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If there\u2019s one<\/span> thing we know about the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, it is this: The police failed to stop it<\/a>. This was not for an absence of well-funded, trained officers on the scene. They were there.<\/p>\n Rather than placing themselves potentially in harm\u2019s way, however, the cops waited outside for over an hour and aggressively confronted desperate parents who begged for them to enter, including handcuffing one mother.<\/p>\n This failure to save lives was not, as I wrote<\/a> at the time, a failure of police work. It in fact exemplified what police critics and abolitionists<\/a> have stressed for decades, with reams of evidence. Police do not save lives or prevent crime<\/a>. Policing is not the \u201cthin blue line\u201d between social peace and chaotic violence. And the work of policing is a far cry from the heroic myth so stubbornly lodged in the American imagination<\/a>.<\/p>\n This was not, of course, the lesson learned by Texas authorities after the shooting. Instead, the state\u2019s response was as predictable as it was doomed to produce only more violence in Texas schools: They added more cops.<\/p>\n There were no well-researched, pragmatic policy changes around limiting assault rifles<\/a>, regulating the hyper-destructive expanding bullets<\/a> that ripped children\u2019s bodies apart, and increasing mental health support \u2014 things that could actually stop shootings like in Uvalde, which was carried out by a troubled 18-year-old.<\/p>\n Texas school districts instead poured billions of dollars into stationing police at every public school campus in the state. The results, as a New York Times report<\/a> published this week found, has been an horrific spate of violent police abuse against children in schools across the state.<\/p>\n Texas stationed police officers at every school. The result has been a horrific spate of police abuse against children.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n There is no official use-of-force data on the over 11,000 cops stationed across Texas\u2019s 400-plus school district police departments, the Times reported, and scant oversight. Despite the limited access to information, journalists were able to pinpoint \u201cmore than 2,600 use-of-force incidents\u201d in a nearly four-year period using only the \u201csmall share of records\u201d available.<\/p>\n There are horrific details. Kids are routinely slammed to the ground for minor misbehavior. Police punch children in the face. They shock students with Tasers for being in the wrong place. Or point guns at unarmed teens. Cops put handcuffs on a 6-year-old who later cried to his father, \u201cThe police wants me to die!\u201d In some cases, low-level disciplinary infractions that should lead to no more than a trip to the principal\u2019s office left children facing criminal charges; the well-documented school-to-prison<\/a> pipeline in all its ignominy<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n According to policing experts who spoke with the paper, Texas lawmakers \u201cembraced school policing without establishing safeguards required for meaningful accountability.\u201d A cop was mildly disciplined for having hogtied a 10-year-old boy with a behavioral disorder; apparently hogtying kids was a pattern for the officer. In response to the incident, the school district had to ban the practice of binding children by their hands and feet. The risks of bodily harm coming to kids across the state, however, remain tremendous: As in 16 other states, corporal punishment is legal in Texas schools.<\/p>\n And there is no mention in the Times investigation of the demographic profiles of the children abused by cops, but the videos in the report overwhelmingly show what appear to be nonwhite children enduring violent police abuse.<\/p>\n Filling school campuses with cops, meanwhile has not even worked to achieve the policy\u2019s stated aim of stopping school shootings in Texas. In late March, a 15-year-old student in Bulverde, Texas, shot<\/a> and injured a teacher and then took his own life.<\/p>\n\n