Last Week Tonight did a story on police in schools a while back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgwqQGvYt0g
It’s literally impossible to know how many shootings were prevented because the shooter knew there was an armed cop present.
And they actually have stopped active shooters, several times.
Like, real cops are bad enough. You don’t have to just lie about them. Lies can be effective propaganda but if you don’t need to lie then you’re just undercutting your message for no reason.
*The only reason to downvote this comment is if you care about vibes above truth and vibes above effective messaging. Or are pro-cop and want to make lefties look dumb. Self reflect.
I do know of at least two massive school shootings - Parkland and Uvalde - where the cops literally cowered outside, and listened as the shooter murdered child after child.
Every cop is trained that their primary objective is to make it home safe at the end of shift. Anything they have to do to accomplish that is acceptable, including killing people or allowing people to be killed. Cops don’t protect anyone but themselves.
We have to ask ourselves if the money that was spent on cops in schools was instead spent on counseling for troubled students, would we be better off?
I would argue that this would have been just as effective at preventing shootings without any of the negative side effects.
I took it that they were talking about active shooters that went ahead with it.
That that after all this expense and day to day intrusions, etc, that none of the thousands of shootings were ever stopped by the people who were employed and trained to do so…I agree with your comment 100%. But I down voted because of your edit. Never assume you know all the reasons someone might down vote.
I also down voted for the attitude.
Man that says more about you if you interpret OP as having an attitude. You can infer that from some text. Grow up 😂
It was hyperbolic, but I wanted to explicitly call people out for rejecting reality when it doesn’t line up with the most convenient possible narrative. Something which feels like a growing problem on lemmy.
Indeed. It’s not a defensible argument because it’s too categorically strong. I looked up some reasonable counter examples just to make sure I’m not crazy, but I will not be in the position of defending pigs, so I’ll leave it at that.
Definitely fuck the police, but don’t stoop to their level.
It’s not defending the police to defend the truth unless you think the truth makes the police look good. Knowingly spreading lies is just bad from every angle. Tactically, rhetorically, intellectually, etc.
It’s doing the right’s job for them if stuff that is easily disproven is being presented as a reason that cops suck.
I am quite sure they were agreeing with you.
I didn’t read it as such and wasn’t arguing with them. I was just prickling at the ‘defending pigs’ bit and reiterating.
I am pretty sure they were saying they weren’t going to share the examples they looked up in defense of cops, not suggesting that you were defending them.
My main concern is lack of critical thinking skills clouding the message. I want to stick to actual facts as much as possible, but for some of my brothers and sisters, vibes is all they’ve got to work with, and we still need these people too to present a united front and affect real change. Their heart is in the right place.
If you want, you can find the data on the number of school shootings before and after Columbine. Here is a website with those stats: https://echomovement.org/school-shootings/
You can see that the change was slight at first, but in the last 10 years it has gone through the roof.
So, you can argue that there is no way to know how many were prevented, but we can see that they occur in MUCH larger numbers than they did pre-Columbine. Maybe the numbers would be higher without the cops there? Whose to say. I can tell you that there seems to be a problem that we aren’t addressing, and sending cops into schools to arrest little children of color doesn’t seem to be the answer we all are hoping for. Maybe we can look at the system in systemic racism and see what systems need to change? Does that system involve gutless fucking pigs who like to shoot minorities and hide while children are being mowed down? Maybe we should have a fucking barbecue.
So, yeah. You can’t say how many they’ve prevented, but I can tell you how many dead children are buried now on their watch, and that tells me they aren’t worth the salt in the cure.
There was a Federal ban on certain military style assault weapons from 1994-2004. During that time, mass shootings were fairly rare, as you stated. The Columbine massacre was in 1999, and kind of started the era of modern mass shootings, but it didn’t really kick in until the ban ended a few years later, as you stated.
The assault rifle ban worked as planned, and it’s clear that the minute it was lifted, mass shootings began.
I feel like this would have a bigger impact if it mentioned how many school shootings have happened since then as well.
It’s a sad commentary on society that 1 million brown kids being persecuted isn’t impactful enough.
I don’t think that’s what they meant. It’s a “yes, and…” statement. It goes to show not just that they cause harm, but that they also don’t do any good.
The truth is our society loves cops and doesn’t like solutions.
Sauce? Seriously, somebody give me a paper or data. Now I’m genuinely curious about historical trends in school cop hiring and student arrests.
“trust me bro”
10,000 and 1,000,000 seem like pretty high numbers, can we get a fact check on that? How does one submit a claim to snopes?
EDIT: I guess nationwide the 10,000 number is believable
It’s definitely a pulled-outta-ass stat. 1 million arrests by 10,000 school cops over 20 years averages out to like 5 arrests each a year…
TBF it could be unique students not unique arrests, in which case a lot.
not that they did anything at Columbine either – police were on site pretty much the whole time, SWAT arrived half an hour later – and they both sat on their thumbs for another hour
I specifically remember watching the Columbine massacre live, and being angry that the cops were dawdling around, chatting in groups, laughing, taking their time. It was like a paid day off of work for a fun training exercise on a sunny spring day. There was absolutely no sense of urgency at all.
Meanwhile, students were being murdered the entire time.
Are you thinking of columbine in 1998, in Colorado? Or are you thinking of that one in Texas about 2 years ago, where they gathered in the hallway, and wouldn’t let people through while the killer shot something like 23 kids?
Then there was the Parkland cop, who cowered outside, listening to the killer shoot one kid after another, then convinced the first cops on the scene to not go in, too.
He was later charged criminally, but was acquitted. He may have beat the charge, but he will always be guilty of abject cowardice.
yep, Columbine, not Uvalde – suicide at 12:08, SWAT entered school 1:09
Maybe get them used to police presence as early as possible?
At least as many.
It was wild. They hired a cop on my high school campus after Columbine. He was going to stop me ditching, but I got to know him and instead, every time I ditched I bought him egg rolls (because I was always getting Chinese food).
