attacker from over 100 yards away, as assumed by ALERRT’s partial report.”
pp. 42-43.Report
Thanks, PD and DD. I stand corrected.Report
I didn’t see that as a correction, you raised an interesting point and I thought it had to be add discussed somewhere in the report. It was in the footnotes, so DM probably didn’t see it.Report
In a related story, the new SF district attorney is promising to “get tough on crime” and ramp up the War On Drugs by rejecting the plea deals offered by her predecessor.
This is the flip side of the “Moar Gunz” idiocy.
That the only possible options are the dictatorship of government agents with guns, or the dictatorship of self appointed vigilantes with guns.
The idea of a civil society is dismissed out of hand.Report
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to be unjust:
1. Type One Errors
2. Type Two Errors
A type one error, in this case, is the police cracking down on innocent people (or cracking down too hard on guilty-but-not-THAT-guilty people)
A type two error, in this case, is the police failing to crack down on criminals
We have just had one helluva Type Two Error Kinda Prosecutor. Like, even when he was prosecuting murderers for murder, he would use language that dismissed the gravity of what they had done.
Unfortunately, Justice consists of both “not cracking down on innocent pepole” *AND* “cracking down on criminals”.
A DA that cracks down on criminals is something that people want.
It’s good that Chesa did such a grand job on not cracking down on innocent people, though. Good job avoiding those type one errors, Chesa!Report
The two types are really only one type.
Arresting an innocent person means a guilty person goes free.
Devoting resources to scofflaws allows serious criminals to act with impunity.
And this case, rejecting plea deals will almost certainly result in many cases being dismissed entirely, allowing the guilty to roam free while the innocent languish in jail.
https://missionlocal.org/2022/07/brooke-jenkins-jail-backlog-pulling-time/
If the only government tool you have is a hammer, every citizen looks like a nail.Report
While I appreciate that you can’t (or won’t) tell the difference between the errors, people who do tell the difference will see that we just got rid of a situation where the DA bragged about making Type II errors and has been replaced with a DA who has said that they will no longer be making Type II errors.
Perhaps when the DA has been in office as long as George Gascón has been we will be able to say “This DA is a failure.”
I think that declaring her a failure at this point is premature.Report
“…replaced with a DA who has said that they will no longer be making Type II errors.”
PorqueNoLosDos.gif
I expect all around competence from the people who are trying to put me in jail.Report
I am not that sure that we can ignore scofflaws that much. The Anglophone Left,
especially in the United States and Great Britain, seems to be trying to build high trust society in a place with a lot of assholes. Making matters worse is that in heterogeneous society, whether asshole behavior is scene as such depends on how sympathetic you are to the group that the asshole belongs to. This is why white people who present as working class get a big pass from MAGATs or the Jacobin crowd while the Intersectional Left tens to look the other way at asshole behavior from groups they feel sympathetic to.
You can’t create political support for a social democratic policy when you have lots people angry at different groups of scofflaws and tell the voters that they shouldn’t worry but things will get better once the proper policy is in place. People do not like paying to support groups they identify as assholes or proudly dysfunctional. The more scofflaws, the less chance of getting liberal and further left policy enacted.Report
I agree that scofflaws and public disorder needs to be addressed. What is meant by “addressing” is the contention.
What the voters have repeatedly said they want, through initiatives, is for drug addicts to be diverted into treatment not jail.
Yet the “tough on crime” lobby has refused to accept that, and refuses to fund or staff those programs.
In Los Angeles, the city’s businesses have partnered with the city to create Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) which have two teams, one a set of people going around cleaning graffiti and trash, and a security detail that rides around on bikes resolving minor conflicts and petty problems.
Its very efficient at nipping the Broken Windows stuff in the bud. Because the fact is, most problems don’t require a gun.
But they do require funding and commitment , and lack the emotional satisfaction of “throw ’em in jail”.
As the article pointed out, by refusing the plea deals, there is a good chance that a lot of criminals are going to walk free due to the new DAs policy. But she will get some good press for “getting tough”.Report
(From my relatives) My impression is a lot of drug addicts don’t think they have a problem and don’t want treatment. Ditto with mental illness.Report
One thing that most of the treatment side wants but doesn’t exactly say is for the drug addicts to be out of sight. Where I think our side as problems is that many of the activists do not like this and want the problems to be in the face of the normies because reasons.Report
Squeaky wheel gets the grease.Report
I am coming to the conclusion that the elites have largely realized that the worst thing likely to happen to them is a bit of snark and then they can cry all the way to the bank as the expression goes.Report
RE: False Alarms (crying wolf).
