Evaluate Self Before Evaluating Uvalde

 As an academy and in-service instructor, I have noticed how often cadets and seasoned officers can divorce themselves from the reality of the experience of others. I remember specifically a colleague who was a firearms instructor conducting a range day that included some dash-cam videos of officers being assaulted. We watched a horrific replay of an officer on a traffic stop being brutally beaten in a blitz attack, then murdered before our eyes. The instructor’s comment was “She didn’t have the will to live”. I don’t know whether she had the mythical warrior mindset or not, but I do know I had stood in her shoes, in proximity to a traffic offender, and had been knocked unconscious on the pavement. Was it because I lacked the tactical knowledge or the will to live? Of course not. But I did put myself in a vulnerable position on that night on that stop, trying to deal with a carload of characters. By the grace of God and a backup officer, I was not killed. 

We imagine ourselves as our fictional heroes, making all the right moves in the glorious fog of battle because we’ve poked holes in paper targets and run through some scenarios at the shoot house. All good, but as anyone who had been the target of someone actively trying to make you die can testify, training is vital, but reality is terrifying. Officers who should be moving tactically sometimes look like a squirrel in the road not sure which direction to go. I remember asking the occupant I had arrested after a pursuit and crash what happened. He replied that he wasn’t sure but all of the sudden this lady cop was yelling at him to get out of the car. We had no women on duty that night, so apparently, my voice went up a few octaves under stress.

Experiencing shock and pain is not pretty. Indecision is awkward. Obeying orders that are bad ideas is cognitively torturous. Wanting to charge in is natural for most cops because we’re used to being independent decision-makers, but we also are trained to coordinate when in teams and follow the chain of command. Who wants to pick up the dropped battle flag unless we know the platoon will follow us? Self-doubt under duress sometimes masquerades as self-assessment. One is unhelpful, the other essential. So, before we join the chorus of condemnation, let’s humble ourselves for a minute, and put our feet in the boots of the officers that day.

The interim legislative report wisely states: “Based on the experiences of past mass-shooting events, we understand some aspects of these interim findings may be disputed or disproven in the future.” We also know that if something new and positive eventually surfaces it will not see the light of day in the media. If some new damning information arises, it will be in the mouths of every network anchor.

Would police leaders who respond and advance toward shots fired always have the immediate thought of getting out of there and setting up a command post? There’s always criticism of chiefs who forget that they are still cops. What about the cops that forget they are chiefs? I’m certain that among the dozens and dozens of officers present, the vast majority were willing to march into the danger zone and die for the kids. But at what point does heroism become strategically foolish? At what point is survival to continue the mission more important than proving you care enough to generate a grand police funeral?

With the unfixed locks and the lax adherence to routine safety policy and confusion of multiple crimes being reported and the failure of radios and alerts, can we crush that last domino that fell in the series and think we’ve addressed the tragedy enough that we can walk away with confidence saying “things would have been different if I’d been there”? I’m not an apologist for what happened or should have happened on May 24th at Robb Elementary, but context here is critical.

Should we analyze the hell out of this thing? There is no question that we must. The dead deserve it. The community deserves it. The cops deserve it. Every nervous teacher and scared student in the country deserves it. But let’s do this with humility. If you haven’t read the latest evidence and reports from credible investigative bodies, then you are relying on the same media you criticize for the false narratives about policing that are so pervasive. Maybe no comment until you know as much as you can. No eye rolling, no shoot-from-the-hip second-guessing, no denial that you might have done the same thing in the same circumstances. The tragic deficiencies overshadow the notion that there were heroes on that day, but there were many.

Welcome Back to the Constitution

 Welcome Back to the Constitution

Whether we agree or not on recent U. S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions, one thing seems to be certain – the majority of Justices are putting the brakes on MSU (making stuff up). Hot button issues like abortion, guns, and police conduct are being viewed through the lens of what the Constitution says instead of what judges and politicians want it to say.

Without commenting on the merits of any of the case decisions, the trend toward originalism – interpreting the Constitution in the context of the authors’ intent – does seem to be gaining preeminence in this season’s SCOTUS opinions.

The Supreme Court is often accused of being politicized and the truth of the matter is that it has always been so. The recent but quickly discarded idea of adding to the number of justices so that Biden could make additional appointments of presumably liberal members. Until settling on the number nine for the court in 1869 there were several changes and attempts to change from the original number of six Justices at the Court’s invention in 1790. The notorious effort by President Franklin Roosevelt to “pack the court” after several of his New Deal plans were ruled unconstitutional was unsuccessful. Roosevelt did, however, due to his long Presidential tenure, end up choosing eight of the nine justices by the end of his term.

With lifetime appointments and no history of any Justice being impeached, the consistency of the Supreme Court’s power has been proven through the years. The process of selecting what cases get to be heard at this highest level provides the opportunity for the Court to decide what issues will be addressed. Earl Warren, serving as Chief Justice from 1953 to 1969, was a notable activist in selecting cases that had a tremendous impact on the civil rights movement of the era, including many landmark cases in criminal justice including granting lawyers to poor defendants, requiring a rights warning before police interrogations, allowing stop and frisk searches, extended fourth amendment requirements to state and local law enforcement, expanded availability of federal lawsuits against police, restricted the use of deadly force, and others.

SCOTUS 2022 has determined that the 2nd amendment prohibits the restrictive New York requirements to obtain a handgun, the regulations for which were intentionally cumbersome to limit the availability of concealed weapons permits. The decision relied on a broad reading of the right to bear arms in an originalist sense and cast a shadow on the gun control advocacy statutes and regulations in local legislative bodies. The majority of states have loosed concealed carry restrictions, and many have eliminated the need to obtain a permit in “Constitutional carry” states. In contrast, many local governments have attempted to enact restrictions within their boundaries.

In a win for effective law enforcement, the Court has recently upheld cases that maintain the concept of qualified immunity. While the doctrine is one that was made by court rulings when it comes to use of force its definitions rely on the 4th amendment understanding of reasonableness, the standard that has prevailed rather than a standard for perfection and prognostication.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade indicates another turn toward the Constitution’s framers for interpreting what the document means. Again, regardless of one’s opinion about the issue of abortion, critics of the decision have long held that intense scrutiny of the Constitution finds no explicit right to any medical procedure. Had the Justices wanted to make a statement on moral or scientific grounds, they would have looked at the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” rights in our founding documents which inform originalism interpretation. The original Roe case found an unspoken right to privacy which the Court then extended to medical decisions. The right to privacy, like other implied rights that had no ink in the original documents, has long been recognized, but the link to abortion laws, says today’s SCOTUS, was too weak to be legitimate.

The ruling does not prohibit abortion, as is being portrayed by many observers, but rather says that it, as with all matters not covered in the U.S. Constitution and left to the 10th amendment, is a matter left to the states to regulate or not as they see fit.

The good news for the citizenry, whether these decisions are celebrated or decried, is that there is one governmental body that remains mostly shielded against the knee-jerk politics of the day. Having at least one branch of the government not subject to the fickle winds of opinion polls is a good thing.