I want to recommend the following three items. This first one is an article about the controversy around the release of the 82 minute Uvalde School Massacre video, and the other two are links one to the entire 82-minute video and one to the 4 minute edited version that has been widely seen.
“The Ridiculous Claims That Journalists Shouldn’t Have Published the Uvalde Video: Officials in the Texas town have located a final leg to stand on”, July 14, 2022, Justin Peters, Slate, at < https://slate.com/business/
And
“Exclusive Uvalde video shows school shooting, police in hallway after shooter entered classroom”, July 12, 2022, Anon, Full 1:22:24 (82 minutes and 24 seconds) duration full version of video, Austin American-Statesman, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
And
“Exclusive: Watch Uvalde school shooting video obtained by Statesman showing police response”, July 12, 2022 updated July 14, 2022, Tony Plohetski, 4:08 edited version of video, Austin American-Statesman, at < https://www.statesman.com/
Introduction by dmorista:
The Slate article, “The Ridiculous Claims That Journalists Shouldn’t Have Published the Uvalde Video: ...”, does a good job of discussing the issues around the release of this video and the embarassment and response of Public Officials when their incomptence and callous disregard for the people they supposedly serve is exposed. The two versions of the video, to which we have posted the links are also revealing. The long one is interminable with extended periods of time during which the police, heavily armed and with bullet proof shields and body armor, stand around for nearly 80 minutes sometimes doing trivial activities. What is most revealing, however, is the fact that as the Slate article noted while: “You can hear a lot of gunshots in the video; an 'editor’s note' appears periodically informing viewers that 'The sound of children screaming has been removed ' ”.
There are significant issues about the grief and the sensitivity of the parents who lost their beloved 7 and 8 year old children in this recent attack. But I would challenge Beto O'Rouke, who is running against the loathsome Greg Abbot for Governor, to wage an aggressive campaign with ads that feature photos of the sort of bloody jello that the children killed at Robb Elementary School were converted into. Children whose parents could not identify the mutilated remains of, and those partents had to submit DNA samples to collect the horrible maimed bodies of their dearest little ones. The most gruesome example was of a little girl whose mutilated remains were only identified by her green shoes, and whose head was smashed and not found, just the bones of her spine stuck up from out of the bloody jello. The Rethugs constantly pose with assault rifles for their campaign ads, Eric Greiner in Missouri even took the genre a step farther with a campaign ad showing him and some henchmen hunting RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) with semi-automatic shotguns. Republican candidates regularly accuse Democratic opponents of being “sexual groomers” of young children in their fund-raising emails. Hardball campaign ads against these people are not merely possible they are just waiting to be produced. Some footage of the situation in the school corridor at Robb Elementary, from which 'The sound of children screaming has not been removed ' should be juxtaposed with images of Greg Abbot. And that should include mention being made of the loosening of gun purchase restrictions and carry rules he had worked to pass shortly before the children were murdered. There is some fine footage of Abbot and other officials at some PR stunt in Uvalde, where they all posed and acted sad a day or two after the massacre. O'Rouke challenged their stance and actions and they viciously and bitterly accused him of “politicizing the situation”. Just the other day the City Council of Uvalde met and denounced the media for releasing the video that makes them look so bad. The loathsome and inviting target Ted Cruz was at the meeting where they denounced O'Rouke. Cruz has two daughters who attend some elite Prep School that has high dollar security to protect the students from the sorts of monsters the Rethugs are working so hard to unleash on the rest of us. These facts and the names of any other Rethugs whose children attend heavily guarded schools should be released. If the names of the schools are available, maybe that information should be released too, pending some sort of legal opinion by attorneys for the campaign(s). The American people are very sensitive to hypocrisy and would react to anything that could be dug up against the Republican leadership in Texas and elsewhere. The ruling class despises people who send their children to public schools and not just public schools in poor places like Uvalde. This also includes public schools in prosperous places like Columbine, Colorado; Parkland, Florida; Oxford, Michigan; and Newtown, Connecticut.
