Warriors Or Guardians? Uvalde, Crime And Cops

Highlights

Who’s to blame for Uvalde? Who’s to blame for rising violence in our cities? In my opinion, it was the thousands of rioters and protestors (costing insurance companies two billion dollars) blaming cops for all urban ills. It was politicians, advocates, endless reporters, and community leaders who wanted to restrict, defund or eliminate the police.

The police response in Uvalde and growing crime in cities are robustly linked. Per Pogo, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

Author

Opinion

Like most of us who write or comment about crime and policing, the school mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24 continues to puzzle and sadden me. The fact that hundreds of officers decided to wait for over an hour before ending the event by killing the shooter is bewildering.  Multiple national news organizations are suing the state for records so the story remains incomplete.

The account from the Christian Science Monitor (below) may be the best synopsis offered to date. The article offers a debate on the controversy between cops as warriors or guardians and for me, it’s the heart of the argument.

Inevitable Confusion

Anytime there are multiple agencies present at a major and ongoing criminal event, there is going to be inevitable confusion. As police officers, we are trained to follow orders from superiors or more experienced personnel. But when you have 376 police officers at a scene from multiple agencies, all using their own radio frequencies, the confusion as to who is in charge and what’s happening becomes almost impossible to access and comprehend.

There were five school police officers at the scene among hundreds of state and federal officers. When you have a massive response from major law enforcement organizations, local authorities usually turn the event over to the better equipped, better-trained responding agencies.

Yes, training and policy dictate that you immediately go in and confront the shooter. But you need someone to give the order. You need information as to the condition of the classroom, points of access, the shooter, and those still alive or in need of medical attention. Without precise information known by all, you could easily make a tragic situation much worse.

When I was trained in shoot-don’t shoot computer simulations, they usually started with a criminal (90 percent covered behind a hostage) holding a knife to the throat of a woman who was holding a baby. Training staff played the scenario of the criminal announcing that he was going to kill the woman, thus forcing you to shoot. Even though I just came from scoring nearly 100 percent in live fire exercises, I (and no one) could make the headshot required on the first try. There was a high probability that I (and everyone else) was going to shoot the hostage from 30 feet away.

I believe the officers at Uvalde wanted to go in and take down the shooter regardless of the equipment at hand. And they wanted to do it shortly after their arrival regardless of the lack of orders or complete knowledge of the circumstances. They, however, knew the risk of inadvertently shooting a teacher or child was probably high, especially if the shooter was using them as shields. If they hit or killed a child, their careers could be over and their names splashed (and vilified) via every newspaper in the country.

We live in a new reality.

Criticizing Cops

We live in an age where cops have been dragged over the coals for their mistakes for the last seven years. There have been thousands of media articles and reports harshly criticizing cops (yes, some of it was justified) for everything from shootings to their social media posts. There have been plenty of instances where police officers have made honest mistakes in the heat of a confrontation and had their lives and careers placed in jeopardy. Some have been convicted and incarcerated without proof of criminal intent.

Cops have been endlessly ostracized for miscalculations. And it’s ridiculously easy to make them. Every police officer knows of times when they came close to shooting someone in the heat of the moment just to discover that there was no criminal motive. If you’ve been a cop, you understand. If not, you probably don’t get it.

Endless media accounts (and former President Obama) have clearly stated that they don’t want cops to be warriors. They want officers to use the means at their disposal to apprehend suspects with as little force as possible. They don’t cops to go charging in.

Proactive Policing

With rising violence and fear of crime at all-time highs, I’m asked by reporters, podcasters, and television hosts as what works to reduce crime. Per data from the US Department of Justice and the National Academies of Sciences, it’s proactive policing where the officer leaves her vehicle and, when there is a legal right to do so, confronts someone on the streets as to their activities with the possibility of a legally permitted search.

Literally, there is no other modality with a comprehensive research base of hundreds of evaluations showing that it reduces crime beyond proactive policing. There may be modalities that seem promising, but in fact, at the moment, proactive policing is all we have with an extensive research base.

Are we doing proactive policing? The short answer is no (with some exceptions).  Per research, cops are wary of getting out of their vehicles and confronting a suspect when the probability is so incredibly high that something could go wrong resulting in critical national news coverage. What used to be routine is now something to be avoided.

I remember news reports and videos from Baltimore when crowds of people surrounded cops (after the most recent riot) as they were making a felony arrest filming them and heaping every possible profanity on officers for simply doing their jobs. Similar reports came from other cities. Politicians, opinion writers, and community leaders made it abundantly clear that they did not want police proactivity.

Since then, Baltimore and a wide variety of other cities have experienced massive increases in violence and fear. People and businesses are leaving. Economies, children, and families are being destroyed.

