VP Debate

On School Shooters and Immigrants

This was going to be just in my reading recommendations, but there’s so much to say about it that I had to pull it out into its own post. I recently read a report from RAND on a survey they administered to teachers across the U.S. about school safety and active shooter drills. This is timely considering the vice presidential debate in which one candidate basically said the only thing we can do is turn our schools into reinforced fortresses, while the other said we should pass some laws to keep weapons out of the wrong hands and ban the most dangerous weapons. I don’t even want to think about how much it would cost to make every school across the U.S. bulletproof and hire police officers for every school, though this would clearly involve a massive expansion of government employees and budget from the party of “small government.”

Reading Recommendations

1. First up, new reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle details a statewide conspiracy by police and their lawyers to cover up police crimes and allow them to “resign” from departments that are investigating their illegal conduct. They also get a clean record agreement which means that the department will completely hide the investigation records and not report them when new departments conduct background checks and reference checks on officers. There are an absurd number of reports, including officers who moved around to multiple departments, sexually abused women in their custody, embezzled funds, harassed coworkers, and repeatedly used excessive force. All before having the records sealed and continuing to menace society. When people speak of “criminals” as if it is a core part of their identity, it’s important to realize that police only enforce some laws against some people, allowing us to create a two-tiered system where people of color and poor people can be labeled criminals while white people, the wealthy, and law enforcement are often allowed to commit crimes with impunity.

At least 163 California police agencies have executed separation agreements concealing misconduct allegations against at least 297 officers and deputies, records obtained by this investigation show. The actual numbers are likely much higher, because one-third of police agencies asked to release the agreements refused, citing privacy laws….

More than half of the officers who secured clean-record agreements uncovered by the investigation also received lump-sum payments as part of the deals, totaling $23.7 million. One officer got $3.1 million. At least five officers have secured multiple clean-record agreements.

2. In The Nation from February of this year is an excellent report on the austerity politics which defunds our schools in times of budget shortfall, and never replaces the funding in times of booming wealth (at least for the 1%). It notes the presence of lead in many schools, and the fact that Republican politicians consistently vote against funding for new school facilities, including removing that wording from the recent Inflation Reduction Act. Considering the topic of this post, it begs the question again of who will fund the bulletproof windows and doors and everything else Vance noted in the debate when his own party refuses to pay to remove lead from schools. It also notes how consultants waste education funds to peddle fake expertise and how poor children and children of color are punished and criminalized early

A case in point: A teacher in low-income Lawrence, Mass.—where children of color, many of them from Dominican and Puerto Rican families, make up 96 percent of public school enrollment—was told by an observer from a teacher-training corporation, who was sitting with two other trainers in the back row of her sixth-grade classroom, that she was smiling too much at her students (“I came across as too happy,” she was told) and wasn’t standing stiff enough or straight enough while she was talking to them. According to the teacher, whose story got some brief attention in 2015 when it was cited by Valerie Strauss in her education blog in The Washington Post, “I was told to stand in ‘mountain pose’ and not to favor one leg over another. I was told not to cross my legs. My body language must be in no way casual.” She was also told that her tone of voice conveyed too much enthusiasm and that she was giving children too much praise when they did a lesson right or behaved correctly. The teacher-training experts were speaking to the teacher through an earpiece that she had to wear and which, she said, the children noticed and found perplexing. “Miss,” a student asked her, “what’s that in your ear?” When another student spoke up out of turn, the teacher was told through her earpiece, “Give him a warning.” When the boy kept talking, “Tell him he has a detention.” At that point, she said, “the boy stood up and pointed to…the three classroom ‘coaches’ huddled around a walkie-talkie. ‘Miss,’ he said, ‘don’t listen to them! You be you. Talk to me! I’m a person! Be a person, Miss. Be you!’ I thought that boy deserved a prize, instead of a detention.”

3. Here’s another example of police only enforcing some laws for some people. This article from Gothamist found that the vast majority of New York tickets for jaywalking are given to people of color and enforced much more heavily in low-income, majority minority neighborhoods.

Neighborhoods where police issued a disproportionate number of jaywalking tickets this year include Downtown Brooklyn, Coney Island, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Jamaica. In comparison, the neighborhoods with the lowest number of tickets include affluent areas like the Upper East Side, Williamsburg, the Financial District and the Upper West Side.

4. And one final example of only enforcing some laws for some people. A study from researchers at several universities found that Chicago police have basically replaced stop-and-frisk (found unconstitutionally discriminatory) with discriminatory traffic stops of black and brown people.

Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.

For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54% of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70% of police stops.

On roadways where half of the drivers are white, white drivers account for around half of automated citations – and less than 20% of police stops.

This might lead one to think that speeding cameras are the answer and we should replace police enforcement with cameras, however I think back to the idea of non-reformist reforms. I’m not opposed to traffic cameras in general, but there are many other ways to make our streets safer, including traffic calming measures like speed bumps, narrowing roads, protecting bike lanes, redesigning intersections, etc. which have a variety of benefits and are often low-cost. Before we jump to spending tons of money on cameras, lets look at smart solutions that make better communities, rather than more of the same.

5. Finally, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from several immigrants rights organizations revealed that since 2014 ICE has been spending money training civilians to use firearms and do simulated immigration raids. Supposedly, these academies are intended to boost community perception of ICE. They also note that other federal law enforcement holds similar trainings. The wasteful spending of law enforcement on PR activities and departments is a topic for another post.

