\u201cKindness takes courage!\u201d<\/u> read rainbow letters written by Alithia Ramirez, a fourth grader at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. In the corner of her contest-winning poster, a round yellow sun looks on, cross-eyed, over a cloud of forbidden words: \u201cFat! Loser. Ugly. Dumb.\u201d Each is circled and eliminated with a slash. At the top of the poster, Ramirez wrote a hashtag embellished with an extra smile: \u201c#End Bullying.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ramirez has been identified<\/a> as one of the students killed in the mass shooting at her school on Tuesday.\u00a0Her father told<\/a> local station KSAT that she wanted to be an artist.<\/p>\n The Uvalde City School District has its own police department \u2014 staffed with a chief, five cops, and a security guard \u2014 which participates in anti-bullying initiatives, including the poster contest Ramirez won. Absent meaningful gun reform, advocates and lawmakers often call for changes that seem more attainable: less bullying and more cops.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is Alithia Ramirez, 10. She was a 4th grader at #RobbElementary<\/a>.<\/p>\n Her dad says she loved to draw and wanted to be an artist, and even submitted a drawing to Doodle for Google.<\/p>\n I met him yesterday when he was waiting for answers. I was really hoping he’d get a different one. pic.twitter.com\/xEaJe0obxR<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Garrett Brnger (@BrngerReports) May 25, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Despite the school and the police\u2019s best efforts, an 18-year-old high school student was able to purchase an AR-15 firearm \u2014\u00a0 as soon as he became of age, in a state that does not require a license to carry<\/a> \u2014 and use it to massacre 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers in Uvalde. And although the shooter had crashed his car and been \u201cengaged by law enforcement,\u201d before entering the school, he still made it inside.<\/p>\n As the\u00a0number of school resource officers has ballooned<\/a> over the last two decades, so has the number of school shootings. There is no evidence<\/a> that police have the ability to stop\u00a0shootings from happening. \u201cThe idea that a standard armed school police officer is gonna stop someone in that situation has proven not to be true, time and time again,\u201d said Alex Vitale, a sociologist at the City University of New York and the author of \u201cThe End of Policing<\/a>,\u201d who noted that police and security guards are often the first casualties in mass shooting events.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nevertheless, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said \u201cit is a fact\u201d that due to the quick response of law enforcement officials, \u201cthey were able to save lives. Unfortunately, not enough,\u201d in a press conference Wednesday. Abbott went on to list more than 20 state and federal agencies, including more than two dozen law enforcement agencies, involved in responding to the shooting. (These included immigration enforcement agencies housed under the Department of Homeland Security, which promised<\/a> to refrain from deporting and arresting people in the area \u201cto the fullest extent possible\u201d for the time being<\/a>.)<\/p>\n A flurry of early coverage quickly identified the shooter as a \u201cvictim of bullying\u201d and speculated about mental health issues, even though he had no publicly known diagnosis. \u201cAnybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge,\u201d Abbott said Wednesday<\/a>, though he soon contradicted<\/a> himself by adding that in this case, \u201cthere was no known mental health history.\u201d<\/p>\n Lawmakers concerned about bullying leading to violence in schools might consider that members of law enforcement themselves are often the ones bullying students. \u201cCops are authorized to use force in a way that teachers and school administrators are not,\u201d Radley Balko wrote<\/a>\u00a0for the Washington Post in 2018, in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. \u201cIf administrators increasingly turn to on-site police officers to discipline students, that means more kids will be handcuffed, Tased and beaten.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Though school shootings are both incredibly traumatic and increasing \u2014 there have been more than two dozen<\/a> in the U.S. this year\u00a0\u2014 they are still statistically rare, Vitale\u00a0pointed out. \u201cSo what are those [school] police officers actually doing all day every day? Since they\u2019re not preventing school shootings? They\u2019re harassing kids, searching kids, waging a war on drugs, engaged in criminalizing disciplinary problems. And the burden of that falls most heavily on disabled kids, kids of color, and LGBTQ kids in the form of harassment arrest. That\u2019s what actual everyday school police do.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLaw enforcement cannot react quick enough to stop these things every time. So we\u2019re gonna need people on the ground, whether they\u2019re trained police officers or whether they are people that are trained in the school,\u201d Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton said<\/a> Tuesday night on Fox News, urging viewers to support the arming of schoolteachers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea that a teacher with a gun is going to stop someone with a semi-automatic or automatic weapon wearing body armor is ludicrous,\u201d Vitale said.<\/p>\n In January, Uvalde City police received a\u00a0half-million-dollar grant<\/a> from the state\u2019s controversial Operation Lone Star<\/a> program, which Abbott launched last March, deploying thousands of soldiers<\/a> to the state\u2019s southern border. The grant came on top of the department\u2019s existing $4 million budget \u2014 just under 40 percent of the total city budget. Federal funding for school resource officers comes from the Community Oriented Policing Services<\/a>, or COPS, program under the Department of Justice, which provides more than half a billion dollars each year for state and local law enforcement, including more than $50 million to a school violence prevention program.