47 times, not 50. But yes, they had 47 lock downs.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/07/19/texas-border-control-tactics-uvalde-school-shooting/10093512002/Report
“It’s good law enforcement practice that if you have a bailout situation near a school, you’re going to lock down the school for safety and security reasons,” Perdue told USA TODAY.”
These kind of statements are always taken as gospel, but the rationale behind them is never explained.Report
Police often have only two response positions; do nothing, do way too much.
If you have a bailout, does a school need to go into lockdown, or can the school simply pass word to all the staff that the external doors are locked for the time being, and avoid the whole dramatic lockdown thing?Report
What a brilliant idea.Report
Well, we do have that.
The terminology and specifics vary, but you have two basic kinds of lockdowns:
1.) One involves securing the perimeter of the building and proceeding as normal within, perhaps with heightened awareness from anyone in an outward facing security position. This is what you get when there is someone presumed dangerous in the area. Or bears. We sometimes get this for bears. Depending on school protocol, students may not even know this is happening. There may be a code that is announced via the PA (e.g., “Will Mr. Wells please report to the office?” and all the faculty/staff know there is no Mr. Wells).
2.) The other is when there is an identified or presumed threat inside the building, such as an active shooter. This is where all doors are locked, shades are drawn, and the school goes into a full lockdown as you are imagining it.
The thing is, both of these are often referred to as a “lockdowns” so just hearing how many lockdowns a school had doesn’t really tell you anything about what actually happened during them.Report
Those two tracks are what our kids experienced. I would add that for bomb threats, the students are walked away from the building. These became pretty common about seven years ago, and so they started making credibility determinations. AFAIK they’re always kid pranks, frequently incentivized by getting out of school, so instead of giving them what they want, the school confers with law enforcement about the seriousness of the threat and then text parents to inform them that this happened.
In any event, there was not a lot of detail in the report that I could find from skimming about the policy. The main things I saw was that there had been a significant increase in bailouts in the last 18 months, and school parents had offered to pay for off-duty police to be at the school.Report
Yea, there are other “security plans” or whatever. In my town, it seems that unsubstantiated bomb threats get a sort of in-between of the two lockdowns, mainly to keep kids out of the hallway as much as possible to allow for whatever sweeps might be necessary. I don’t think they evacuate them unless there is much credibility behind the threat, for the reasons you mention.
Even when we do evacuate, there are different scenarios, such as if we have to walk to an alternate location or can just be outside the school.
No plan is perfect but there whole “respond to a potential threat” protocol is more involved than most outsiders realize, which is why simply citing the number of lockdowns is kind of useless and feels a little sloppy from whomever wrote the report (I haven’t read it and am trying to offer more general perspective than a specific analysis of what did/didn’t happen).
Also of note: Most states/districts have legal requirements in terms of how many of which type of safety drill (i.e., practice) must take place. For instance, in NY State, I’m pretty sure we have to conduct one fire drill per month. Stuff like that.
In some places, depending on what they’re willing to count, actual responses can count towards the required “practices.”
So depending on the local laws/regulations, schools may be having multiple “lock downs” every year even absent any threat.
Also… bears. Bears trigger lock downs.Report
The more intense words virtue signals that you’re ready and prepared.
That’s way more important than actually being ready and prepared.Report
So you have “on alert” & “locked down”, but both are reported as lockdowns?
That’s helpful…Report
Like I said, the terminology differs and the exact protocols differ but overall, you’re going to have different emergency responses which some folks might just lump together as “lock downs.”
I don’t know if that is what happened here.
I was responding to this specific question you asked:
“If you have a bailout, does a school need to go into lockdown, or can the school simply pass word to all the staff that the external doors are locked for the time being, and avoid the whole dramatic lockdown thing?”
Everywhere I’ve taught does have a differentiated response.
FWIW, my stepdaughter has talked about “lock downs” at her school, all of which were of the “on alert” variety but which she described as “lock downs.” So I don’t know who is calling what what… but I do know that we have these softer responses and that some people at least call them lock downs.Report
I’m just saying words matter.
