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Uvalde Cops Lawyering Up as Investigation Proceeds to Next Step and Interviews

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Very few people know that Marjorie Stoneman-Douglas High had a good guy with a gun, a school resource officer who went and hid while a former student rampaged through the hallways with an AR-15 (that damned gun). From a 2021 AP article:

Broward Circuit Judge Martin Fein declined to dismiss the child negligence charges against former Broward County Deputy Scot Peterson, the Sun Sentinel reported.

Peterson, 58, had worked as a school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Nikolas Cruz, who was 19 at the time of the February 2018 shooting, has been charged with 17 counts of first-degree murder.

So there can be real consequences for sworn law-enforcement officers that fail in a dereliction of duty. This may explain why the Uvalde police officers that are currently undergoing an investigation of their role in last week’s shooting in which children actually dialed 911 thirty minutes into the standoff, now seem to be afraid of that very same investigation.

According to Adam Katersky of ABC News Radio, the Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde ISD police force are no longer cooperating with the Texas DPS investigation into the massacre at Robb Elementary and the state’s review of police response, multiple law enforcement sources told ABC reporter Josh Margolin. 

The decision to stop cooperating occurred soon after Col. Steven McCraw held a news conference Friday during which he said the delayed police entry into the classroom was “the wrong decision” and contrary to protocol.

There are very few people with a “duty to act,” especially to undertake danger to themselves in order to save others but, as we see above with respect to Parkland, those kids could be seen as under the care of the Uvalde Police Department from the moment they arrived on scene and serious charges might come about given the amount of information available to the officers.

Yes, and Twitter was 100% on board with possible charges:

Exactly.

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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, with Nicole Hickman

Jason Miciak
meet the author

Jason Miciak is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is originally from Canada but grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He now enjoys life as a single dad raising a ridiculously-loved young girl on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He is very much the dreamy mystic, a day without learning is a day not lived. He is passionate about his flower pots and studies philosophical science, religion, and non-mathematical principles of theoretical physics. Dogs, pizza, and love are proof that God exists. "Above all else, love one another."

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