The cops in Uvalde fucked up. There really isn’t any disputing that. Their decision to wait for backup was about as catastrophic a mistake as it’s possible to make in that position. I think pretty much everyone is in agreement about that.
Where you go from there, though, is very much a matter of dispute. Public responses range from acknowledging the error and quickly attempting to change the subject, to calling for the cops in question to be fired, sued, or jailed (or some combination thereof), to treating their catastrophic fuckup as a sweeping indictment of the entire profession that calls for the dismantling of the aentire American law enforcement apparatus. Where a given speaker falls on this spectrum seems to be very strongly correlated with their pre-existing views of police in general, so there’s a lot more heat than light here.
As is often the case with these things, I find myself distracted by something that’s a bit of a side issue, namely the 100% rock-solid certainty that everyone commenting on this seems to have. Everyone presents themselves as absolutely confident both that they know exactly what the police should have done, and that they would have made and acted on that correct decision in the moment. And that’s kind of where I part company with the entire discussion, well before we get to the policy disputes.
Again, to be clear, the cops in Uvalde fucked up. They made just about the worst possible choice, with the stakes at their absolute highest, and all eyes on them. I am absolutely 100% confident that this is true.
I am not, however, confident that I would’ve done better, had I been in their shoes. Not in the least.
I would absolutely like to think I would’ve acted decisively and correctly, but I recognize that that’s largely a kind of wishful thinking. Or maybe “failure of imagination” is a better phrase, because they were in a situation that I literally cannot imagine myself in with any plausibility. I can try, but it inevitably ends up as a kind of pastiche of the cocaine-addled action movies I watched as a kid, a thin and implausible simulation of reality where all the knobs have been turned up to 11. I just can’t begin to comprehend in any real way what it would feel like to be in that scenario, tasked with making those decisions. I mostly just end up circling back to a sense of profound gratitude that I can’t picture that, and a bone-deep hope that I never can.
That breakdown of imagination, by the way, does not extend to what the cops actually did— this isn’t a claim that their decision-making was incomprehensible, as a lot of people have professed over the last few days. Quite the contrary— the thought processes that might’ve led them to fail in that specific manner are entirely comprehensible, in a way that makes me queasy when I think about it. Even before they proffered an official explanation (in a bumbling way that did nothing to calm the situation), I knew what it would be. It’s not remotely satisfying— again, they absolutely and without question fucked up— but it’s all too easy to understand how they got where they did.
At the same time, while it’s very easy in hindsight to imagine counterfactual situations that turn out better (in the very narrow space of “better” that was available given what had already happened), it’s not all that difficult to imagine other counterfactuals that go worse, in which waiting would’ve been the right choice. Where cops or parents rush into a fatal ambush, or a bunch of kids and teachers end up shot by the police. There’s absolutely a version of reality that ends like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie where bold action saves a lot of lives; there’s also a version where this is the prologue to an agonizing drama about someone struggling to live with the disastrous aftermath of their attempt at bold action.
Again, this is not an attempt to excuse what actually happened as anything less than a colossal fuck-up. It absolutely was a catastrophic failure on a scale that’s hard to comprehend. But the mere fact that it went wrong is not at all difficult to understand— they were in an unimaginably horrible situation, faced with a set of terrible choices, and they chose poorly. And they’ll be struggling to live with the horrific consequences of those choices for the rest of their lives.
So, in the end, I can’t really engage with this situation as a matter for discussion of law enforcement practices and policies. That’s not that there aren’t lessons you could draw from this, in a detatched and cold-blooded sort of way— there absolutely are.
But while I can sort of do that as a kind of academic exercise, in a much more visceral way, I always end up back in the same place: “There but for the grace of God go I.” I am far too conscious of my own fallibility to have any enthusiasm for joining in the current chorus of condemnation. I’m just profoundly grateful that I’ve never had to face horrible decisions on that scale, and hope with every fiber of my being that I never do.
Speaking of things that I don’t want to happen, I very much intend for this to be my only commentary on this specific issue. I wouldn’t’ve said this much, but it was blocking me from writing anything else, so I had to type it out. So if you click this button expecting to get more stuff exactly like this, I very much hope you will be disappointed:
I am also going to depart from my usual policy of leaving the comment section open to all, because the limitations of my imagination very readily encompass most of the possible results of doing that, and basically none of them are anything I want.