Comedian John Mulaney has a joke about the New York Post and how it chooses to identify people in headlines.
He said the tag “hero” is placed on anyone who simply does their job, listing “hero tutor teaches after school” as an example. Obviously an exaggeration, but his idea is something I agree with.
We throw the term hero around too loosely these days.
This is probably going to upset some people, but not all police officers, firefighters and members of the military are heroes. They serve the public in a variety of important ways and their jobs can put them in a variety of dangerous situations. They certainly have more opportunities to be heroic than the common person.
But a hero does something that most people can’t imagine themselves doing. You earn the title doing something heroic. When faced with a situation, a hero responds, often with little regard to their own safety.
I would imagine your opinion of heroic cops would be very different if you live in Uvalde, Texas versus Nashville, Tennessee.
School shootings in those two cities showed the difference between heroes and cowards. The reason I am writing this column is because I was nearly moved to tears by the body cam footage worn by the officers in Nashville.
But I want to start with Uvalde where 19 children and two teachers were gunned down at Robb Elementary School in May of 2022 by an 18-year-old man with an assault rifle. The suspect barricaded himself in a classroom as children died, while dozens, if not hundreds, of officers amassed in the hallway and around the school.
They hadn’t breached the room or killed the shooter for an hour until a border patrol tactical unit pushed past the other officers to enter the room. Interviewed later, officers said they had feared the suspect’s assault rifle which could have made it easy to kill anyone entering the room. The shooter, an untrained civilian, audibly taunted the officers from inside the room during the 77-minute incident.
There were the images from hallway cameras where officers shared fist bumps and one even took time to secure a squirt of hand sanitizer as they waited outside the classroom.
The Uvalde Police Chief was later fired over the response as investigations painted a picture of numerous miscalculations, disorganization and a prioritization on officer safety rather than victims.
Then you look at the Nashville shooting earlier this week where a 28-year-old former student of the Covenant School gained entry by shooting through locked exterior doors before killing three children and three adults.
That situation ended in 14 minutes as police killed the suspect, armed with a pair of assault rifles, who was firing on other officers from a second-floor window.
There are certainly differences in the two situations, including the barricaded nature of Uvalde, but the biggest is in the attitude of the officers.
I don’t know if you have seen the body camera footage from Nashville, but it painted a picture of officers who were going to put themselves at risk to stop a shooter – prioritizing speed over their safety.
Four-year officer Rex Engelbert arrives at the school and immediately removes his own assault rifle from his cruiser. He is quickly met by a school employee, who acts heroically in her own right, who gives him information, including the location of the shooter. I was struck by how close to the building this unarmed woman remained to assist officers. She wasn’t yelling or even rattled.
Engelbert is preparing to enter the door in seconds.
“Give me three. Let’s get three,” he yells to gather other officers as he prepares to go in.
The female school staff member continues to relay information to him off camera. She said there are gunshots coming from the second floor and there are a lot of children still up there.
“Let’s go. I need three. Let’s go,” Engelbert yells with increasing urgency.
Engelbert and two other officers enter and make their way down a hallway, quickly checking every corner of open classrooms they pass, as a jarring emergency alarm blares through school address system.
“Next. Let’s go,” Engelbert said as they reenter the hallway and head for another room. “Door. Door. With me,” he says to fellow officers as he enters the next room. They are at a near-jogging pace as they move, checking locked classrooms with a quick flash from a gun-mounted light.
Once they make it to the stairs, they are sprinting. At the top, they hear gunshots coming from the end of the hallway.
They run past other officers and Engelbert pokes around a corner where he sees the suspect near a window and rips four shots into the suspect. Officer Michael Collazo, who entered the building with Engelbert, then advances and puts an additional four handgun rounds into the fallen suspect, who was still moving and had a firearm.
It’s pretty easy to spot a hero in a situation like that. Engelbert and the two officers with him ran toward danger. They didn’t back up. They didn’t set a perimeter and wait. They didn’t get on the radio and ask for backup. And they certainly didn’t stop for a squirt of Purell.
Could I have done that? Probably not, and even if I could it wouldn’t have been with the fearless certainty of Engelbert and the other officers. I like to think I could be heroic when faced with saving others, but the truth is the only way to know is to act when the situation is in front of you.
And that is the difference between a hero and everyone else – actions over assumptions. Most officers, firefighters and members of the armed forces think they will respond heroically when needed.
But we need to save that hero title for those like Engelbert who put duty above self in the face of peril.
–Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune.