Austin at Large: The Big Fat Blue Lying Line

Nothing about Uvalde should surprise us in Austin about the credibility of police


Kevin Conner shows where he was hit with lead pellet rounds on May 30, 2020, after the death of George Floyd (Photo by John Anderson)

Two years ago, the last weekend in May saw one of the worst mass shootings in Austin history – perpetrated by the Austin Police Department. The fact that this milestone comes upon us (and two years is an important one – it's the deadline for filing a civil suit) in the wake of the much worse mass murder in Uvalde, and the incompetence of the police response there, is a painful but effective way to be validated in one's beliefs – my beliefs and many of yours – about the thin blue line.

Uvalde is most of all a damnation of our state's gun laws, and of the people in power who have collapsed under pressure from the gun nuts and gunmakers and loosened those laws beyond what their own common sense tells them is prudent. Greg Abbott's hapless pandering (see "Quote of the Week" above) obscures that he clearly thinks – and said so after the Santa Fe High School massacre in 2018 – that the state should consider red flag laws or a higher age limit for gun purchasers, and that neither he nor Dan Patrick really think permitless cowboy carry was such a hot idea. Sucks to be you, Gov. Loveless! Watch Beto O'Rourke's numbers against you tick up in real time, because everyone knows where he stands on guns, and that he sincerely believes it. The Abbott campaign has been trying for months to nail O'Rourke as a flip-flopper on guns, a line of attack that I can't imagine will survive the events of this week.

But About the Keystone Kops

Uvalde is a small town, about the size of Taylor, although it is the seat of its rural county. It's fought well above its weight throughout its history, having produced a vice president and speaker of the U.S. House (John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner), a governor of Texas (Dolph Briscoe), and perhaps a future politician in Matthew McConaughey. (And Roy Rogers' wife and cowgirl co-star, Dale Evans! But not her horse Buttermilk, who was from Wyoming.) The surrounding countryside includes some of the most beautiful parts of the Texas Hill Country, so lots of people have been to Uvalde, but it is still a small town.

Which makes the mass murder of small children in the heart of town something that's going to hit almost everyone in town where it hurts. They have been deprived of the succor that survivors often turn to in such cases – that the people in charge did all they could, that they were brave, that they were willing to sacrifice themselves if necessary to save the lives of little kids. On Wednesday of last week, they were told that pleasing fable by Abbott himself. It was all a lie, or at the very least a fantasy that people so desperately wanted to believe that it took on a life of its own.

It feels like punching below our weight to expect the Uvalde Consolidated ISD police force, which led the efforts on scene, to respond flawlessly to an active shooter armed with weapons far more powerful than their own. Attention is focusing more closely on the bad decisions of the chief of that force, Pete Arredondo, which complicates the fact that he just got elected to City Council. (He had to take his oath of office in secret, lest trouble break out.) Apparently, he's stopped cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety's investigation of the massacre. But the point remains – these are small-town cops who were first on the scene, this is traumatic for them too, we should have some compassion.

That's been made impossible by the exposure of the many, many lies that were told about the police response, not just by Arredondo but by a lot of people who should have known better or who could have seen the different reality with their own eyes. It's one thing for rumors and disinfo and bullshit to spin out of the socials and get sucked up by the partisan noise machines. It's another thing when all the official sources are telling lies to one another.

Don't Just Believe the Cops!

The Austin police who fired upon rowdy but nonviolent protests in front of their headquarters at I-35 and Eighth Street two years ago, in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Mike Ramos here, luckily didn't kill anybody, though their "less lethal" munitions proved to be plenty injurious to more than a dozen people. The indictment by a special grand jury on assault charges for the APD officers who shot those people is being treated by the copagandists as a sin against all that is holy, but that's why we have trials! They're just not used to being exposed to the same potential for injustice by highly powerful prosecutors that they know gets directed at the people they arrest. They know it sucks! (Even if District Attorney José Garza were the radical socialist partisan that they shriek about, who gives a fuck? We elected him. That's how it works.)

The city has already committed tens of millions of your tax dollars to the survivors of Eighth Street violence, which is a more true and telling verdict on the failings of our police force than might actually emerge from the criminal cases against individual officers. According to the police union, we should all be blaming ex-Chief Brian Manley for mismanaging the scene as badly as did Arredondo, which is a point well taken. It was also Manley who tried to feed Austinites a bunch of bullshit about the violent threat to everyone's safety posed by the protesters – canards now being repeated by the copagandist defenders of the indicted officers. Dudes, I was there; some people had rocks and bottles, but only the cops had guns. In Texas, that's not going to always be the case.

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