People seem to want to blame the police for this. I’m far from a police apologist but this seems like a weird thing to criticize them for. We haven’t set up laws, procedures, or funding to follow up on reports like this in anything resembling a reasonable fashion. Most states don’t have a process in place to do anything more than initiate a conversation even if a report of imminent violence is credible, timely, and investigated by someone who both takes it seriously and has the authority to act on it. There are tons of problems with the way policing is done in America but this particular issue is a systemic problem that has its root in American culture, not police personnel.
I suppose you could characterize most issues in that way if you really wanted to. It just seems odd to blame police in this scenario when it seems clear to me that the reason this keeps happening is that we, collectively, do not want to solve the problem. We keep voting for people who won’t do a damn thing about it and then we all point fingers at the other guys when it comes time to blame someone. This is not anyone’s fault but ours.
Saying that I can already hear some of you responding “but I voted for the right people, I have empathy, surely it’s not my fault”. Yes it absolutely is. More than anything our biggest failure as citizens is not enforcing consequences on politicians for refusing to enact the will of the people. We have this idiotic mentality that keeps us voting for people who say they’ll do what we want them to and then just don’t. They don’t give a fuck what we think because we haven’t given them a reason to. And yet, instead of doing anything to change that we just try and virtue signal harder, hoping that will change something, and then when it doesn’t we distract ourselves with pointless entertainment until the next newsworthy incident and the cycle starts all over again.
This is why we can’t get anything accomplished politically. This is why our quality of life is diminishing. This is why our life expectancy is falling. This is why our fellow countrymen are getting shot while eating dinner with their families. All of us, myself included, are too cowardly to do anything beyond bitching about these problems on the internet and carrying around a semi-witty protest sign twice a decade. Until that changes we’re all going to keep having these same fruitless conversations while we watch things get progressively worse.