This is a post about evil. Lots of disturbing stuff in here, no real jokes, so reader discretion advised.
Thanks to eyewitness accounts from the families of murdered children, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Uvalde Police Department failed to take meaningful action to stop an 18-year-old from slaughtering 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday. There is video footage of cops screaming at desperate parents who were begging these armed police officers and sheriff’s deputies to go into Robb Elementary School and do something, anything, about the horror unfolding inside.
In one of the videos above (because they’re really fucking hard to watch), a cop says that he’s not inside the school where, again, 10-year-olds are dying “because I’m having to deal with you.” That’s “you” being the families getting irreparably damaged in real time by what’s happening a few agonizing feet away from them.
The Uvalde PD and the attendant departments at the scene of the shooting failed on a profound level. They failed their community and they failed to live up to the tulpa of Policing that American culture and the American state has created: that of a brave, selfless Force of Heroes who dedicate and sacrifice their lives to the innocent and vulnerable in the exact way these actual flesh and blood cops did not.
So, if they can’t stop the massacre of children, what does the Uvalde PD do? Inspired by this thread from Steven Thrasher, let’s look at the department’s Facebook page to see the parts of their job that they want the public to see.
It is immediately clear that public humiliation is very important to Uvalde PD’s “brand.” I feel morally obligated not to post the mixture of mugshots and perversely posed photographs with clearly visible faces, but UPD has recently posted several times about what they term “human smuggling attempts.” But the full photos of desperate men, women, and children staring into/cringing away from the camera are on the department’s Facebook page and primed for ridicule if you can stomach them.
Stoking racist, xenophobic conspiratorial thought is also all in a day’s work for UPD. The dreck in one comment section suggests exhausted men packed like sardines into a couple of cars, caught trying to cross the border, are an invading army.
Commenters make fun of arrestees’ facial expressions, the clothes they’re wearing, and the fact that they’re criminals in the first place.
And while a good Uvalde PD officer with a gun is not enough to stop a bad guy with a gun, they do use their Facebook page for critical public safety work, such as…
And, of course, members of the Uvalde PD seems to spend a lot of their time celebrating the Uvalde PD. The posts hit all of the cop Facebook page tropes: haul photos from drug busts and pictures with teenagers who spontaneously challenge cops to games of pickup basketball and whatever this… is.
The tragedy in Uvalde is not an isolated one (it’s the 27th school shooting this year and the latest of over 200 mass shootings in 2022), which only deepens the horror. Uvalde’s police department, and the way it depicts itself online, is not isolated either. The department typifies the preening cruelty at the heart of American policing, the desire to be adored for its monopoly on violence.
And remember: This is what they want us to see. This is what they’re proud of. This—not saving 10-year-olds from an assault rifle—is their job.
Questions, comments, corrections? (“You don’t know what it’s like to be a police officer” is not a correction.) Shoot me an email at k80way@protonmail.com, or DM me on Twitter.
Names and numbers to any cops that didn't go in please.