Nor do children give up that right when they go to school. The point is that cops are agreeing to take risks higher than the general public, in exchange for tax dollars. They are free at any time to end that agreement, but if they end it, it may be appropriate to end our payments to them.
More importantly, we’ve got a broad agreement with the institution of policing, that they’ll take those risks. If there’s a broad institutional failure, as there was in this case, we need to re-evaluate how we mitigate those risks.
They are here to protect the moneyed class from you and me and to enrich themselves in the process. Maybe chuck in a bit of low-level ethnic warfare as well. And none of us here are in the “moneyed class” for this purpose. If you think you are, you’re deluding yourself. You might be in the favored ethnic group, though (in this area that would be the Irish Americans, though that’s slowly broadening to other white people).
Let’s be clear–police ought to accept higher risks to themselves to protect public safety. But it is correct to say that legally and constitutionally there is no real requirement to that effect, despite propaganda attempts to portray things otherwise, the police are quite literally not bound to protect you. Maybe they should be, but they are not–anyone seeking a cause of action against police for failing to protect individual persons, is simply not going to prevail in the current legal environment (while somewhat forgotten one of the first posts in this line of dialogue actually speculated that parents are going to sue the police department–they probably will, but the suit probably won’t be successful.)
Watch the video @DavidNRockies posted above. It has the answers to the questions you keep asking. It has a timeline, number of shots fired, who ordered the police to stay back and who left the door open. He even says in no uncertain terms that 19 cops hung around in the hallway while kids were still in danger. Instead of poo pooing everything people here are saying, pay some attention to the sites already given to you.
Then the police should shut the fuck up with all that “we have the most dangerous job that anyone has ever held in the universe” horseshit whenever they need to justify spraying bullets at some brown person holding a cell phone. Either they are capable of using their training and their powers of deadly force when ordinary civilians are in harm’s way, or they aren’t.
That is technically correct, an officer rescued his daughter.
Here are some details per NYT: The officer was off-duty getting a haircut. His wife was a teacher at the school and texted him “active shooter” “help”. The officer borrowed a shotgun from the barber and went to the school. His daughter was located in an area away from where the shooter was contained in the classroom. He evacuated dozens of children, including his daughter.
Yeah people advocating for themselves even though you can poke holes in said advocacy, is probably not going to change. Police have a lobby and unions, and politicians supported by and acting in support of them. Wishing such things go away, or suggesting they should go away because you’ve become aware of some hypocrisy just isn’t the way it works.
Yeah–we know more just in the past few hours because the police spokesperson has literally come out and said the local commander on site made a mistake, so it is fairly unequivocal at this point the initial responders didn’t handle this situation properly.
To answer my own question, yes, the school district has its own police force, with four officers, a lieutenant detective and a chief of police. Quite aside from this event, that seems weird to me.
Did we see what the inside of the school and that classroom look like? That diagram they held up doesn’t tell us what the police were facing. I will continue to wait for the facts to become clear.
I am sorry if I caused you offense. Often my use of language is clumsy.
If the reports of the police activity prove to be true, then the police seem to have behaved dishonorably. Well, what does “honor” even mean?
I hold it simply means doing what you promised to do. The police promised to protect us. They promised to defend the weak. The did not do what they said they would do. They are dishonorable.
Yo didn’t watch it, did you? He explained exactly how those two rooms were laid out and why there was access from one to the other. Give me an example of what you need to know about those classrooms that would make any difference. Did you want to see where all the blood was?
The officer speaking said several times that it was handled badly, and that it was the wrong thing to do. It went against protocol and training. Do you think he was lying? Why would he?
Wow. A police force specifically for the school district, I would have thought, would have had a focused priority, training and plan for an active shooter scenario. Damn.
Who exactly made that promise? If you are asking if our police as an institution has let us down then I have no argument. But individual policemen are not there to satisfy your individual requirements. I don’t know what happened here, I don’t know what promises anyone made, I don’t know what orders they were given, I don’t know what training they had, and I don’t know exactly what the situation at the scene was. I’m not going to call those policemen dishonorable if I don’t know what they have promised to do. I think that is the honorable approach. I know we’re all angry about this situation, I’m angry too, but I want to know the details, not just presumptions.
