Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

[DrEvil]

There's about a hundred thousand federal law enforcement agents in the US, so I'm guessing there's also a lot of retired federal agents. It shouldn't be very surprising that at least one of them turned out to be a racist asshole who agreed with the shooter. Old, mostly white law enforcement people aren't exactly known for their inclusive mindset. This guy was probably just a more extreme version of all the old, white dudes spewing bile on Facebook and in the Fox comment section.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Good to see you round Iam... hope you're still kicking goals.

Mac never admits it when he's wrong. He's just one of those people...

Someone showed me this Bill Maher thing the other day. I recognised his name from this site but didin't really know who he was. I've seen his vids before but never bothered remembering his name.



Its an interesting title.

Maher's primary role increasingly seems to be to present reality in easy-to-digest nuggets/portions to a largely liberal audience. Practically the equivalent of tailoring 'adult' messages for children.

He touches on some important points that should be self-evident, but of course leaves out the more sinister -- yet all too real and recurring -- intel/cointelpro-esque angles to these shootings that are increasingly prominent (perhaps always so). Not every shooting involves intel ops, to be clear.

But my current take is this one did. And likely prior recent ones as well.

Case in point, shared earlier in this thread:

I don't think this is cross-posting because it may turn out to be directly relevant:

Via Buffalo News

Law enforcement officers are investigating whether a retired federal agent had about 30 minutes advance notice of a white supremacist's plans to murder Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, two law enforcement officials told The Buffalo News.
...

...

A breadcrumb, of course -- there won't be any metaphorical smoking guns on this sub-topic of federale/ops involvement.

The point is Hollywood reflects a culture. it doesn't create it or brainwash people.

We tell stories to ourselves to define who we are.

Since 9/11 the US has been about venegence - ie shooting anyone, doesn't matter who (schoolkids, black boys with mopeds guns, arabs, afghanis, russians, whoever the fuck looks like a convenient target,) because 9/11 hurt. And since the 1830s in the South West or even the revolutionary war its been about solving problems with guns. Bigger, better guns with bigger better ammo. Even to the point of inventing nuclear weaponry. The Comanche people were tougher, better trained and far more skillful warriors than early frontiers people so the solution to that was to build more effective firepower to help steal their land.

That's how they "won" or "stole" if we are being honest, the "West".

Its a founding myth of modern US culture. American society is built around stomping on the poor and shooting people to steal their stuff or make a name for yourself.

All these mass shootings we see now are just historical chickens coming home to roost. A purer expression of your culture.

[Belligerent Savant]

There's about a hundred thousand federal law enforcement agents in the US, so I'm guessing there's also a lot of retired federal agents. It shouldn't be very surprising that at least one of them turned out to be a racist asshole who agreed with the shooter. Old, mostly white law enforcement people aren't exactly known for their inclusive mindset. This guy was probably just a more extreme version of all the old, white dudes spewing bile on Facebook and in the Fox comment section.

Collectively, we all need to stop simply assuming (or not - we all have choice, right?) that information/storylines posted in a news item played out exactly as depicted (or even at all). This thinking is now a deep liability and negatively impacts all of us. Literally. By way of example: mandates were passed and persisted far longer than warranted (they weren't warranted at all, not for all groups of people) due principally to the people's passive compliance and/or acceptance of faulty narratives and LIES. Devastation ensued.

When I called it a 'breadcrumb', I mean it in the sense of a signal being put out there, for whatever reason, that govt/federal agents had advanced knowledge. It's foolish to simply take the front-facing story and then make blanket statements as if it neatly resolves the other problems with that particular shooting, let alone other mass shootings with dubious explanations or glaring plot holes that remain unsolved/unanswered.

Again, this doesn't mean that all shootings are 'orchestrated conspiracies' by federales. But clearly something has been amiss for some time. And there are compounding factors. Guns are but one, and likely the least compelling reason for these types of mass shootings.

Also, we need to dispense with blaming everything bad with 'some racist asshole'. Yes, racism exists. Yes, it's bad. But sorry: the egregious harms over the last ~2 years were not caused, not even peripherally, by racist mindsets of everyday white supremacists or hicks from the MidWest (that said: racist assholes may well be utilized as patsies/cogs to a given operation, just as 'towelheads' were used back in the infancy of this century of madness to generate easy-to-digest/hateable enemies. etc.). Resist the urge to be used as a rube as it's detrimental to the majority. We need to be better.

Or suffer the consequences.

(and here I'll add that it likely will get worse -- probably markedly worse -- before it gets better. Because too many are either in denial or simply too obtuse to look beyond long-held blindspots)

These facile left/right-wing tropes no longer hold water. It's not 2019 anymore. Time to update and recalibrate reasons for root causes and discard much of the now-legacy "left" or right" paradigms (always flawed to begin with, in any event).

