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Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

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Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#141

Post by sangnoir »

donmcronald wrote: post #48
Arrath wrote: post #2

I think the 'weakness' of their response is plainly obvious. If criminals can find advantages in this footage, its an opportunity to overhaul training programs and response plans. The training and response was woefully inadequate for this crisis, after all. There should be no reasonable reality in which the release of this footage is suppressed. This is an undeniable tragedy, battening down the hatches and obstinatel…

I think the problem is that no one wants to take the blame for being wrong or unprepared and the media won't pass up an opportunity to sensationalize mistakes as incompetency, maliciousness, etc.. I wish more of the world could function like the culture adopted by the western airline industry where every incident and investigation is treated as an opportunity to learn and improve the system rather than an opportunity…

> I think the problem is that no one wants to take the blame for being wrong or unprepared and the media won't pass up an opportunity to sensationalize mistakes as incompetency, maliciousness,etc

So, is it going to be Law and Order for thee, paid suspensions and additional training for me?

Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#142

Post by kube-system »

gensym wrote: post #130
kube-system wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's expected that first responders may do things that are generally dangerous but they're not on kamikaze missions, it's completely normal for them to back out when they believe their own life is in danger. This is not any different for any first responder. Firefighters will run right back out of your house if they think it's required to save their own lives.

Saving a house is not the same thing as saving children. People risk or sacrifice themselves to save others with some frequency. Just a week before Ulvade, Dr. John Chang gave his life to tackle the shooter at his church in Orange County. Bravery exists. The belief in bravery is why we give special privileges to law enforcement. If we knew that police would never put themselves in harm's way to save children, we woul…

Dr. John Chang is a one-in-a-million hero.

If we hired every one-in-a-million hero as a police officer in the US, we'd have 165 police officers.

There's about 700,000 police officers in the US, and we can barely hire them as it is.

Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#143

Post by [deleted] »

kube-system wrote: post #66
jjulius wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want to find yourself in harm's way, don't become a police officer. Legally required or not, they knew the risks when they signed up, they knew what they were trained to do, and then they... didn't.

This is just unreasonable. Humans have a natural desire to preserve their own lives. First responders aren't any different. The idea that first responders are superheros is a fallacious trope. The vast majority of police never use their gun over their entire career.

[deleted]

Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#144

Post by Apocryphon »

threatofrain wrote: post #139
jmpman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would run on bankrupting the entire city before paying one dime on the police officer’s pensions

Will the bankruptcy court then seize the city's assets and prioritize creditors?

Maybe they would start with the PD, which consumed 40% of the city's budget.

Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#145

Post by kube-system »

Apocryphon wrote: post #122
kube-system wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a large number of police doesn't decrease the risk to the first person to jump through the door. And most police body armor is only effective against handgun rounds, across part of the body. Police militarization helps the police protect themselves when a situation gets out of control. I don't think there's much evidence to show that it ever helps police protect others. Although, there's a lot of reasons why p…

Don't soldiers have to undertake such dangerous actions? What's the point of militarizing all of these police departments with actual War on Terror surplus if they're not going to make use of it? So that weaponry can be misused in disproportionate responses in less dangerous situations?

They do make use of it, to protect themselves. I've never seen evidence of police using that equipment to swoop in and save anyone.

Soldiers use that equipment in a very different way, are way better trained and compensated, and have a very different set of rules to work with. And very rarely is it their mission to swoop in and save innocent people.

Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#146

Post by corrral »

daenz wrote: post #131
corrral wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other take: north of a dozen "good guys with guns" didn't do jack-shit. Other other take: military bases have very strict gun control, far in excess of the civilian world, despite hopefully being far more reliable, stable, and law-abiding than the general population. It makes them more vulnerable in certain rare cases, but they judge it to make them far safer in general, so the rules stick. Other other other take: pr…

>north of a dozen "good guys with guns" didn't do jack-shit. The "good guys with guns" clearly had no investment in a positive outcome, unlike the parents who were fighting the police to save their kids. A "good guy with a gun", by definition, has a personal, moral obligation to save lives...something that those police obviously lacked, so classifying them as such is disingenuous.

OK, so we've solved school shootings, let's say (ignoring that when it actually matters ~everyone agrees removing guns makes things safer, let's just grant that for the sake of argument). How about when it's not kids, with relatives nearby? Vegas shooting? Malls? You gonna run in and risk your life to save some strangers? These cops didn't, despite guns and training and all that "warrior mentality" shit.

[EDIT] My main point is just that we already know how to reduce gun violence. People with power, even if they're publicly extremely pro-gun, don't want people with guns around them unless they're paying them or they're cops. Organizations with the ability to curtail gun possession do so enthusiastically and almost universally, even if their members & leadership claim the solution to shootings is more guns in more places. So we flood the world with more guns and save (let's be extremely generous) 5% of the people who'd have been murdered with guns. Great. Wonderful. Could have done a lot better by doing the opposite, though.

Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#147

Post by rasz »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #23

Yeah, sure. The "weakness" they don't want exposed is them standing around in the hallway doing nothing while the murderer took his time in a classroom full of kids.

Some went in for their own children https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/officers-rescued-own-child...

at this point I assume cops shot those children

Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#148

Post by philistine »

doodlebugging wrote: post #86

I thought body cam footage was public data, discoverable and releasable under the law. There is no one left to prosecute here since they killed the shooter so there is no reason to delay disclosure. That thin blue line looks more and more like a line for cowards to hide behind while they seek to escape accountability for actions they know would have them arrested if they had no badge. Simply holding their noses while…

Imagine a group of hired goons, in a medieval setting, who are paid in pillaged goods to maintain a certain group of people in power.

Can you transpose those goons to modern police officers?

Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#149

Post by kdkslqlqo »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #97
jmyeet wrote: post #55

Are we afraid won't actually do their job when it actually involves putting themselves in danger? I think the cat is out of the bag on that one. Quite famously, the police are much better at shooting children [1] than they are at shooting to protect children. The Uvalde PD consumes 40% of the town budget ($4m of $10m exclusive of a $500k grant they got from the state of Texas months earlier). 19 police officers were…

> But nothing here will change. It's hard but it's important to keep faith, and to keep working to change people's minds about police. Even your comment can make a difference: a place like HN is full of intelligent people who generally come here fairly open minded. Maybe your comment - the top one right now - can open someone's eyes to what cops really are. Stay in the fight!

No post body was provided.

Re: Texas police want uvalde bodycam footage suppressed

#150

Post by Apocryphon »

kube-system wrote: post #145
Apocryphon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't soldiers have to undertake such dangerous actions? What's the point of militarizing all of these police departments with actual War on Terror surplus if they're not going to make use of it? So that weaponry can be misused in disproportionate responses in less dangerous situations?

They do make use of it, to protect themselves. I've never seen evidence of police using that equipment to swoop in and save anyone. Soldiers use that equipment in a very different way, are way better trained and compensated, and have a very different set of rules to work with. And very rarely is it their mission to swoop in and save innocent people.

> I've never seen evidence of police using that equipment to swoop in and save anyone.

What about all of the times heavy-armed police teams burst into residences during Swatting incidents?

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