Uvalde parents lash out after new report clears city police of wrongdoing during 2022 school attack
UVALDE, Texas (AP) — An investigation Uvalde city leaders ordered into the Robb Elementary School shooting cleared local police officers of wrongdoing Thursday, despite acknowledging a series of rippling failures during the fumbled response to the 2022 classroom attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
Several family members of victims walked out in anger midway though a presentation that portrayed Uvalde Police Department officers of acting swiftly and appropriately, in contrast to scathing and sweeping past reports that faulted police at every level.
“You said they did it in good faith. You call that good faith? They stood there 77 minutes,” said Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was among those killed in the attack, after the presentation ended.
Another person in the crowd screamed, “Cowards!”
Jesse Prado, an Austin-based investigator and former police detective who made the report for the Uvalde City Council on Thursday, described several failures by responding local, state and federal officers at the scene that day: communication problems, poor training for live shooter situations, lack of available equipment and delays on breaching the classroom.
“There were problems all day long with communication and lack of it. The officers had no way of knowing what was being planned, what was being said,” Prado said. “If they would have had a ballistic shield, it would have been enough to get them to the door.”
Did anybody honestly think they were gonna do something to them? There was a whole reason while there were marches for police accountability, BLM, and racism during covid.
Nothing changed.
ACAB
Not true!
A bipartisan bill was passed to increase Federal police budgets by something like $40 billion.
Nevermind all that police protest, we just need to give cops more money, I guess, and that will solve everything. /s
And we got the thin blue line flag. Cuz you know police rights or something
Hey, give them a break. They're a persecuted minority!
Or they persecute minorities. One of the two.
Hey, give them a break! They work a dangerous job and just want to go home every day! Never mind that they're not even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs, or that they've willingly signed up to put their lives on the line. No, they just want to go home at night donchaknow!
When you're a cop, you can be both persecuted and persecutor. If only we could harness the power of their flip flopping to generate electricity, the police would finally do more good than harm.
Didn't you read their quote? They didn't go in not because they were cowards who shirked their duty, it was because they didn't have a bulletproof shield
Clearly we just need to keep arming the police until the protection trickles down
The state trooper that finally shot the fucker literally ran in with a shot gun. Fucking cowards.
... This ghoul seriously forced in a talking point asking for more equipment? To grieving parents who watched their kids die while the police were derelict in their duty? 50% of the city budget isn’t enough huh?
Ah. “We’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing” despite the feds openly stating the opposite
Next time just say the shooter is a black man and watch them go.
Yup, once a team decides not to go in, they won't go. There will always be another goalpost to move. If they had the shield, they would be waiting for one more guy, or a specialized unit or a robot to go in.
After driving in from an hour away. Or more.
I dunno. If only people had voted in a change of leadership after a failure of leadership or something.
Uvaldes is majority conservative according to Google, so that wouldn’t have happened. I expect nothing less of Texas
That’s what makes me saddest. Their community was wounded directly and that wasn’t enough to cause change. There’s no hope for them.
It's a maga death cult. Drink bleach, shove a UV light up you ass, take vet meds, vaccine misinformation, and on and on.
That's what you get when you turn your politics into a sports match.
Yeah, unfortunately they got the government they voted for, and decided that nothing was good enough.
"We have tried nothing, and it's not working!"
They just re-elected (primary) the Sheriff on Tuesday. So...
"The officers didn't actually shoot any of the children themselves, so therefor they did nothing wrong."
Did they ever release the body cam footage to confirm that they didn't?
That footage will never, and I mean, NEVER see the light of day. It will have to be leaked to get out.
If they did no wrong, then they would release it. Since they haven't released it and never will, wrong has definitely been done.
If it hasn't been destroyed, it would take burglary of a police station to get it released.
I could have sworn they did release it. I remember people saying that it was graphic because you should see dead children on the floor as the police, nonchalantly, walked around the building.
There have been a few mass shootings with released footage, but Uvalde isn’t one of them. The prevailing theory is that a cop (or multiple cops) accidentally shot a kid (or multiple kids) in the classroom so the footage has been buried. IIRC, at least one kid in the classroom had gunshot wounds that weren’t consistent with the caliber of gun the shooter was using, but matched standard police issue.
Holy fuck, really? I didn't keep up with it at all, but that seems like a pretty significant indictment of the department and the officers there, way beyond even just the extremely laggardly response time and very poor tactical decision making. That's also what I would say is pretty definitive evidence, caliber mismatch isn't something you can really handwave away. Do you got any sources on deck for this?
At this point, I'm starting to think that the officers delaying so long might have actually prevented more children and bystanders from getting killed ... if they had gone in earlier with guns blazing at everything that moved, they probably would have killed a lot of innocent bystanders before realizing who they were actually supposed to shoot in the first place.
Fuck the police.
Comin' straight from the underground.