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: Rupert Murdoch (Cool Version)

The City of Uvalde and its police department are working with a private law firm to prevent the release of nearly any record related to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in which 19 children and two teachers died, according to a letter obtained by Motherboard in response to a series of public information requests we made. The public records Uvalde is trying to suppress include body camera footage, photos, 911 calls, emails, text messages, criminal records, and more.

“The City has not voluntarily released any information to a member of the public,” the city’s lawyer, Cynthia Trevino, who works for the private law firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, wrote in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The city wrote the letter asking Paxton for a determination about what information it is required to release to the public, which is standard practice in Texas. Paxton's office will eventually rule which of the city's arguments have merit and will determine which, if any, public records it is required to release.

The letter makes clear, however, that the city and its police department want to be exempted from releasing a wide variety of records in part because it is being sued, in part because some of the records could include “highly embarrassing information,” in part because some of the information is “not of legitimate concern to the public,” in part because the information could reveal “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime,” in part because some of the information may cause or may "regard … emotional/mental distress," and in part because its response to the shooting is being investigated by the Texas Rangers, the FBI, and the Uvalde County District Attorney.

The letter explains that Uvalde has at least one in-house attorney (whose communications it is trying to prevent from public release), and yet, it is using outside private counsel to deal with a matter of extreme importance and public interest. Uvalde’s city government and its police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Motherboard.

The city says that it has received 148 separate public records requests (including several from Motherboard), and has lumped all of them together, making a broad legal argument as to why it should not be required to respond to many of them. Earlier this week, Motherboard reported on a similar letter sent to Paxton by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which wanted to suppress body-camera footage because it could expose “weaknesses” in police response to crimes that criminals could exploit. (The main seeming weakness in the Uvalde response was that police, in violation of standard policy and protocol, refused to risk their lives to protect children.)

For example, the city and its police department argue that it should be exempted from releasing “police officer training guides, policy and procedure manuals, shift change schedules, security details, and blueprints of secured facilities,” because these could be used to decipher “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime.” The Uvalde Police Department and Texas Department of Public Safety have been pilloried by the press and the public for standing in the hallway while a gunman killed children—against standard protocol—and for preventing parents from entering the building to save their children. The letter also argues that the department should be exempted from releasing body camera footage simply because it could be “information considered to be confidential by law, either constitutional, statutory, or by judicial decision.”

It is impossible to say what records, in particular, the city and the police are referring to in many parts of the letter. For example, it says it cannot release an individual's criminal history because it would be "not of legitimate concern to the public," because it could be "highly embarrassing," and because it would violate their common-law right to privacy. But the letter does not talk about who the records would be about, why they wouldn't be relevant to the public, or why they would be highly embarrassing.

“They claim that the compilation of individuals’ criminal history is highly embarrassing information, which is a strange cover. The embarrassing information is the inept police response,” Christopher Schneider, a professor of sociology at Brandon University who studies police body cameras and the disclosure of footage from them, told Motherboard, noting that suspects' criminal histories are released by the police all the time without anyone having requested them. “They have no problem using information like that against individuals of the public. The information disclosure needs to go both ways, if that’s the case.” Disciplinary or criminal records for members of the police, for example, would be obviously relevant public information in a case in which the police response has been highly criticized. "It’s rather ripe to say any of this is not of legitimate public concern," he added. "The whole country is trying to figure out how to not allow this to happen again."

This is a relatively common sort of argument, but it shows yet again that the deck is stacked against the public disclosure of public records when they are inconvenient or embarrassing to the police.

“The case that’s being made contains some particularly asinine stonewalling,” Schneider said. “It seems like the city is throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and seeking a ruling to suppress this information from being released.”

Schneider says that lumping together all 148 public records requests, and asking for a legal ruling on everything at once, seems like a tactic to prevent the release of anything and everything.

“It appears that they’re conflating all of the information requests as a justification to not release the stuff we should be seeing. If it’s an officer’s email to his wife, yeah, we don’t need to see this. But the body-worn camera footage is of concern. They’re conflating all of this information together to suppress the legitimate stuff,” he said.

In his research, Schneider said that body-worn cameras often do not do what they’re supposed to do, which is hold police accountable to the public. This is because public records laws are often written in such a way as to provide wide latitude to police to decide what the public actually gets to see, and allows them to “regain control of the narrative” when it is convenient for them.

“It’s not a coincidence journalists run into this problem [of not being able to obtain body camera footage] over and over again,” Schneider said. “The law is by design, the privacy rules are by design to make it absolutely as difficult as possible to release the information.”

[Belligerent Savant]

Via: Rupert Murdoch (Cool Version)

Ha (or, Ell Oh Ell). Well played.

