Public opinion on how America does its policing has devolved into two camps. The first is highly progressive, driven by ideological certitudes and made possible by a generally limited experience of life. These are the defund-the-police people, small in number and suffering in public support but effective at pushing their agenda through highly ideological district attorneys.
The other camp is all “back the blue”—police are heroes who put their lives on the line to protect us.
In neither camp do people feel free to depart to any degree from their side. A progressive can’t say, “Jeez we’re going too far against the cops, my grandmother’s afraid to leave the house.” That person would be thrown out of Democratic Socialists of America. If you are back-the-blue, you can’t look with a critical eye at the cops.
What challenges all this is the two Uvalde, Texas, videos published by the Austin American-Statesman. You have seen them or read of them—they show what happened at Robb Elementary School when the killer sauntered in and heavily armed cops, massed in the hallways, failed to stop him for more than an hour. Any progressive with a normal human heart would watch and say, “Why didn’t the cops move, why weren’t they tougher?” They depend on the police as the first line of safety more than they admit. Any back-the-blue person would say, “What is wrong with these guys, the kids were dying.” They are doubting in private more than in public.
The cops in the video are heavily armed and look like combat infantrymen. They maintain form, weapons held high. But strangely, they are like people who don’t know school shootings happen, and have an unsure sense of procedure and what is expected of them. The key moment occurs three minutes after the gunman enters the school, when the first officers arrive inside. They make their way toward the classroom where the killer is. There is gunfire. The officers then retreat, running back to the end of a hallway. From that point and for more than an hour, the police stand about as victims inside are dying.
It is a great scandal, the biggest police scandal since George Floyd, meaning one of the biggest in U.S. history.
I spoke to a longtime veteran who operates at the top of American policing. From the beginning of time, he said, cops ran in when the shots rang out. It was the Wild West, they kicked in the doors, guns up. About 50 years ago police departments started to lean more toward the SWAT model for big incidents—containment, perimeters, coordination of information, controlled entry with superior firepower. An emphasis was put on negotiation, dialogue.
It worked pretty well, he said, until the incidents changed to mental illness and workplace shootings, school shootings, other mass shootings.
The Columbine High School massacre in April 1999 changed everything. There, cops did everything they’d been taught to do. Meantime, inside, the two killers were running around shooting. Victims waited for rescue. The shooters committed suicide hours before the police got in. Some of the injured died in that time. In the end, 13 people were killed, 21 wounded.
A new approach came into being. The first two or three officers on the scene would be the contact team. They would find the killer, neutralize him, stop the threat. Outside, rescue forces would build—SWAT teams and also ambulances, paramedics, EMTs ready to go with stretchers.
At Uvalde the contact team had what it needed, heavy vests and pistols, but it retreated. After the contact team failed, the SWAT team arrived, with police from different agencies, and at that point everything froze. “The main job—find, confront, stop the killing—isn’t getting done,” the police veteran said.
“It’s gonna be hard on them because this is a test,” he said. “It’s a test you face in policing, with all the training and equipment and practice: On game day, are you really prepared to go down there and do what you swore to do? That’s where heroes are born. No heroes were born that day.”
A problem in U.S. law enforcement is not a preoccupation with weaponry but “a total lack of clarity about the immediate-action part.”
A complicating factor: Police officers are drilled in the need to get themselves and their partner home safe each day. In an active-shooter situation with a madman and an AR-15, you put yourself and your partner in extreme danger to save other people. A big question is how to train officers to handle their own fear when the gun is aimed not at them but others. You can train them tactically. Can you teach courage? You can inspire courage in people who have that within them, who have something to be brought out.
Later the police veteran sent me a Texas state directive, training guidance published in 2020, on active-shooter response for school-based incidents. It puts the first priority in caps: STOP THE KILLING. The second, also in caps: STOP THE DYING. “First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm’s way and display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent,” it reads. ”They must accept the role of “Protector”: “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”
I end with the views of another longtime law-enforcement professional, who operates independently and outside department structures.
He noted that America has more than 15,000 police departments and most are small, 25 officers or fewer. Uvalde was representative of policing in many communities—resources are limited, training and communications imperfect. But all the lessons we’ve learned from mass-shooter events come down to what an officer will do when up against a madman with an AR-15. And all these departments have to be ready for what’s coming, because this era isn’t over.
All this is unfolding within a connected but hidden crisis. “The most challenging issue for police departments in America is hiring the next generation of cops,” he said. Departments paying high-five-figure starting salaries aren’t getting applicants; the risks of the job are too high. He was recently at a meeting of hundreds of police executives. They were asked, “How many of you want your son or brother to be a cop? Raise your hand.” No one did. This, he said, is a catastrophe: Cops come from families of cops; that’s how they’ve traditionally been recruited.
It’s keeping mayors and police chiefs up at night: How do we get the next generation of cops? Who will patrol the streets?
I came away from these conversations thinking three things. Police departments have to make active-shooter protocols and procedures clearer and more front of mind. They must regularly address how to handle fear in shootings involving the mentally ill and the dreadful weapons we show no sign of controlling. And this is a good time for us to start to remember and restore the true stature of the policeman’s job, and to allow him satisfaction that he followed a calling—providing physical protection to law-abiding citizens and protecting them from human evil is most rightly seen as a vocation, a calling—that is understood to be an admirable one.