When You Can't Count on the Police
My editor's letter from The Week, from the issue published June 3. The disastrous performance of the police in Uvalde should raise the question of how many other times, in less high profile cases, the police in Uvalde and other towns fail, ignore, and dismiss the people they are supposed to protect.
We don’t want to think of how the last children died, huddling next to their friends, wondering why nobody was helping them. Outside, the parents were arguing with the police. The cops tased one, handcuffed another. The minutes passed. More children were shot and died. The parents and the children of Uvalde were failed in a million different ways. Despite the pain, though, it’s worth thinking specifically about how and why they were failed by the police. We hear over and over from the police lobby about protecting the public. But in fact, called to actually protect, the cops retreated into the ways of working they were most used to: loudly asserting their authority while spinning their wheels. They’d had plenty of training, but when it mattered, all the investment in SWAT teams and active-shooter procedures came to naught.
Why? Consider the reality of policing in a town like Uvalde. In 2019 and 2020, by far the biggest category of arrests made by Uvalde officers, according to FBI data, was for “other offenses”—not violent crimes, not thefts, not drug violations, not even DUIs. These are minor violations, often the result of missing a hearing on something as small as a noise complaint. Combined with “drunkenness,” these “other offenses” account for most of the arrests the Uvalde police make. On a typical day a cop in Uvalde is vastly more likely to be handcuffing a citizen who failed to pay a fine than helping the victim of a serious assault. So it is that police learn to think of citizens as problems to be corralled and controlled. In turn, the public learns to expect less of the police. And as the expectation of care and protection erodes, the answer from much of the law-and-order lobby is not that we should fix policing. It is that, like the parents of Uvalde, you are on your own. Go and get yourself a gun.