So much that can be analyzed, particularly given the source of this piece, but one portion worth highlighting:

The letter makes clear, however, that the city and its police department want to be exempted from releasing a wide variety of records in part because it is being sued, in part because some of the records could include “highly embarrassing information,” in part because some of the information is “not of legitimate concern to the public,” in part because the information could reveal “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime,” in part because some of the information may cause or may "regard … emotional/mental distress," and in part because its response to the shooting is being investigated by the Texas Rangers, the FBI, and the Uvalde County District Attorney.

And:

It is impossible to say what records, in particular, the city and the police are referring to in many parts of the letter. For example, it says it cannot release an individual's criminal history because it would be "not of legitimate concern to the public," because it could be "highly embarrassing," and because it would violate their common-law right to privacy. But the letter does not talk about who the records would be about, why they wouldn't be relevant to the public, or why they would be highly embarrassing.

etc.

[mentalgongfu2]

There was nothing specious about my question and it was no speculation. Both CNN and NBC demonstrably said "father", not "stepfather". You're capable of logging into RI to insinuate dark motives of a multi-level crisis actor scenario but incapable of spending 60 seconds to search out the answer to your 'question.' Because it wasn't a real question, it was a bullshit assertion of nonsense you hoped would be ignored like the majority of the purely made up bullshit you spew.

You have no idea what competent and honest reporting looks like, nor do you care. This is laughable, deflecting bullshit.

I am glad to hear that CNN and NBC did not actually stoop to inventing a bereavement (or at least not in this case), even though one of them did misrepresent a stepfather as a father. That is why I requested input from RI members. and, if possible, clarification: You got the clarification you pretended to seek, and are now mad about it because someone rightfully pointed out how FUCKING CRUEL it is to make accusations like this with no evidence or understanding and ABSOLUTELY ZERO attempt to actually find the truth. And yet you have the audacity to talk about "competent and honest reporting." Doesn't this strike you as the behavior of a garbage person? I'm just asking questions. I would love some clarification from any RI members on how behaving like Alex Jones denying Sandy Hook does not make one a piece of human trash.

[...]
If anyone can come up with an innocent explanation for this, please do so.

It's no surprise to see that you're incapable of providing such an explanation without accusing me, absurdly, gratuitously and with zero justification, of actual cruelty for even asking.

[elfismiles]

.
Why did law enforcement wait ~over an hour to enter the school? There may be a number of 'human nature'/fear-based/'protocol failure' reasons for this, but malevolent/nefarious causes can't be ruled out. It gets uglier the deeper one digs.

They were inside within 3 minutes WITH rifles, body armor and ballistic shields ... AND THE FUCKING DOOR WAS UNLOCKED!!!! BASTARDS!!!!

"ABJECT FAILURES" - ALL OF THEM!



“If there’s kids in there, we need to go in”: Officers in Uvalde were ready with guns, shields and tools — but not clear orders
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/20 ... e-records/

Police didn't try to open doors to Uvalde classrooms with shooter inside: Source
https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-open-d ... d=85494335

[Wombaticus Rex]

Almost a full month of stonewalling obfuscation radio silence to come up with this limited hangout -- I'm dubious! I am.

[Iamwhomiam]

Curiouser and Curiouser it becomes.

Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo placed on leave; city council denies leave request

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/06/22/uvalde-city-council-denies-pete-arrendondo-leave-absence-request/7700455001/

Related:
DPS Director Steve McCraw on Uvalde shooting and police response

(short version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yupuq2gVDPI

(Full testimony) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGtj37pkfoM

[Joe Hillshoist]

.
Why did law enforcement wait ~over an hour to enter the school? There may be a number of 'human nature'/fear-based/'protocol failure' reasons for this, but malevolent/nefarious causes can't be ruled out. It gets uglier the deeper one digs.

They were inside within 3 minutes WITH rifles, body armor and ballistic shields ... AND THE FUCKING DOOR WAS UNLOCKED!!!! BASTARDS!!!!

"ABJECT FAILURES" - ALL OF THEM!



“If there’s kids in there, we need to go in”: Officers in Uvalde were ready with guns, shields and tools — but not clear orders
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/20 ... e-records/

Police didn't try to open doors to Uvalde classrooms with shooter inside: Source
https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-open-d ... d=85494335

JHFC.

Man ... sometimes you just have to act.

[Harvey]

https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022/06 ... save-wife/

Shocking testimony from the Texas DPS director on Tuesday has revealed even more insight into the “abject failure” of response to the Uvalde shooting that occurred on May 24. Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steven McCraw revealed that the husband of slain elementary teacher Eva Mireles tried to save her but was barred from doing so. Ruben Ruiz is a police officer for the school district and was on the scene after the gunman entered the school and opened fire. McCraw said Mireles called Ruiz and told him that “she had been shot and was dying. And what happened to him, is he tried to move forward into the hallway,” McCraw said. “He was detained and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.”

McCraw didn’t say who specifically detained Ruiz.