The Cowardice of Uvalde Police Is Exactly What America Asked For - Revolver News
The failure of the cowardly police in Uvalde is appalling. But it's a failure America has been courting for years.
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Over the past several days, it has become clear that the gruesome death toll of the Uvalde, Texas school massacre was substantially due to the inexcusable incompetence and cowardice of the city’s police.
Americans of all backgrounds are depressed, horrified, humiliated, and ashamed to see to many innocent lives lost thanks to gross failure by those sworn to “serve and protect.” But Americans should not be surprised at this outcome. America has spent decades deliberately creating less capable, more cowardly police, and without a change of direction more tragedies like Uvalde will come to pass.
Like many other towns in America, Uvalde has a large and well-stocked police department. The town of 15,000 has a part-time SWAT team and 40 officers, roughly one for every 375 people. That’s substantially more than the number of police per capita in nearby San Antonio or El Paso.
But when they were put to the most important test of their lives, the officers of Uvalde flopped. Early viral footage from the city shows terrified parents shrieking and begging police to storm the school.
Initially, police claimed that a “brave resource officer” at Robb Elementary had confronted shooter Salvador Ramos, but it turned out the officer had mistakenly confronted an unarmed teacher instead. Police also blamed a teacher who left a door propped open for allowing Ramos into the building, but that turned out to be untrue as well.
Eventually, it came out that 19 officers had assembled outside the classroom Ramos barricaded himself in, but it took an extra 40 minutes before the gunman was killed. And in the end, it wasn’t an officer but rather an off-duty Border Patrol agent who was getting a haircut when the shooting began who swooped in to kill Ramos and end the massacre. And according to the most recent revelations, that agent and others from the Border Patrol acted independently, out of frustration with the ineptitude and stalling of local police.
Then, on late Monday, close to a week after the shooting, ABC News reported that Uvalde police have ceased cooperation with the Texas Department of Public Safety in investigation of the shooting, essentially an admission that the department fears its officers’ failure may be criminal in nature, or might expose them to a gargantuan civil lawsuit.
In a remarkably frank admission, police said they did not take out Ramos more quickly because, well, they could have been shot.
Believe it or not, the full statement is worse than the headline.
When officers actually were exchanging fire with Ramos, it appears their own incompetence may have directly gotten at least one child killed.
Things have become so disgraceful that additional police are pouring into Uvalde in order to protect local police from the angry public.
So, what explains this heartbreaking failure? Why were police busy “establishing a perimeter” rather than moving at maximum speed to take down a shooter by any means necessary?
Across America, police routinely retire at age 55 or even younger. In much of the country, they receive generous pensions upon retirement. In nearby Austin, a policeman who retires after 30 years of service will receive 75% of their base salary every year until death. The reason policemen are pushed out of work at an early age, and the reason they were awarded such generous pensions far above the typical Social Security benefit, is because we trust them to risk their lives protecting others.
Yet America has largely abandoned that expectation. America is a country where stigma and social shaming do nearly as much work as the law itself. A recently viral video shows subway passengers sitting quietly while a deranged man harasses a helpless, terrified woman:
Why did people do nothing? It wasn’t just fear of being hurt, or of being arrested. Most people hesitate because they fear the possible ramifications of being caught on camera in a confrontation with a black male. We’ve already seen how that ends: Last year, Army Sgt. Jonathan Pentland was convicted of third-degree assault for confronting a retarded serial harasser and attempted baby-abductor whom police had failed to stop, because to his misfortune the confrontation was caught on camera and weaponized to destroy him.
Social stigma is powerful, and often harmful. But it is useful, too. And in Uvalde, it was a lack of social stigma that may have cost numerous lives. Strong, healthy societies have stigmatized this type of cowardice, fairly and sometimes unfairly, for centuries. In Britain during the Great War, thousands of men signed up to serve in the trenches out of fear that a woman back home might hand them a white feather and reveal their cowardice to the world.
But in today’s ailing society, we hysterically stigmatize police who are rude or use too much force on known criminals, but not those police who are passive in the face of crime, danger, and evil. The events in Uvalde are no exception to this rule. No cop will lose his pension or his job for this morally atrocious failure.
Scot Peterson, the worthless deputy who cowered outside during the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018, is collecting more than $8,000 a month right now. The three police officers present at career criminal George Floyd’s overdose death who weren’t named Derek Chauvin will likely spend years in federal prison.
In a healthy society, the cop who cowers in a parking lot while a killer rampages should feel the same fear of public humiliation for himself and his family — more fear, in fact! — than Americans currently feel about standing up to raving psychopaths in public or posting their honest political views on social media.
Of course, it’s very easy to say such a thing. It’s much harder to do something. In 2022 America, what man in his right mind would be brave? A culture of bravery, like a culture of chivalry or a culture of honesty, presupposes things America no longer has. In America, Kyle Rittenhouse used a gun to defend his community from a marauding mob end up charged with murder. Jake Gardner used a gun to defend his father and his business from looters and was legally hounded until he lost everything and was pushed into suicide. Garrett Rolfe, the police officer who shot fleeing suspect Rayshard Brooks after Brooks aimed a stolen taser at him, lost his job for a year and still has a possible murder charge hanging over his head.
None of these cases is directly comparable to a school shooting, of course. But they are indicative of a greater society-wide sickness, a sickness that tells people to “mind their own business” and not try to be a hero. And if the message to the public is “don’t be a hero,” why should we be shocked that heroes are hard to find?
The most succinct but accurate take may belong to sports commentator Jason Whitlock.
America’s highest priority for police officers is to make the job more “accessible” and to turn the cops themselves into glorified TSA agents. In the past two years, in the wake of increased hostility toward police, more prosecutions over split-second decisions, and widespread rioting implicitly backed by political elites, thousands of police in the U.S. are simply quitting. Police departments are struggling to replace them.
America is headed for a future where America’s police will be a handful of heroes who refuse to step away no matter how bad it gets, and a larger mass of dull, out-of-shape trash who simply won’t leave because they have a cushy job they could never replicate elsewhere.
It was foolish to think police are immune to the same forces that have slowly hollowed out other once-great institutions in American life. The same military that won World War 2 now pays for sex reassignment surgery and considers diversity a top strategic priority. And so it is with police. In Pennsylvania, the Justice Department actually sued and settled with the state police because of the disparate impact of the rate at which men and women passed the physical fitness standards test:
Physical standards were already being gutted by the Pennsylvania state police, but it still wasn’t enough for our woke Department of “Justice”. Pathetic standards had to be set even lower to satisfy the democratic levellers currently leveling American society.
In 2011, El Paso police chief Greg Allen remarked on how the profession had changed during his career in an interview with a local publication:
The failure of the police in Uvalde is appalling. But it’s a failure America has been courting for years.
Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind? Turns out that’s just another day in the Globalist American Empire.