We have made police officers extremely cautious because we INSISTED that they be passive guardians, not warriors.

The Christian Science Monitor (edited for brevity)

A recent string of mass shootings has shown the best and the worst of American policing. While officers ran to help during a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, on July Fourth, things were different in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24. There, 376 officers milled around a Texas elementary school for over an hour, while children called 911 on the other side of a classroom door.

After-action reports in Texas are painting a picture of fumbled responsibility and failed leadership that go far beyond the actions of one small-town police chief – intensified and fueled by national debates over protocols, jurisdictions, and traditional hierarchies that have guided police responses to community emergencies. The report does not blame any individual officers for the delayed action, but rather systemic failures that day that spread across multiple agencies.

The events in Uvalde – from the desultory response to the shooting to subsequent attempts to downplay potential culpability – are fueling a fresh debate over how to inspire leadership among police officers amid profound disagreements about how to patrol a jittery nation.

“We are a divided nation, these shootings are on the rise, political violence is very present now, and … policing is in collapse,” says former New York Police Department Officer Eugene O’Donnell. “Where is the forward-thinking plan? How do you do it affirmatively? It’s just elaborately fantastical that we’re going to pay [officers] $800 a week to be like the Navy SEALs and Mother Teresa.”

Homicides in the United States rose by 44% between 2019 and 2021, while traffic fatalities rose by 18% in the same time frame. Looking longer term, fewer murders are getting solved, with the rate of successfully closed homicides dropping from about 90% in the 1970s to about 50% today. And, as with many professions that serve the public, officers are quitting and retiring at higher than usual rates.

The rising crime and stress are coming at a time when the policing profession is at a fundamental crossroads over use-of-force protocols, proactive policing, and limited immunity laws that protect officers from consequences for mistakes made in the heat of action.

That all came to a head in the small South Texas town of Uvalde on May 24, a Texas House report concluded last week.

“Nobody Knew Who Was In Charge”

“Systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by hundreds of police officers on scene contributed to a gunman murdering 21 people, including 19 children, in the school. Police officers “failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety,” the 77-page report concluded. Officers from at least a half-dozen law enforcement agencies – including the Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Administration – responded during the attack.

“There were so many cops there that nobody knew who was in charge and everybody assumed somebody else was making decisions, so they ended up just kind of hanging out – that was the immediate failure,” says Dennis Kenney, a former Florida police officer.

America’s policing structure itself raises complications. Without a federal police force, training varies widely across jurisdictions. Smaller and rural departments are often at a marked disadvantage when it comes to training, equipment, and preparation. Struggles during the shooting ranged from who was in charge to communication failures to a lack of rifle-rated shields with which to confront a shooter wielding an assault-style rifle.

Yet more broadly, policing experts say, the Uvalde failures are consequences of a tumultuous decade of policing scandals, murder indictments and convictions of officers, massive social justice protests, and recruiting and retention problems.

Warrior Or Guardian?

Some longtime officers also point to rethinking about what it means to serve and protect, saying that prioritizing guardians over warriors and an emphasis on community policing efforts over catching bad guys can lead to breakdowns like Uvalde.

“You can label this as political commentary, but [President Barack] Obama didn’t want warrior police officers; he wanted guardians,” says Mr. Shults, the former Colorado police chief. “Well, at Uvalde you had 400 guardians and a couple of warriors. The question is really for the American public: Do you want warriors, or do you want cops playing basketball in the ’hood?”

To a large extent, the bulk of U.S. officers – some 700,000 spread over nearly 18,000 departments, half of which have 10 or fewer officers – are often too busy and sometimes undertrained to confront those questions by themselves.

Indeed, the willingness to risk their lives for others – the ultimate form of leadership – is perhaps the profession’s most defining dynamic.

“The thing that made policing valuable were the individuals who did it were willing to assume the risk; they were willing to work in the dark and the danger. That’s gone. Today, paralysis is the way. Do not get engaged.”

Also, hundreds of officers opening fire without a clear plan could easily have resulted in chaos and perhaps even more loss of life. One officer that day had aimed at a running man wearing black: It later turned out he was a school coach.

That sense of “paralysis” may have become magnified in the hallways of Robb Elementary School.

President of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, John Catanzara, attributed police pulling back in Chicago for a host of different reasons, including, the coronavirus, police coming under more scrutiny, and that making an arrest may not be worth their life or becoming a prominent news topic and villain, according to the Sun-Times.

Police agencies can be corrupted from within by “a low work ethic and a curdled cynicism,” warns William Bratton, who served as chief of the Los Angeles and New York City police departments.  Writing in the Atlantic, Bratton said police need to guard against shutting down in response to angry criticism from the outside.