If you don't want to find yourself in harm's way, don't become a police officer. Legally required or not, they knew the risks when they signed up, they knew what they were trained to do, and then they... didn't.
The "someone" might have a little more skin in the game than you do, though.
They aren’t holding up their side of the deal here.
I agree, but that has always been a perception, and it has never been a reality.
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.
What's the point of militarizing the police if they can't handle 19-on-1 situations?
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.
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.
What about all of the times heavy-armed police teams burst into residences during Swatting incidents?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdwgn/uvalde-swat-team-brag...
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.
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.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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.
"
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
The idea that first responders can solve anything is a very comforting idea that resonates with many people. That doesn't make it true.
And this is where, circumstantially, you and I seem to have a fundamentally different viewpoint. We'll just keep going in circles.
If we're willing to remove these things, then I'm more than fine with not expecting them to handle dangerous situations.
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.