In the aftermath of the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, conservatives naturally blamed the defund the police movement. “The Defund The Police crowd is always quiet after mass shootings.” Charlie Kirk opined.
“1. The party of defund the police, out of control crime, & a deadly open border wants to take away our guns and wants us to trust them with our children's lives while they fund death and war, with US tax dollars, in some far off land that most Americans can't find on a map,” said Rambo cosplayer and US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“Dems Outraged About Texas Shooting Pushed Bill To Defund School Police Protection” read an outraged Daily Caller headline. “Congressional Democrats who have blamed Republicans and a lack of gun control laws for the Tuesday school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, pushed a bill that would have banned federal funding for school police in 2020,” the author wrote.
Then the videos of cops stalling outside the school while the shooting occurred came out. They show hysterical parents literally begging the cops to enter the building and stop the shooter, while the cops stood around outside the school dithering for at least forty minutes while restraining terrified parents.
What explains the police’s cowardice? Low morale, of course:
Early on Thursday, more facts emerged: Despite local police being present on the scene even before the gunman started shooting, the shooter spent roughly one hour locked in the classroom. “It’s time to die,” he told a class full of third and fourth graders.
Meanwhile, outside, police set up a cordon blocking access to the school and pushed back parents desperate to help their kids. When officers finally entered the building they needed the help of a staff member to unlock the door. Once inside, a cop told kids to yell if they needed help. According to a boy who survived the shooting, when a girl yelled for help in response, the gunman shot her. According to the Department of Homeland Security, you are supposed to stay silent in an active shooter situation.
The town of Uvalde spends just over $4 million on its police department, which amounts to nearly 40 percent of of the town’s total $10 million budget. The chart below shows “where the money goes” and as you can see the vast majority of it goes to policing. As The Intercept’s Akela Lucy noted in her reporting on the Texas shooting, Uvalde also recieved a $500,000 grant from Texas’s controversial Operation Lone Star that deployed thousands of soldiers to the state’s southern border.
The small town Uvalde—a population 16,000 people—also has a SWAT team. SWAT teams were invented in Los Angeles, California during the 1960s to control riots and handle violent confrontations with armed criminals. SWAT today stands for “Special Weapons And Tactics” but it originally stood for “Special Weapons Attack Team.”
In 1966, Charles Whitman, a former Marine sharpshooter, climbed atop a tall building at the University of Texas-Austin, around 11:35 am, and opened fire, killing fourteen people and wounding 31. As Radley Balko reported in “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” the enterprising Los Angeles police commissioner, Daryl Gates, formed a SWAT team in response, and other large cities followed suit.
Over the next several decades, virtually all juristictions in America formed SWAT teams. Here’s the Uvalde Valley SWAT team, looking real bad and tough holding rifles and shotguns. The image below is the embodiment of “fuck around and find out.” The cop propaganda wants us to believe that the police run toward danger while the rest of us runaway. The Uvalde shooting shows the exact opposite to be true.
What were local police doing standing outside the school for forty minutes while a shooting took place? Waiting for the SWAT team…
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