At first the Uvalde school shooting riveted everyone’s attention because of its horror and tragedy. The murder of innocent and beloved children and their teachers is a nightmare that engenders deep feelings of rage and grief. At first, the stories focused on the victims and the perpetrator, and also some descriptions by survivors.
But after a while people realized that the perpetrator will always remain opaque, as psychopaths so often do. What drove an 18-year-old to end his life through an act of obscene cruelty? We’ll never know. The grandmother he shot in the face and left for dead has surprisingly survived, minus her jaw. His family will live with the mystery and the horror forever, but they have faded into obscurity once more. The children he killed will always be mourned by their families and friends, and the survivors will bear the physical and emotional scars.
But the world has moved on, as the world does. Now we’re confronting what might be done to improve school security, and the hearing in Texas this past Tuesday that featured Texas Department of Public Safety head Steve McCraw had lengthy discussions on that issue. But the focus for most people listening to the hearing was when he finally gave an updated timeline and facts.
In particular, people wanted to know about the police response. Ever since just a few days after the shooting, when it began to emerge that the police got to the school quickly but acted with agonizing slowness and delay, a great deal of rage has been directed in their direction and in particular towards the person who was ostensibly in charge but seemed to not have a clue what should be done, school police chief Arredondo.
I set out to watch McCraw’s entire testimony, which lasted about four and a half hours. I took notes the entire time and listened very carefully, sometimes playing certain sections several times. About a third of the way into it, I was struck with the thought that I was watching something that was teaching me much more than facts about the shooting. That “something” concerned the ways in which people take in information, communicate that information, understand or don’t understand each other, and act on their perceptions in terms of behavior and also in terms of their judgments of the behavior of others.
It’s something we do every day and every time we interact with another person. We’ve done it all our lives. Sometimes, when people make errors in perception or judgment or behavior, it doesn’t matter much. Sometimes it causes small misunderstandings and mistakes; sometimes it causes large ones. Sometimes it even causes fatal ones.
People whose job it is to investigate accidents are well aware of that. Sometimes they discover that an instrument was read wrong. Sometimes a word was misheard. Sometimes a person is tired and loses alertness (I once fell asleep for a split second while driving on three hours of sleep, and almost veered into oncoming traffic when something – I don’t know what – jerked me awake).
Fortunately, though, most of the time our errors have few or no important consequences – although some misunderstandings and miscommunications can end a friendship, or a marriage, or estrange a relative. But that’s part of being human.
Here’s a story. When I was about five years old, my older brother and I used to attend Sunday School classes from 9 AM to noon. My mother would pick us up then and take us home, about a three- or four-mile drive. But one Sunday she didn’t come.
I couldn’t figure out why. I watched all the other kids leave, and I think even a teacher or two asked me if I was all right and I said I was fine (I hated asking for help). But at a certain point I was left alone, standing there.
Fortunately it was a beautiful day, sunny and just a little warm. Although I was only five, I knew the way home – after all, we drove it Sunday after Sunday.
And so I started out for my house on foot. I had a choice of one of two ways to go. The shorter way was through the park and the longer way would take me around it (in those days each route was fairly safe). I chose the longer way because I would be passing the apartment building where my aunt, uncle, and cousin lived, and I decided to stop there and see if they were home, because I figured if they were then they could drive me to my house. I was starting to get a bit tired.
It was a good idea in theory. But they weren’t in their apartment; I rang and rang the bell but no answer. At that point it would have made my trip even longer to have backtracked and gone through the park, so I continued onward. It was a long walk, and as it got hotter I took off my outer sweater and carried it; for some reason I remember that in particular. The last stretch was uphill and I was dragging a bit more. But then I got to my block, and then my house.
The front door was open, and I stepped in. I saw my mother in the living room, sitting on a couch and chatting on the phone. She looked at me, open-mouthed with surprise, and I said something nasty to her and then turned on my heel and went upstairs to my room. I was really, really angry, because the only explanation in my head the entire time had been that she had simply forgotten me.
