A deranged gunman massacred 21 people at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary three years ago. The murderer is dead and someone must be held accountable, so a former school police officer was tried for abandoning or endangering children. Adrian Gonzales (above, checking his phone like he probably did as the kids were being shot), the first officer to arrive at the school, faced 29 counts of abandoning or endangering children, 19 for the dead and 10 more for survivors. A jury found him not guilty yesterday. Soon the pretty clearly incompetent school former school police chief Pete Arredondo will face trial later on similar charges, and we should expect the same result.
One of Ethics Alarms’ encomiums is that when ethics fail, the law steps in and usually makes a mess of things. If people won’t do the right thing because it’s the right thing, making them do what the state says is the right thing because they’re afraid of being punished is a very poor substitute. Those following the law may not have any concept of what the right thing to do is.
The Uvalde prosecutions arise out of anger and frustration, and reasonably so. Emotions, however, are not reliable motives for law enforcement. The school’s police pretty clearly failed the children of Robb Elementary because Gonzales and Arredondo choked when an unexpected crisis required them to place themselves in harm’s way. As much as we find it disheartening, lack of courage in a crisis cannot be criminalized. These officers thought they had accepted a relatively low-stress job in a quiet community. They hadn’t dealt with a gun-wielding madman before. Sure, we’d like to know that a Dirty Harry is ready to let an active shooter “make his day,” but in the real world—and, I will say without more than my own assessment, increasingly a nation of weenies—that is probably not going to happen. Gonzales had received active shooter training and was also a co-instructor in such a course, but training, however, is one thing, and the a real gun-wielding killer is another.
Bill Turner, a special prosecutor, argued to the jury during his summation that Gonzales froze during the first two minutes of the attack when most of the children and teachers died. “You can’t stand by when a child is in danger,” he said. “Police officers have a special duty. Stop the killing. Stop the dying, even if you are the only one there.” Yes, it would be nice if most human beings, even most police officers, thought like that and could act on it. But jurors undoubtedly ere thinking, “Gee, I don’t know if I could do that. Should I send someone to prison for acting like I would?”
In his closing arguments, Jason Goss defended Gonzales by arguing that he was unfairly being singled out for the failure of many other officers that day. About 370 officers were involved in the police response in Uvalde, but only Gonzalez and Arredondo were charged, with most of the rest being fired or leaving their jobs in disgrace. “He was acting. He was trying. None of those officers are in that chair,” Goss said. Well, he was acting incompetently, and he wasn’t trying hard enough. But is that criminal?
Melodye Flores, a teacher at Robb Elementary during the shooting, told the jury that she was outside the school and alerted Gonzales to the gunman’s location. “I said that he was heading into the fourth-grade building, and we needed to stop him,” Ms. Flores told the jury. “We needed to go in and stop him before he went in. [Gonzales] just stayed there.” Gonzales told an investigator that he focused on the woman in front of him who seemed under duress and not on the gunman she was telling him about. “It was my mistake, but it’s just the adrenaline rush going and, you know, shots fired and stuff like that,” he told the investigator.
What to do: make sure the woman screaming that there’s someone with a gun running amuck in the school is okay, or go after the maniac with the gun? Hmmm. Tough choice…
I do not believe we can criminalize cowardice and incompetence, even from supposed professionals who we need to trust to protect us. Sue the town, the school and the police departments for negligence. The law can’t make courage mandatory, or make flawed human beings virtuous.
Ethics Alarms 
Huh? Even if they were seeking employment in what they thought was a cushy job doesn’t mean that lingering in the background of a police officer’s ever present duty is putting oneself in harms way when one dons the uniform.
There’s ALOT of guys who joined the 1990s Army on the idea that history was over and the Pax Americana meant any real shooting wars would be long in the distance if ever.
Guess what they were expected to do by late afternoon of September 11, 2001?
Nah, though police officers aren’t absolved of their duty because it was unlikely they’d have to fulfill their duty.
The charges may be wrong in this case in which the juries were correct. But officers failing to do their duty have to face consequences.
The charges may be right and the prosecution failed or the jury.
“Guess what they were expected to do by late afternoon of September 11, 2001?”
And we still had people like Cindy Sheehan who felt that a soldier who enlisted in a volunteer army should not be required to fight in a conflict.
