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.
**not sure if some replies are missing my point or just talking past it. I’m not saying school cops are a good thing I’m saying the tweet is blatantly factually wrong and should not be promoted.
***Oh the tweet is from February 2018, it might have actually been true at the time. For about one month until the Great Mills shooting.
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.
school shootings in 2024 average 1.8 per every school day (0.9 at 365 calendar days a year). The next highest country - Mexico - has one every
24 school days (one every 46 calendar days)I would not call that a deterrent.
Edit: oh God, it’s actually even worse. I assumed I was looking at yearly stats for Mexico. it was actually a decade. It’s one every 15 months
And this is probably higher than usual in Mexico, since the USA-backed “Guerra contra el narco”, started in 2006-2007, brought a lot of violence and firearms, the latter mostly from the USA.
Fortunately, we’ve been recovering from those levels of violence consistently since 2021.
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 *disagreement 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.
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.
Cops don’t protect anyone but themselves.
And the rich, thank you very much.
Valid.
Not all the time, or Brian Thompson would be alive, and Luigi wouldn’t be a patsy.
Who’s Brian Thompson? I just think of him as a Corporate Serial Killer for Profit. I don’t want to know his name.
I know who my man Luigi is, though!
Just because they are supposed to protect the rich, doesn’t mean they’re good at it. They don’t get suddenly competent because it’s a rich guy. The rich are being guarded by the same dumb apes that are brutalizing the rest of us.
That was my point really. They may protect the rich and their property, but they aren’t effective, efficient, or even educated.
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.
It’s literally impossible to know exactly how many, but it’s statistically possible to compare data from before this measure was taken to after the measure. A serious argument could be made and it’s probably already done. Also, the other point made is as important as this, since many other consequences come with armed police officers in schools. Considering the prevalence of non-white people in the imprisoned population, and the well-known bias of police officers in the USA against non-white people, well…
In this case, not really. How many school shootings were there before Columbine…?
I’m not making a point on that. I’m just saying that you can argue with numbers and not only with statements that can just be denied with statements saying otherwise. As a foreigner to the USA, I don’t even care about that specific discussion. Before and after Columbine there were way too many school shootings in the USA, anyway. Their numbers on this have always been stupidly high.
Definitely, raw data never tells the full story. Just pointing out in this specific case, Columbine was certainly an inflection point, and the presence/absence of school security seems hard to use as a metric for before/after.
Quite a few, school shootings date back to at least July 26, 1764. Yes, 1764, not 1964. Greencastle, Penn
There were roughly 14 major ones, but stats weren’t really kept as well as they are now.
Now, there’s 14 a week 💀
I imagine there’s a hell of a lot more armed school security guards today, so if anything, they’re not a catch-all deterrent.
My point was that Columbine was the first event that got mass media attention, and things have gotten progressively worse since.
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…That’s the thing, they have. However, turns out the tweet is from February 2018 and the earliest example I could find (not looking very hard) is March 2018, funnily enough.
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”
Last Week Tonight did a story on police in schools a while back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgwqQGvYt0g
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.
Which is way too many school kids sent to jail when they otherwise would be a community problem with community solutions. Now they’re a kid with a record and no prospects.
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?
yep, Columbine, not Uvalde – suicide at 12:08, SWAT entered school 1:09
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.
ACAB.
Lmao
I went to Philly schools that were so “ghetto” and having some cop in school make it felt even more like a prison than it already is.
Like airport style security and xray machine… wtf… and you get blamed for being late if the security checks takes too long…
Cameras everywhere…
Jesus christ…
That stuff at school is literally just food poisoning
Also I got arrested for self-defense… cuz the schools apparantly expect “model minoity” to just endure the racist bullying and keep quiet and not say anything about it… to just somehow endure it, so when I decided to be like: you know what, screw this and take a stand, uh oh, now the system is mad because I didn’t go along with the obedient non-confrontational asian nerd stereotype.
All the virture signalling about #StopAsianHate and nobody ever stood up for me… in a deep blue city, during the height of covid (like this incident happened 1 week before schools got shut down)
Fuck this racist system
ACAB
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).
That’s a lesson worth learning, they’re no smarter than a guard dog. If you can work them right you can get away with everything. They’re also unpredictable and reactive so you have to be careful when they’re emotional or scared.
At least as many.
Where I used to live, my neighbor, a policewoman, complained that she was often sent to public schools to arrest kids for the color of their shoelaces. Because it was supposedly a sign of a gang affiliation.
Well, yes. That’s how America works.
Create a problem so that the solution works in your favor. Double points if it’s spinned for good publicity.
It’s the “war on drugs” all over again. It was never a war on drugs, it was a war on ethnicity.
Maybe get them used to police presence as early as possible?
Removed by mod