The reproductive rights situation is also well suited to a similar attack against Abbot and other Rethugs in the U.S. Planned Parenthood leaders, in interviews over the years, have said that they have plenty of photographs of pregnant 8 and 9 year olds and also of dead young women lying in pools of blood after botched abortions. Well the time to use this material is well and truly here. What is this material for, when a life and death struggle for the young women and girls of Texas and other Fascist run Red States is taking place; and the Rethug Legislators in those states are passing newer and more draconian laws every day. I am not a campaign consultant, but I do know that most people have children and they are outraged when they find out that the rich and their servants among the political classes protect their children, and their wives and daughters carefully while exposing the children and wives and daughters of the common people to a wide range of dangers.
The time for hardball campaigning is here. The time for not obeying the Supreme Court is now here. The time for opening reproductive health care centers on Federal Land in reactionary states is here. The time for Jurisdiction Stripping for the Supreme Court is here (as enumerated in Article 3, Section 2: “ .... the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”) {Emphasis added}. The time for making sure that none of the 6 reactionary creeps from the court can ever again eat a restaurant meal in Washington or New York or Los Angeles without loud raucous protesters disturbing them is here. I know that many of the readers here are even more dubious of the Democratic Party's operatives than I am, but now is certainly the time to push and demand action.
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The Ridiculous Claims That Journalists Shouldn’t Have Published the Uvalde Video
Officials in the Texas town have located a final leg to stand on.
On Tuesday, the Austin American-Statesman and local TV station KVUE released an 82-minute video of previously unseen footage from May’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The video, which is primarily composed of footage taken from a security camera inside a Robb Elementary School hallway, begins as gunman Salvador Ramos approaches and enters the school from the outside. Gun in hand, wearing body armor, Ramos moves through the hallways and begins firing.
Though the video does not include any gory footage, and though we do not see inside the classrooms in which Ramos shot and killed 21 people, it is nevertheless hard to watch. (You can hear a lot of gunshots in the video; an “editor’s note” appears periodically informing viewers that “The sound of children screaming has been removed.”) Almost exactly three minutes after Ramos enters the school, three police officers enter and head down the hallway toward him. A minute later, after receiving fire, they retreat. More and more police officers show up. For over 40 minutes, as the video makes irrefutably clear, they more or less just stand there.
On Wednesday in Slate, my colleague Rebecca Onion nicely captured the excruciating experience of watching over an hour’s worth of footage of officers sanitizing their hands, checking their phones, standing around, and doing pretty much everything but intervening to stop the shooter. (The news outlets also released an edited four-minute version of the footage.) “The guy was so safe, so incredibly safe,” Onion wrote of the officer who was filmed getting a spritz of hand sanitizer from a wall dispenser. “[H]e was wearing armor and a helmet and hiding behind a nice, solid cement-block corner while unarmed kids smeared blood on themselves and pretended to be dead right down the hall. All that abundant protection, and he still needed just a little more.”
It’s one thing to read about the police inaction at Robb Elementary; it’s another, much more viscerally maddening thing to see it with your own eyes. The written accounts that I’ve read of the police response have contained excuses and rationales and official statements; they’ve left room for doubt over what happened and why, and for the prospect that the police on the scene actually acted heroically after all. But the video has no bandwidth for such shades of gray. It is an indelible partial record of what happened that afternoon. It sticks in a way that the stories I’ve read did not.
The Statesman-KVUE video—which was leaked to the outlets from an ongoing investigation into the Uvalde shooting—is a plain and clear document of the authorities on the scene failing to rise to the needs of the moment. The footage, in its way, is a demand for accountability, which is perhaps why some of the officials who ought to be held accountable have reacted so negatively to its public release. On Tuesday, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin announced that the news outlets were “chicken” for publishing the video before the victims’ families had had a chance to see it. (The chair of a Texas House committee looking into the shooting had planned to show a version of the video to the families on Sunday, before releasing that video to the public.) “They didn’t need to see the gunman coming in and hear the gunshots,” McLaughlin said. “They don’t need to relive that—they’ve been through enough.”
The mayor’s response, in which he appealed to emotion in order to criticize the media for doing their jobs, is worth analyzing. On its face it sounds reasonable, even humane. The victims’ families have indeed been through enough, and it’s natural to want to spare them additional gratuitous trauma. But this plea to consider the families’ emotional welfare reads as smarmy and self-serving when uttered by the mayor of a town whose first responders failed the students and teachers of Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, and whose authorities have been trying to duck responsibility for their own behavior ever since then.
