Floyd’s murder and the Uvalde massacre are two horrors in which police are at the center, though in completely different ways. In Minneapolis, police used excessive force; in Uvalde, everyone seems to agree, they failed to use force as soon as they should have. These are extreme examples of a familiar dyad of overpolicing, which includes pretextual stops (when officers find an excuse to stop someone, in the hopes of uncovering a more serious offense) and brutal enforcement, and underpolicing, in which citizens feel abandoned by law enforcement.

In the Floyd case, junior officers were convicted for failing to intervene as Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck. In Uvalde, officers did not act for nearly 80 minutes as they waited for an order. Experts say criminal charges in Uvalde are unlikely—prosecuting officers for inaction is even harder than prosecuting them for things they did—though civil suits are possible. Pete Arredondo, chief of the school-district police, has stepped down from a city-council seat and is on leave from his police role but has not heeded demands to resign.

Both cases are also unusual in that they have attracted widespread condemnation from other police officers. Yet nearly 50 days have passed since the massacre, and the public still knows vanishingly little about why the police failed so badly in Uvalde. But as we’ve learned from past incidents, civilians should be skeptical of official accounts, especially early on. The initial police report about Floyd’s death infamously stated that “officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress.”