How Our Fractured Societal Priorities May Have Influenced The Police Response In Uvalde

Mock and Daisy spoke about this phenomenon in their podcast, and Mock subsequently posted about an interesting Twitter thread about “how Covid culture may have played a part” in the horrifyingly sub par response by police during the Robb Elementary school massacre. But I think there is another part of our fractured society that might have contributed to this tragedy.

In case you missed it from The Chicks, this is the Twitter thread to which they were referring.

I’ve been thinking about this for hours and it seems to me that what those police officers did in TX – waiting outside, protecting themselves, while children were shot and killed – may be an extreme result of the culture we’ve established the past two years.

In 2020, we decided

— Ann Bauer (@annbauerwriter) May 27, 2022

Essentially, she lays out how American society has spent the last 2 years of COVID willing to sacrifice children in the name of the supposed “greater good.” Protecting teachers from a 99%+ survivable virus at the expense of the educational, psychological, social, and physical fitness of children. Forcing unnecessary experimental vaccines on children who have almost 0% chance of dying from the virus. Masking healthy children for hours a day, every day, despite the science showing it to be unnecessary and ineffective. For 2 years, adults have been willing to sacrifice their children’s wellbeing in order to provide security for adults, when in times past, adults would give up everything to provide security for children instead. And apparently Uvalde maintained this new children-last precedent.

In addition to this tragic reality about our current society, where adults are no longer willing to sacrifice for the good of children, I wonder if the abysmal police response was impacted by 2 years of concerted efforts to vilify the police. Were those officers hesitant to put themselves in danger and risk being called a racist when the public found out they shot a person with brown skin? Risk facing an angry public mob calling for their jobs and heads for shooting a latino offender rather than bringing him in peacefully, insisting things would have been different if the offender had been a white? Risk facing charges for excessive force or anything they could make stick in order to placate the public mob calling for blood from the police they insist are racist?

I’m not excusing the behavior of these officers in Uvalde. I saw the devastating video of parents begging the cops to do something to save their children, and instead being detained and prevented from helping themselves, and it made me sick to my stomach. I also read the following thread about training that those officers were supposed to have had, and how they were supposed to have handled this situation.

I have spent the past few days researching the training of Uvalde officers, including the tactics they were expected to use to halt school shooters.

The documents are jarring. Here’s a thread of our findings so far.

1/9

— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) May 28, 2022

I’m not excusing the obviously wrong response by these officers, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the actions (or inactions) of those officers were impacted by these thoughts. In a society where the police are continuously vilified for doing their job, eventually they will hesitate to do their job for fear of being vilified.