There’s ALOT of guys who joined the 1990s Army on the idea that history was over and the Pax Americana meant any real shooting wars would be long in the distance if ever.
I was recruited by a statement similar to this. Joined the army on June 19th, 2001. After September 11th, I often wondered if I would be the guy who would freeze, fight, or flee. Three years later, I learned who I was on a convoy that came under fire.
My point, I don’t think anyone really knows what they would do until they actually have to do it.
In my opinion, the jury made the right call here.
You are correct. No one knows how they’ll react when they see the elephant.
But donning a uniform and taking an oath is an explicit declaration that you *will* stand and fight when you do see the elephant.
Sure. But it doesn’t mean squat until you actually do it.
And since the uvalde police didn’t do it when they were oath bound to do so they should face consequences.
They shouldn’t be charged with cowardice. They should be charged for their intimidation and threats of arrest for everyone who tried to stop the shooting. If you are too cowardly to act, get out of the way of those who aren’t.
I’m also going to leave this here.
https://www.sacurrent.com/news/san-antonio-news/gonzales-affair/
The Uvalde police department investigated her death. The police chief is refusing to release the report until after the Congressional election. He claims releasing it before then is not in the public’s interest. In the last primary, Brandon Herrera lost to Tony Gonzales by about 400 votes despite massive institutional support for Gonzales. Herrera is facing him again in the primary.
And what if Ms. Good had run over a kid crossing the icy street as she successfully sped away from the scene where she’d parked her car crosswise in the middle of the street without law enforcement taking any action?
The police response to the Uvalde massacre revealed a deeply concerning contradiction in constitutional law: the state possesses the legal authority to prevent you from saving your children, yet bears no legal obligation to save them itself.
The main reason law enforcement can’t easily be sued for their abdication of duty lies at the feet of the Supreme Court. Through rulings like DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989) and Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), the Court has established that the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It restrains the government from hurting you, but it imposes no affirmative duty on the government to protect you from private violence even when they are aware of that violence and are in a position to stop it.
While the police in Uvalde had a moral duty to save those innocent children, they (obscenly) had no constitutional duty to do so. In the eyes of the law, their inaction was a failure of courage, not a violation of the Constitution.
Simultaneously, the police utilized their broad police powers to physically restrain parents – handcuffing, tackling, tasing, and threatening them – to maintain the security of the crime scene. While parents have a natural right to defend their children, in our system this right is de facto superseded by the state’s authority to control an active investigation. Because citizens are generally prohibited from resisting law enforcement, the parents were placed in a legal bind where physically fighting past the police to rescue their children is not only a felony, but one that would in fact receive more immediate use of force than what was used to stop the killer.
Ultimately this legal framework represents a clear and obvious breach of the fundamental social contract. When the state uses its monopoly on force to restrain the rescuers but refuses to use it against the killer until well past the reasonable point, it ceases to function as a protector and effectively becomes an accessory to the killing.
The law is currently written to protect the bureaucracy, not the citizen. It prioritizes the safety of the police officer over the life of the child. It prioritizes the order of the crime scene over the outcome of the rescue.
It creates a situation where the most rational, moral action a parent can take, saving their dying child, is treated as a criminal act, while waiting in a hallway and listening to the murder of children is treated as legally sound police work. To me, and to most sane rational people, that is not just a failure of law, it’s an ethical inversion that delegitimizes the authority of the police and the government at large.
The jury got it right, and ironically, showed how meaningless that is in such a rigged system. Our government may be the worst one in the world except for all the others, but when the legally correct outcome is this one, I truly wonder if we’d be better off burning it down and starting over from scratch.
Comment of the Day, and Comeback of the Year! Previous comment:2021. I missed you.
The US constitution lacks anything mandating action. But that does not constrain any state government from passing laws mandating action. That’s what Texas did. It lists people who are compelled to take action to prevent harm coming to a child. It is on the jury for giving the officer a pass.
Sooo… basically sue themselves? The outcome would be the plaintiff’s lawyers get 1/3 of the money, the city’s attorney gets paid and the taxpayers get screwed. But then this is par for the course on any police misconduct. The actual culpable people walk away without consequence.
The families of the victims can and usually do sue the municipalities involved. It’s respondeat superior.