If a school says they had 26 lockdowns this past year, that sends a message to the public. But if all of those ‘lockdowns’ were just “on alert”, then the reality is not accurately reflected.Report
The threat level has moved from yellow to orange.Report
Related:
West Hollywood cut a few sheriff’s deputies. It fueled a national firestorm on crime, defunding
In 2012, the city paid $12.4 million for 67 deputies. Last year, it paid more than $20 million for 60 deputies — an average of about $330,000 per deputy, according to a Sheriff’s Department report.
“It’s really expensive,” said Marcel Rodarte, executive director of the California Contract Cities Assn., adding that the average figure covers training, administrative overhead and pensions. “It’s why it’s the biggest line item for just about every city.”
In February, the West Hollywood Public Safety Commission, an advisory board appointed by the City Council, made a controversial recommendation: reduce the sheriff’s contract by more than $3 million, or about 10 deputies, and redirect the money to social services.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-19/la-me-west-hollywood-sheriff-deputies-crime
The gist of the article is to show how even in an ostensibly liberal city, the power of the OUTTACONTROLCRIME panic is very potent. The level of crime is about what it was pre-pandemic, but “feelz” higher, depending on who you ask or what their agenda is.
Police are the one government bureaucracy which can never seem to be challenged even when it is financially crippling. The unarmed “ambassadors” are highly effective at stopping crime before it starts, but lack the dramatic impact of a man with a gun. So voters tend to want more men with guns.Report
Yet another indicator that while journalists might be liberal, media as an organization is still more concerned with profit over political bias. Otherwise we’d hear less about dramatic crimes and police actions, and more about the unarmed interventions that make a difference.Report
I month or so ago, I awoke around 3AM to hear someone crying out for help on the street below.
It wasn’t the usual drunks arguing or crazy people yelling incoherently, but a man repeatedly crying out “Help me! Please, someone help me!”
So I went down to investigate and found a man curled up in a fetal position in the gutter shivering and swatting at some invisible attacker. He was obviously mentally ill, and believed he was being attacked. Terrified, shaking and nearly weeping in terror from the power of his delusions.
I pondered calling 911 to ask for assistance then stopped.
Because I played it out in my head, how it might go. The LAPD would show up in response to a citizen call, and try to roust him like they always do, to shoo him down the street. He might comply, or might become even more agitated and then combative, and the incident would end with a taser or baton and him being brutally forced into a squad car and processed through the bowels of the system, sending him into an even worse psychosis.
The streets of America have been called the world’s largest open air asylum, and the municipal police the worlds most inept mental health intervention force. The police, however effective or well intentioned they may be with regard to crime, just aren’t equipped to be mental health counselors, and like the man with only a hammer, to a man with only a gun every problem is a suspect needing to be shot.
There is no 911 for a mental health crisis, no immediate team that can be dispatched at a moment’s notice to intervene and treat. No newspaper or cable news show pundits go on air to angrily demand that politicians DO SOMETHING and add more mental health counselors. But take a penny from the guns & badges crowd, and the howler monkeys lose their shite.
So in the end I left him there, and lay in bed listening to his pitiful cries slowly subsided. He was gone in the morning. But he’s somewhere right now, maybe better, maybe worse. But eventually he will meet his appointment with a taser or baton or gun.Report
988 hotline is the 911 for mental health emergencies
https://apnews.com/article/mental-health-hotline-988-ac50f02b74b8b89be5592be3f3605ff5
It’s brand new, like this month new. Also when I was dealing with a mentally ill family member the powers that be gave me numbers (not 911) with services geared towards that. She’s better now so there’s that.Report
There is no 911 for a mental health crisis, no immediate team that can be dispatched at a moment’s notice to intervene and treat.
Colorado is ahead of California at something? Unthinkable! Nevertheless, all of the cities along the Front Range have added or are planning to add 24/7 professional mental health coresponders for such cases to their police departments. AIUI, the local 911 dispatchers have been trained to recognize when it’s appropriate to pass that info along to the police.
The county I live in now is building a 64-bed mental health facility focused on crisis care to provide a more reasonable choice for law enforcement than just jail or hospital.Report