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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.
New: Border Patrol tactical agents who breached the classroom and killed the shooter acted on their own initiative after mounting frustration, sources tell @JuliaEAinsley
— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) May 27, 2022
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.
The Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde ISD police force are no longer cooperating with the @TxDPS investigation into the massacre at Robb Elementary and the state’s review of police response, multiple law enforcement sources told @ABC
w/ @JoshMargolin— Aaron Katersky (@AaronKatersky) May 31, 2022
In a remarkably frank admission, police said they did not take out Ramos more quickly because, well, they could have been shot.
"They could've been shot. They could've been killed," Texas police lieutenant explains why law enforcement did not go into Uvalde school right away. pic.twitter.com/lfzTtAQqFg
— Virginia Kruta (@VAKruta) May 27, 2022
Believe it or not, the full statement is worse than the headline.
Blitzer: But don’t current best practices, don’t they call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on site?
Olivarez: Correct. The active-shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life, but also one thing that — of course, the American people need to understand — that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunshots. They are receiving gunshots. At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and at that point, that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school. So they were able to contain that gunman inside that classroom, so that he was not able to go to any other portions of the school to commit any other killings.
When officers actually were exchanging fire with Ramos, it appears their own incompetence may have directly gotten at least one child killed.
A fourth-grader who survived the shooting told local outlet KENS 5 the gunman entered the room he was in and said, “It’s time to die.”
“When he shot it was very loud and it hurt my ear,” he said. “When I saw the bullets on the floor it was real.”
The boy said he and other kids hid under a table with a tablecloth and that he told his friend to be quiet so the gunman wouldn’t find them.
“When the cops came, the cop said: ‘Yell if you need help!’ And one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard and he came in and shot her,” the boy told KENS 5. “The cops barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cops. And the cops started shooting.”
Things have become so disgraceful that additional police are pouring into Uvalde in order to protect local police from the angry public.
Officials say several law enforcement entities from across the state have been called in by Uvalde police to not only assist in supplementing their police force, but to also provide extra protection to officers and the mayor following heavy criticism and threats. #Uvalde pic.twitter.com/nDltMYOuMa
— CBS DFW (@CBSDFW) May 27, 2022
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:
Just another day in new york city safest subway system, where innocent people are being harassed and assaulted.
But the mayor wants you to ride the subway instead of driving, to save the environment. pic.twitter.com/9FfVzfzLoC
— Joel Fischer ?? (@realJoelFischer) May 25, 2022
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.
READ MORE: Biden Admin Digitally Lynches US Soldier For Defending His Neighborhood and Family
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.
Our culture has moved such a negative direction in the last decade, I'm not sure first responders would run up in the World Trade Towers today. Cultural rot has consequences. When you make heroes of people who contribute nothing and demonize those who risk everything.
— Jason Whitlock (@WhitlockJason) May 26, 2022
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:
The Pennsylvania State Police will pay more than $2 million into a compensation fund and are changing physical fitness standards to settle a lawsuit over how the agency’s trooper-hiring practices ruled out otherwise qualified women.
…
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division argued different pass rates for men and women showed the tests had a disparate impact on women. If women had passed at the same rate as men, about 120 more women would have advanced in the hiring process, and about 45 would have made the force over a 10-year period, the Justice Department lawsuit said.
Under 2003 standards, 55% of women and 88% of men passed. Under 2009 standards, 73% of women and 98% of men passed, the court found.
…
The state police tests had included a 300-meter run, a 1.5-mile (2.4-kilometer) run, pushups, situps and a vertical jump. In a joint filing Tuesday, the two sides noted the state police developed a new physical fitness test. Tarkowski said it was used for the first time in the academy class that began in January.
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:
Q: You look physically fit.
In law enforcement, there used to be a thing of being at least 6 foot and a certain weight to go with that height. When you have a big guy standing in front of you telling you to move on, you’re more likely to do what that person says.
But with the advent of technology, and the fact that now we have to accept everyone as being capable of being a police officer, that’s something you don’t want to talk about.
Q: But you do. Is there anything you don’t talk about?
One of the things I think that’s poisoning the world to some degree is being politically correct to the exclusion of actually telling the truth. Too many times we say things so as not to hurt people’s feelings, when that’s exactly what we should be doing.
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.
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