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.