I think the point is that they should be legally required to intervene when a crime being committed but currently are not.

The problem is that they're equally as likely to be crucified if they jump in, and do a dumb thing and accidentally kill someone when others think that it was avoidable. There are just as many people crying "why didn't they just shoot the shooter in the leg to incapacitate him".

I'd rather someone be crucified for fucking up than for not doing anything at all, in this instance. Time is a massive factor in these situations, and time was massively wasted.

> I'd rather someone be crucified for fucking up

The "someone" might have a little more skin in the game than you do, though.

Then - again - that "someone" shouldn't have taken the job if they weren't prepared for the risks.

First responders don’t, and never have, taken on unlimited risk, they take on calculated risks.

This is just unreasonable. Humans have a natural desire to preserve their own lives. First responders aren't any different. The idea that first responders are superheros is a fallacious trope. The vast majority of police never use their gun over their entire career.

Putting themselves in harms way is the deal. It’s why they get to retire over a decade earlier than the rest of us with a nice pension. It’s why they get qualified immunity for a whole bunch of actions.

They aren’t holding up their side of the deal here.

Well said. In addition to what you've listed, it's also why we give them a monopoly on the use of force. The belief that they will protect is why we don't have vigilantes and mercenaries roaming the streets (for the most part). These cops were worse than useless. If they weren't present, there's no way the parents and the rest of the community would have let the shooter stay in that school with their children for so long.

> The belief that they will protect is why we don't have vigilantes and mercenaries roaming the streets (for the most part).

I agree, but that has always been a perception, and it has never been a reality.

Yes, it's expected that first responders may do things that are generally dangerous but they're not on kamikaze missions, it's completely normal for them to back out when they believe their own life is in danger.

This is not any different for any first responder. Firefighters will run right back out of your house if they think it's required to save their own lives.

19 cops (in the hallway alone; more outside!) with rifles, armor, and complete control of the scene against one shooter is not a "kamikaze mission".

What's the point of militarizing the police if they can't handle 19-on-1 situations?

Having a large number of police doesn't decrease the risk to the first person to jump through the door. And most police body armor is only effective against handgun rounds, across part of the body.

Police militarization helps the police protect themselves when a situation gets out of control. I don't think there's much evidence to show that it ever helps police protect others. Although, there's a lot of reasons why people might be misled to believe so.

Don't soldiers have to undertake such dangerous actions? What's the point of militarizing all of these police departments with actual War on Terror surplus if they're not going to make use of it? So that weaponry can be misused in disproportionate responses in less dangerous situations?

They do make use of it, to protect themselves. I've never seen evidence of police using that equipment to swoop in and save anyone.

Soldiers use that equipment in a very different way, are way better trained and compensated, and have a very different set of rules to work with. And very rarely is it their mission to swoop in and save innocent people.

> I've never seen evidence of police using that equipment to swoop in and save anyone.

What about all of the times heavy-armed police teams burst into residences during Swatting incidents?

Most of the time those are not happening with military equipment. These things happened before police started getting surplus military equipment.

Fine. But seeing as how SWAT teams have at least police-grade tactical equipment and training, and are expected to burst through doors, and this town had a SWAT team, you would think this was their moment to act.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdwgn/uvalde-swat-team-brag...

Saving a house is not the same thing as saving children.

People risk or sacrifice themselves to save others with some frequency. Just a week before Ulvade, Dr. John Chang gave his life to tackle the shooter at his church in Orange County. Bravery exists. The belief in bravery is why we give special privileges to law enforcement. If we knew that police would never put themselves in harm's way to save children, we would never tolerate law enforcement as it currently exists.

Bravery is why you give people medals, it makes no sense to give Police Officers privileges on the guess that maybe some of them will be brave.

In the Commonwealth a police officer would likely get a George Cross for extraordinary bravery (the Victoria Cross is the medal for extraordinary bravery in the face of the enemy and so accordingly it is awarded to the military). New Zealand police officer Stewart Guthrie was awarded (posthumously) in 1990 for confronting a gunman who'd killed a dozen people. Guthrie warned him, "Stop or I shoot" but the gunman shot him first.

But of course such awards are rare because such events are rare in Commonwealth countries.

Dr. John Chang is a one-in-a-million hero.

If we hired every one-in-a-million hero as a police officer in the US, we'd have 165 police officers.

There's about 700,000 police officers in the US, and we can barely hire them as it is.

firefighters routinely walk through burning buildings to find and save people, they have safety rules, but this is never a safe action.

If a soldier goes AWOL because they're "scared" of fighting or consistently straight up neglects to do their job, I'm sure "natural self preservation" will be a stunning and effective defense at the court martial regardless if they're ina combat role or not.

It's almost as if civilians (read: police) and soldiers are trained, equipped, and deployed to different environments, with different rules.