More than an hour elapsed between when the first police officers arrived on the scene at Robb Elementary and when the police finally confronted and killed Ramos. This gap was not initially public knowledge, and in the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw announced that “the bottom line is that law enforcement was there, they did engage immediately, they did contain him in the classroom.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, praised the police on the scene for showing “amazing courage by running toward gunfire,” and proclaimed it a fact that “because of their quick response, getting on the scene, being able to respond to the gunman and eliminate the gunman, they were able to save lives.”
When it turned out that the exact opposite had happened, the world went from praising the Uvalde first responders to trying to figure out what, exactly, had taken them so long to respond. None of the parties who might be able to accurately answer that question has been particularly forthcoming, perhaps because the answer to the question is not a flattering one. The public cannot expect officials to reliably narrate and recount their own actions in instances where they may have behaved dishonorably. In these sorts of situations, it is common for public officials to blame the media in order to divert blame away from themselves.
The fact that the Robb Elementary footage was leaked from an ongoing investigation gives the blame-the-media brigades more fodder for their smarm and their scorn. Officials of any sort hate it when embarrassing material leaks from a black box, and they generally turn their ire on the outlets that have the chutzpah to publish it. By raising a fuss about the provenance of the leaked material and the ostensible impropriety of its publicization, officials often hope to deflect attention away from the substance of the story. Fox News pulls big ratings every night by pursuing this very strategy of deflection.
But the Uvalde City Council ain’t Fox News, and the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE weren’t the ones standing around for an hour while a teenage gunman killed 19 students and two adults inside a classroom that might not have even been locked. These outlets have done a great public service in acquiring and publishing footage that renders transparent the authorities’ opaque narrative of that desperate hour at Robb Elementary. The video clarifies a part of the story about which the authorities have been neither credible nor consistent, a story on which it’s been shown that we cannot trust the authorities’ word. It has immense news value and is of immense public interest—not for what it shows us about the shooter, but for what it shows us about the people who were supposed to confront him.
I am willing to believe that by making the video public, the Statesman and KVUE may indeed have temporarily increased the pain that the victims’ families are feeling right now. Indeed, some have said as much. “This is the opposite of what the families wanted,” the mother of one deceased girl wrote on Facebook, according to the BBC. “Our hearts are shattered all over again!” But reporting decisions cannot be guided exclusively by concerns over the emotional welfare of the people who may be affected by a given story. Just as our justice system leaves it up to a judge to impose a sentence rather than letting victims and their families determine a convicted criminal’s fate, “what the families want” simply isn’t the last word when it comes to reporting on mass shootings. Like it or not, the Uvalde tragedy and its aftermath belong to the world now, and the world deserves to know exactly what went wrong with the police response.
On Tuesday night, Uvalde councilmember Ernest King echoed Mayor McLaughlin in deeming the Statesman and KVUE “chicken shit” for publishing the footage, specifically calling out those outlets’ decision to include material of Ramos entering and shooting within the school—material that would apparently have been redacted from the footage the families were supposed to view privately this Sunday. “They did that for ratings and they did that for money,” King said.
Whatever, man! The Statesman and KVUE clearly did not publish the video for lurid, tawdry ratings reasons, or in some cynical bid to drive clicks and grow wealthy by exploiting tragedy. (An editor’s note appended to the top of the Statesman’s story says that “This exclusive story and video are being made available free of charge as a public service. If you value strong journalism from the American-Statesman, support us by subscribing.”) They published the video in part because it’s become clear over the past month that the Uvalde authorities are in cover-their-asses mode. The video clarifies a part of the story about which the authorities have been neither transparent nor consistent, and reminds us all that just because some fulminating dumbass gets elected doesn’t mean that the public should automatically trust his judgment or his word.
In a column on Tuesday, Statesman editor Manny Garcia wrote that the paper’s goal in making the footage public “is to continue to bring to light what happened at Robb Elementary, which the families and friends of the Uvalde victims have long been asking for. … We have to bear witness to history, and transparency and unrelenting reporting is a way to bring change.” People who held a public trust already flinched once from confronting the awfulness of the Uvalde shooting. The media must not flinch in holding them accountable.
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