If there’s one thing we know about the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, it is this: The police failed to stop it. This was not for an absence of well-funded, trained officers on the scene. They were there.
Rather than placing themselves potentially in harm’s way, however, the cops waited outside for over an hour and aggressively confronted desperate parents who begged for them to enter, including handcuffing one mother.
There were no well-researched, pragmatic policy changes around limiting assault rifles, regulating the hyper-destructive expanding bullets that ripped children’s bodies apart, and increasing mental health support — things that could actually stop shootings like in Uvalde, which was carried out by a troubled 18-year-old.
Texas school districts instead poured billions of dollars into stationing police at every public school campus in the state. The results, as a New York Times report published this week found, has been an horrific spate of violent police abuse against children in schools across the state.
There is no official use-of-force data on the over 11,000 cops stationed across Texas’s 400-plus school district police departments, the Times reported, and scant oversight. Despite the limited access to information, journalists were able to pinpoint “more than 2,600 use-of-force incidents” in a nearly four-year period using only the “small share of records” available.
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