But then she told me her story. At about ten o’clock, my brother had called her from the school phone and said something like “We’re being let out early and I’m going to Jimmy’s house.” Jimmy was his friend. My mother thought that the “we” was my brother and me, but he actually meant that the other person in the “we” was Jimmy. My brother never for a moment thought my mother would misunderstand and think that he and I were the ones going over to Jimmy’s house. And my mother never thought that he didn’t mean me, so she never thought to ask him what he meant.
They both thought everything they said was clear. But when my brother phoned her to be picked up later on at Jimmy’s house, which happened at about 12:30, and she arrived there, she was stunned to learn I wasn’t at Jimmy’s, too. Stunned and very very upset.
Meanwhile, I was oblivious to all that, and plodding home, with my short cotton socks sinking down at the heels and forcing me to tug them up every block or so.
My mother took my brother in the car and they went to look for me. I wasn’t at the school anymore when they got there, of course; no one was. Again, my mother – and my brother – made an assumption at that point. Their assumption was that I would of course take the route we always took, the short one through the pretty park with the water feature and the birds. It never occurred to them that I wouldn’t do that, because they simply didn’t think that I’d stop at my uncle’s instead. I guess they thought of me as a creature of habit, unable to come up with a more creative solution to my problem; after all, I was only five. But when they drove the park route (several times, I think) I was nowhere to be found.
And so they went back to our house. My mother was extremely upset. My father wasn’t home. Did she call the police at that point? I can’t remember. But when I entered the house she was certainly calling someone (no cell phones back then, of course). She was flabbergasted and delighted to see me trudge in, my sweater dragging too. And I was absolutely enraged at her, till she told me the story of what had really happened. Even then, I couldn’t understand for a long time how my brother and mother had misunderstood each other so badly, and it bugged me that it ended up affecting me. It also seemed strange to me that all this drama had occurred completely outside my awareness. For me, the drama was at the beginning; the rest had just been tedious.
That’s a story with a completely happy ending. No one was hurt. My mother wasn’t guilty of neglect. I was forgiven for being angry. My brother was – my brother. But it planted seeds of knowledge within me about how easily communications can go astray, and it certainly wasn’t the only time that happened in my life.
On Tuesday, when I watched McCraw’s presentation, and then listened to the question-and-answer period as well, I was struck over and over with the ways in which people misunderstand each other despite making enormous efforts at being clear. It was a demonstration of one of my favorite quotes, from Karl Popper:
Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.
And combine that with Donald Rumsfeld’s:
…[A]s we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
It’s usually those last ones that get you.
But police responding to a school shooter call don’t have the luxury of misunderstanding, or of having a lot of unknown unknowns. We demand perfection or near-perfection of them – or at least competence in often-chaotic situations – for a reason, which is that the stakes are extremely high. They are required to understand others clearly and to be understood clearly by others as well, and it is necessary for them not to assume that they know things they don’t know and to ask the right questions of dispatch, and all this must happen very rapidly in tense situations.
We also require courage of police – courage of a degree we don’t all have. I certainly don’t think I have the requisite courage; but then, I’m not a police officer. “It’s what they signed on for,” we say. So it probably is the case that even though we have almost no tolerance in police for error and/or stupidity or misunderstandings that can prove dangerous or fatal, we probably have even less patience for demonstrations of cowardice.
All of those are issues relevant to the perceptions and behavior of the police in Uvalde that day, and to our own perceptions of the meaning of the information we read and hear about that behavior. This was on full display in McCraw’s testimony as well as in the questions of the Texas senators. There were a number of communication breakdowns, as well as unknown-unknowns, even in the interactions between McCraw and the senators there, and I’m virtually certain that a lot of viewers will have trouble agreeing on what was said and in particular what it means.
So here I am again, writing a post with general reflections rather than going into the nitty-gritty of McCraw’s testimony. But for me this is a very big topic with many parts, so I felt the need to write this first. I definitely plan to go into much detail on specifics in subsequent posts – probably exhaustive detail.