<\/p>\n After officers from the Uvalde City Independent School District Police Department<\/a> engaged the shooter, Texas Department of Public Safety Sgt. Erick Estrada told CNN, \u201cUnfortunately he was able to enter the premises and then from there, that\u2019s when he went on and entered several classrooms and started shooting his firearm.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Members of the community gather at the City of Uvalde Town Square for a prayer vigil in the wake of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on May 24, 2022.<\/p>\n \nPhoto: Jordan Vonderhaar\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As mass shootings<\/u> in the U.S. continue to rise, both Democratic and Republican federal and local officials have prioritized additional police presence<\/a> instead of stricter gun laws, which have become increasingly permissive<\/a>. And at the same time, efforts to arm teachers have caused additional violence. After the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, the state passed a law<\/a> allowing teachers to be armed in the classroom. Shortly afterward, there were several incidents \u2014 including in California<\/a>, Virginia, and Florida \u2014 of armed teachers<\/a> and school resource officers accidentally firing their weapons or injuring<\/a> students.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n \u201cPolice are really in schools because they are the most effective tool for the state at controlling young Black and brown people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n If anti-bullying and mental health initiatives are to be taken seriously as a solution, they should be pursued outside a law enforcement context, according to civil and human rights groups like the Dignity in Schools Campaign, a national coalition focused on stopping the school-to-prison pipeline. Putting more cops in schools<\/a> won\u2019t make kids safer but will further criminalize<\/a> them, says Kesi Foster, co-executive director at Partners for Dignity and Rights, an organization that works to advance economic and social rights in housing, education and labor.<\/p>\n Police have been used in schools for more than half a century, at least since the 1950s<\/a>.\u00a0When schools became a place for students to struggle over their rights during the civil rights movement, Foster said, \u201cthat\u2019s when we really saw the large influx of police and police programs in schools. \u2026 Police are really in schools because they are the most effective tool for the state at controlling young Black and brown people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no evidence that we\u2019re aware of, would love to see it if it exists, of having police in schools as a way to make schools safer or prevent school shootings,\u201d said Marc Schindler, co-author of an April 2021 Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute report<\/a> on school policing. Schindler is also executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit criminal justice group. In schools with police, kids are more likely to be suspended and expelled, Schindler said, \u201cand more likely to be referred to the justice system, the so-called school to prison pipeline, for behavior that is not necessarily appropriate to be referred to the justice system. We\u2019re talking about behavior that years ago, when I was in school, would be more likely to be handled in the principal\u2019s office.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n \u201cWhat does keep schools safe is having more well trained mental health counselors, social workers, and alternative resolution dispute programs.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cWhat does keep schools safe is having more well trained mental health counselors, social workers, and alternative resolution dispute programs,\u201d Schindler said. But schools already lack the resources for necessary mental health services and social supports, and education budgets have been slashed while police funding continues to climb. Police officers usually cost more than counselors and social workers, Schindler added, so \u201cyou\u2019re paying people more to do this job.\u201d<\/p>\n And while school shootings have historically been perpetrated by young white males in majority-white schools, he added, the negative consequences of increased policing in schools disproportionately fall on Black and brown students.<\/p>\n Reports have noted that the Uvalde shooter was socially isolated, bullied, and had exhibited<\/a> violent behavior, but the assumption that mental strife leads to gun violence is a dangerous scapegoat. \u201cBlaming mental illness for mass shootings inflicts a damaging stigma on the millions of people who suffer from clinical afflictions, the vast majority of whom are not violent,\u201d wrote<\/a> Mark Follman, a Mother Jones editor and the author of \u201cTrigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America,\u201d in the Los Angeles Times last week. \u201cExtensive research<\/a> shows the link between mental illness and violent behavior is small and not useful for predicting violent acts.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of marshaling a robust preventative intervention, we wait until the problem expresses itself as a mass killing, and then we microanalyze the police response,\u201d said Vitale. \u201cThis is a completely backwards way to approach the problem. Because policing is an inherently inadequate response to these things. By the time the shooting starts, the police intervention is going to be reactive. People will already be dead.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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