And yet, today's police departments are often as militarized as soldiers. Plenty of HN stories about the phenomenon over the past decade

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Soldiers are not first responders.

Clearly that doesn't matter as GP made it clear that this is a human trait, not tied to any profession.

There are many, many stories of individuals putting themselves in danger and in cases dying to protect others. Just the one that came to mind while reading about this sad story, done by a bunch of teens saving their fellow school members.

https://westdene1985.co.za/reports/the-survivors/

"

>>Koen, Petrus Lucas received the Wolraad Woltemade award posthumously. The 17-year-old drowned after rescuing his cousin and five fellow school pupils.

>>Du Toit, Daniel Sarel, aged 14, dived back into the water three times and saved three lives.

>>Mahner, Alfred who drove to the site, jumped into the water and helped several children to safety and assisted the fire brigade to attach cables to the bus.

>>Opperman, Gotlieb Rudolf, aged 15, was rescued in an unconscious condition from the bus after jumping back into the water three times to rescue children.

"

I'm sure there's a constant stream of similar stories every day.

Out of the 700,000 police officers in the US, there are undoubtably hundreds, maybe thousands, of them that would voluntarily sacrifice their life to save others. The other 99.9+% of them do as much as they can and but still want to go home to their own children.

If you're not willing to put your life at risk, you should not be a first responder. Plain and simple.

Calculated risks, yes, like going in to the same building as an active shooter. They're not going to jump in front of a bullet to protect anyone else, though. The primary responsibility of any first responder -- police, fire, or EMS -- is to preserve their own lives.

Firefighters can and do frequently put themselves at far more risk than any police officer ever will. Police don't even rank up near the top of the list in terms of most dangerous jobs to hold.

If the police cannot do their jobs to save children from being killed by a school shooter then they should not be police officers. They should not be militarized and given advanced equipment, they should not pretend that they ever need it and their budget shouldn't be the majority of a town's spending. And if they don't like it, then maybe the police and the police union can do better campaigning on actual ways to stop school shooters instead of using it as an excuse to further increase their own budget.

> The primary responsibility of any first responder -- police, fire, or EMS -- is to preserve their own lives.

Over the lives of children, though? Putting your life in danger to save a random guy's life is heroic, but not expected. You're both adults, your safety isn't guaranteed, and it's not guaranteed that you'll be able to save him. But it's quite different when, instead of a random guy, it's a group of children.

I think that's the striking difference with Uvalde. It's really, really hard for me to imagine firefighters not rushing into a burning elementary school to get the kids to safety. Societally, we expect them to, and they know we expect them to.

Society also expects the same from police (laying down your life to save a child), but I'm not sure these police fully understood this societal expectation at the time of the incident, or else they would have acted differently.

>Society also expects the same from police (laying down your life to save a child), but I'm not sure these police fully understood this societal expectation at the time of the incident, or else they would have acted differently.

And yet...

>“People are going to ask why we’re taking so long,” a man who investigators believe to be Chief Arredondo could be heard saying, according to a transcript of officers’ body camera footage.

>By that point, officers in and around the school had been growing increasingly impatient, and in some cases had been loudly voicing their concerns. “If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there,” one officer could be heard saying, according to the documents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/us/uvalde-shooting-police...

Socially, there's an expectation that all other considerations are disregarded when children are involved. But you really can't save anyone if you're dead anyway. People want to think that heroes will die trying, but those heroes also want to go home to their own children. There's really no black-and-white line here, it's a big grey area.

> The primary responsibility of any first responder -- police, fire, or EMS -- is to preserve their own lives.

This is fundamentally wrong. If it were ok, let's just disband them all and save a lot of money since their responsibility doesn't benefit anyone other than themselves. I reject the concept of a society where this is somehow ok.

It's 100% the truth. First responders are neither instructed to nor required to sacrifice their lives at work. They're required to take upon some amounts of risk as a matter of circumstance, but that line stops far before death.

The idea that first responders can solve anything is a very comforting idea that resonates with many people. That doesn't make it true.

>They're not going to jump in front of a bullet to protect anyone else, though. The primary responsibility of any first responder -- police, fire, or EMS -- is to preserve their own lives.

And this is where, circumstantially, you and I seem to have a fundamentally different viewpoint. We'll just keep going in circles.

Police departments are budgeted and equipped on the assumption it will be useful in situations like this, but the equipment isn't used in situations like this. Instead it's used for the abuse of defenseless civilians.

If we're willing to remove these things, then I'm more than fine with not expecting them to handle dangerous situations.

If it were adults your theory may hold, but not for children.

Evolutionarily we have even higher desire to protect our young(so does most of animal kingdom).

The instinct to protect young children is stronger than desire to protect self - the trait is easily strongly selected under evolutionary pressure.