‘The Wire’ Creator David Simon Calls Out Police Response to Texas School Shooting

thewrap.com:

This post has been updated to correct factual errors. David Simon, the creator of HBO’s acclaimed cop drama “The Wire,” spoke frankly about the police response to the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school on Tuesday — and contrasted that response to police officers he knew in real life.

On Wednesday, it came out that police officers stood by for nearly an hour as parents begged them to confront the shooter — dithering that might have helped create more deaths — and have since failed to offer a coherent explanation for their failure to act.Simon, inspired by this news, offered his own thoughts in a series of tweets on Thursday. “I am writing to say that as a reporter, I knew men who could not have produced any smart or tactical reason to stand outside a school while children were shot and bleeding to death inside,” Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter, said.He began his tweet thread by mentioning two police officers he knew who died in the line of duty, named Ira Weiner Owen Sweeney.“Yesterday, for the first time in years, I thought about Ira Weiner, who answered a domestic call and ran without backup into that rowhouse on Mulberry because he heard a woman screaming.

The man waiting for him on the other side of the door stabbed him above the eye with an icepick, then grabbed Weiner’s gun from the holster and shot him to death.

Owen Sweeney, who five years later went up some stairs to try to talk a disturbed man out of his barricade only to be shotgunned to death through a wooden door,” he wrote. “It may sound as though I am highlighting the risks of being a police officer to mitigate the stories coming out of Texas today,” he added, “That’s not my intent.