Authorities described the student as a juvenile male but did not provide further identification or specifics pending an investigation
Wisconsin police shot and killed a student who officials say came to a local middle school with a gun. The student never got into the school, but as a precaution the entire district was put on a lockdown late Wednesday morning.
Students have since been reunited with their parents, some of whom waited up to five hours for their children to be dropped at a bus storage center in Mount Horeb, a village about 20 miles south-west of Madison, the state capital, according to WMTV 15 news.
No other students or staff were injured in the shooting, Josh Kaul, Wisconsin’s attorney general, said during a Wednesday news conference.
We need more information. The fact that the details about the victim are currently lacking is a bit of a red flag here. There is a marked difference between “police observed a 17 year old approaching the middle school with an automatic weapon and several bandoliers of ammunition” and “an 11 year old tried to sneak a handgun into the building in his backpack.” Neither of those children need to be let anywhere near the school, but one of those situations you might be able to deescalate–maybe both. More pertinent to the subject at hand, if the case were the former, I would expect the police to be extremely forthcoming about it. The fact that those kinds of details are, to my understanding, yet to be revealed leads me to suspect that the cops want some time to get their story straight first.
It’s always a good thing when a school shooting doesn’t happen, but that doesn’t change the sad reality that police in the United States are not to be trusted. This is still a story about a child killed by police, and that deserves scrutiny. Hopefully the action was well justified, but I think anyone would be forgiven for exercising skepticism given the dearth of details about what happened.
There are laws specifically against reporting information on children under 18, so in both your cases you would see an information delay. That doesn’t NECESSARILY mean they’re covering something up. Or rather, they may be covering up for the sake of the family rather than the cops. So the way they learn about it isn’t on TV or from a mob of reporters pounding on their door.
It’s entirely possible (and common) to reveal details about an incident without revealing personally identifiable information about a minor. There are good reasons not to–but unfortunately when police are involved, Occam’s razor cuts in favor of agency self-preservation.