from the public-safety-efforts-that-make-the-public-less-safe dept
The bad news keeps pouring in. No doubt, the United States (and US law enforcement) will ultimately walk this debacle off, but it’s going to take just a bit longer this time.
The school shooting in Uvalde has undermined law enforcement’s self-portrayal as the thin line between the public and the criminal element. Hundreds of officers were on the scene, but after a brief exchange of gunfire, the officers retreated for more than an hour as the shooter fired dozens of shots into students and teachers at Robb Elementary.
Since then, law enforcement has been on the defensive. State agencies are still working to prevent the release of recordings captured by officers, under the theory it might show future shooters how inadequate first responder responses actually are. Despite being specifically instructed that sacrificing their safety is a prerequisite in situations where members of the public are in danger, nearly 400 officers remained out of harm’s way, allowing children and teachers to soak up the bullets they were unwilling to risk taking themselves.
There’s no single thing that was done wrong. Instead, there’s a long list of failures that cover everything from an inexplicable search for a room key (ridiculous, considering officers routinely destroy entire houses to gain access when they want to) to the simple fact that quality matters more than quantity when no one seems willing (or even capable) of responding efficiently to an active shooter situation.
One uniquely local contributing factor may have made this worse. Uvalde schools are apparently in lockdown mode frequently. When lockdowns are common, lockdowns just become another annoyance — a thing treated as an inconvenience, rather than a necessity.
When a majority of school lockdowns address no real threat to school safety, the tendency to view the procedure as an annoyance (if not possibly optional) increases. That’s what appears to be the case in Uvalde, Texas, which is about an hour north of the Mexican border. (That would also explain the overabundance of Border Patrol and state police officers at the scene of the shooting.)
Even though it’s an undeniable fact that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than natural born citizens, this is the standard m.o. in much of the state of Texas.
An entire generation of students in America has grown up simulating lockdowns for active shooters, or worse, experiencing the real thing. But in South Texas, another unique kind of classroom lockdown occurs along the state’s 1,200-mile southern border: hunkering down because Border Patrol agents or state police are chasing migrants who are trying to evade apprehension.
Uvalde is uniquely positioned to become a victim of complacency. Not only is it only an hour from the border, it is within minutes of several large immigrant detention centers. When immigrants escape facilities or avoid capture when spotted by border enforcement officers, lockdowns are triggered at nearby schools.
Even the first officers on scene at Robb Elementary wondered whether the threat was a so-called “bailout” — the term used by law enforcement along the border to describe suspected migrants or drug traffickers who have fled. Pete Arrendondo, the embattled Uvalde school police chief who has become the target of angry demands by parents to resign or be fired, told the House committee the thought crossed his mind since it happens so often.
This is apparently standard procedure despite there being no evidence migrants on the run have ever sought to use schools as hideouts or committed any violence on school campuses.
Making things even worse is that school alert systems do not specify the reason for a lockdown. That may have led teachers and administrators to believe the Robb Elementary lockdown was just another “migrant in the area” reaction, further delaying police response and/or making officers believe they were looking for a (non-dangerous) person simply trying to avoid being deported.
And it’s apparently not going to get any better or any less stupid. This irrational fear of undocumented immigrants may have contributed to the botched response to this shooting. That this form of tragic lightning rarely strikes twice doesn’t justify the city’s mayor deciding — even after reviewing this report — that local schools need more lockdowns in response to non-threats, rather than fewer.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, who said he has not spoken to (Governor) Abbott for nearly a month, has called on the governor to do even more on the border to curb migrant crossings. With classes set to re-start in less than two months, he worries about “the bailouts by the schools and so forth” and said “it needs to stop.”
The problem isn’t the “bailouts.” It’s the response. An alert system that generates panic without info isn’t helping. Pretending every mobile brown person without proper papers poses a threat to schools despite there being no evidence of this ever happening just stokes irrational fears and makes actual threats tougher to detect and even tougher to respond to.
Filed Under: active shooter drills, border patrol, immigration, lockdown, moral panic, uvalde
Source by www.techdirt.com
