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After Uvalde, Texas Stuffed Schools Full of Cops. They Brutalized Students.

Texas’s response to school shootings was as predictable as it was doomed to produce only more violence in schools — violence by cops.

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.

Uvalde Police Didn’t Move to Save Lives Because That’s Not What Police Do

This failure to save lives was not, as I wrote at the time, a failure of police work. It in fact exemplified what police critics and abolitionists have stressed for decades, with reams of evidence. Police do not save lives or prevent crime. Policing is not the “thin blue line” between social peace and chaotic violence. And the work of policing is a far cry from the heroic myth so stubbornly lodged in the American imagination.

This was not, of course, the lesson learned by Texas authorities after the shooting. Instead, the state’s response was as predictable as it was doomed to produce only more violence in Texas schools: They added more cops.

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.

Texas stationed police officers at every school. The result has been a horrific spate of police abuse against children.

Texas stationed police officers at every school. The result has been a horrific spate of police abuse against children.

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.

There are horrific details. Kids are routinely slammed to the ground for minor misbehavior. Police punch children in the face. They shock students with Tasers for being in the wrong place. Or point guns at unarmed........

© The Intercept