Since the last yellow drop of piss leaked out of the cowards who were at that school that day the city was always going to find that every single law enforcement officer onsite at the Uvalde massacre acted appropriately.
They are facing massive lawsuits and they will do nothing to give the opposing litigants any ammunition to use against them in court.
CYA, the American Way.
Is this the same Uvalde who just re-elected this dude?
https://people.com/politics/uvalde-texas-voted-for-governor-greg-abbott/
And this dude?
https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas-mayor-election-2023-2262b2eb3596942caa78ad71316af38e
And these two?
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/05/uvalde-sheriff-constable-primary/
So they've (officially) done nothing wrong? Does that imply that it's not wrong to laze about while a shooter—who they obviously knew about—works unimpeded to hollow out classrooms with a fucking carbine?
Legally I think that's exactly what that implies. Cops are under no obligation to defend anyone. They are law enforcement officers, not protection for civilians.
ACAB. Their job is to keep us in line, not protect us.
Always has been.
"Missteps" implies that the police did things.
They failed to act and instead they let children get murdered. I know the SC said that cops don't have to protect you whatsoever, but this is beyond the pale. You have a duty to the American people given that they pay your salary, you fat fucking worthless pitiful excuses for law "enforcement".
The precedent is that an individual officer has no duty to protect any given individual on the basis that the collective police have a responsibility to the public as a whole that outweighs an individual. That argument doesn’t work when the entire department stood by and actively prevented any action against the shooter.
Didn't they just overwhelmingly reelect the sheriff that was part of that fiasco?
It was just the primary. He won't be reelected for another few months.
Ahh, I see that now.
Say it with me folks: ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS Dont forget it
I always saw them more as cunts, personally, but I suppose they can be more than one thing.
Where was this outrage when it came to voting against the same sheriff? Or voting for Abbott?
well in the case ofa sheriff he might have run unopposed
I feel like this is a problem. Is this a problem? This guy thinks so.
Classy, investigator-who-prepared-the-report. What are you, some dumbass cop?
Oh. Yeah. Well.
Yeah.
Of course a former police detective would find the police did nothing wrong.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/no-special-duty
A fantastic episode that basically covers their asses. The police, according to the law, have no special duty/requirement to protect someone who is being attacked.
So every time you see police protecting nazi protesters, remember: they chose to protect those nazis. Just like they chose to let kids bleed out in Uvalde.
Nononooo…
They’re not defending Nazis. They’re defending other cops. Who happen to be Nazis.
"We did nothing wrong! We did NOTHING AT ALL!"
If that collection of utter blunders and incompetence wasn't wrongdoing then what could possibly constitute wrongdoing.
They didn't do a bad job. The problem is that they were a bunch of fucking pussies!
american law american order in action
This isn't a story. They investigated themselves and found nothing. OK. LIGAF why the yokels have to say.
The real story is that the DOJ dropped the hammer on their conduct.
https://cops.usdoj.gov/uvalde
You, personally, are part of the reason this will never go away. The DOJ says 'hey they were bad you guys :(' and then people like you come along and act like justice has been served.
Demand privatization. Stop paying taxes and elect leaders (hell, these parents should run for office themselves) willing to make the hard choices. The cops have had every chance and unlimited budgets to protect the people. They chose to be lazy and scared pussies, instead. Ain't no time for that!
I don't think privatization works out as well as you think it does.
First off, most privatized agencies, all the cops just apply for and now work for a corporate douchelord. They get paid even less than they were before, get even worse training, and even more protection. sure they loose the qualified immunity- maybe- but they get the benefit of corporate-level legal aid.
Secondly, you now have a private, for profit company running law enforcement. conflicts of interest will happen. and chances are solid, they would be the same companies as running prisons, which means officers have every reason to make more arrests than cops already do.
It's not a "think." I saw it work. Check out Camden, NJ. Formally, the murder capital of the world. They privatized the police force and {surprise, surprise} murder dropped significantly.
I understand this topic is unpopular with Lemmings - hell, I don't like the idea of busting unions - but, in the case of the police, I have seen it work well.
P.S. I welcome the downvotes from people who have no clue what they're talking about.
First, Camden isn’t privatized police. They disbanded their police and built a new county-wide police force.
Then, the reform wasn’t without controversy- they basically went full broken windows, issuing summons for shit as trivial as riding bicycles without bells. (Which while the broken windows premise may be valid, the proper response is to fix the damn “windows”)
Next, you’ll note the observation that they rehired most the police force? They girdled everyone, made them reapply and gave extensive scrutiny- including psychological evaluation- and retraining.
Any private corporation will be concerned first and foremost about profits, and not public order; never mind the public good.
Even when private police are “simply” security guards with police powers, employed by corporations; it is likely to be abused- for example enbridge’s privately-contracted police officers that abused the fuck out of protesters and violated their civil liberties
Whatever you want to call it, you can't deny results.