The documents were obtained by the Immigrant Defense Project and Organized Communities Against Deportations, with the legal assistance of Beyond Legal Aid, Latino Justice, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. They include detailed images showing where to strike with a baton or a weapon to cause differentiated harms on the body. 

“It is a violent and racist program, where people pretending to be violent ICE officers got to hold guns and fire them in role-play situations where agents pretended to be immigrants,” said Ian Head, Open Records project manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) a legal center advocating and defending human and constitutional rights. 

Documents also contain presentations on how to shoot a gun, point at targets, and stand in positions to fire. The shooting practices include military-style rifles. Likewise, a training in Atlanta organized drills to shoot at human-like mannequins and fire M4 assault rifles, extensively employed by the military. The training also covered ICE’s guidelines for “use of force,” encompassing deadly force. One presentation slide suggests yelling “drop the gun” as a potential cover when employing lethal force against someone.

Debate Lies on Guns and Immigration

Two false claims that Vance made that I want to focus on are that immigrants from Mexico are the ones bringing guns to the U.S. and that most of the guns used in these shootings are obtained illegally. According to Statista, of 151 mass shootings in the U.S. since 1982, 100 were committed using legally obtained firearms. Only 16 were with illegal firearms, and 34 are unknown. Going with the lowest estimate of 100, that means two thirds of mass shootings were committed with legally purchased firearms.

Even deeper than this, though, is that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms found that 99% of guns traced that were used in crimes are originally sold by a dealer, pawnbroker, or manufacturer. An interesting data point in the report is that almost 26,000 (or 1% of) guns used in crimes were “traced to a government agency, law enforcement agency, or the US Military” (p. 4). This report shows that the common claim that “criminals will get guns no matter what, if we pass laws restricting access to guns we’ll just make it harder for law-abiding citizens to get guns” is complete nonsense. The proliferation of guns is what allows people intent on causing harm to obtain guns, as 99% of them are being sold by folks who are legally allowed to sell them. A simple fix for this is a law that was recently passed in Maryland allowing gun manufacturers and sellers to be sued for “knowingly” harming the public. This could be a high bar of proof, but there is already much evidence that specific stores are responsible for a much higher percentage of guns used in crimes than others:

“a Freedom of Information Act request from USA TODAY unearthed a glimpse of them and showed that the vast majority of guns used in crimes are sold by a small fraction of America’s gun shops.

Among the more than 1,300 outlets targeted in 2023 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are many of the largest sellers – Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s, Rural King and Sportsman’s Warehouse – along with some less well-known stores, such as Town Guns in Richmond, Virginia, and Ammo Bros in Ontario, California.”

These sellers are focused on profit above all else (as is the point of a capitalist economy), meaning if someone is legally purchasing large quantities of weapons over time in a way that is obviously for resale, they will keep selling. Liability of manufacturers and sellers is a step in the right direction, but again the massive quantity of guns produced in the U.S. makes the U.S. incredibly unsafe, but also makes the rest of the world unsafe as well as I detailed in my review of Gun Country. This history book details the individual actors and the historical conditions which created the mass-market for guns in the U.S., first by importing huge amounts of weapons used in WWII which were illegal to import to most other countries in the world (creating local demand), and then by competing to mass-produce cheap guns in the U.S. to keep fueling the demand.

This brings me to the other lie during the debate, which was Vance’s claim that immigrants are the ones bringing in the guns. On the face of it, this is absurd considering that the U.S. makes up 40% of all arms exported and has almost 400,000,000 guns in civilian hands with India being the next closest country for civilian gun ownership at 71,000,000. The vast majority of the guns are ours, and as I noted in my post on Gun Country:

The most recent Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms report on guns recovered in Central America found that 40% of traced guns used in crimes were manufactured in the U.S. Violence is a factor causing increased immigration, and lax U.S. gun laws (not to mention absurd law enforcement operations, I mean, Fast and Furious? come on) directly contribute to it.

As I also wrote in a recent blog post on immigration, “there is no immigrant crime wave (broadly there’s not a crime wave at all).” That post details how immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens and how they also create jobs and have a positive wage effect for U.S.-born workers.

Finally, the RAND report I linked at the beginning found that “One in six K–12 teachers nationally works in a district that has been touched by gun violence since the 2019–2020 school year.” And that “Most teachers (69 percent) indicated that participating in active shooter drills has no impact on their perceptions of safety at school, and only one-fifth said that drills make them feel more safe.” In my first year working in-person at a school after the pandemic closures ended, a student brought a gun to the school I was in, planning to shoot another student. This was a gun his parents obtained legally. Fortunately, he fled the building and ditched the gun, turning himself into police later, but the school was on lockdown for most of the day and students and staff were scared. This is a common occurrence that is unique to the U.S.

Purchase the Book

If you’d like, you can purchase some of the books mentioned in this post from bookshop.org. This is a way to support local bookstores (or me if you use the link below), and avoid the Amazon monopoly.

Here is the link to my store page, with all of my recommendations.

You can also use the store locator and select a local book shop for the profit of your purchase to go to. According to the website:

When you select your local bookstore on the map above and visit their Bookshop.org page, we place a cookie in your browser that identifies you as that store's customer, and the store will get the full profit from all your Bookshop.org purchases (30% of the book's list price).