Just out of curiosity Coronach, could you cite some instances where such arrests "in the open" went awry?
You've never seen a car chase?
That is, essentially, a felony arrest conducted in public. Now, sure, it's not the same thing (sometimes it starts with the bad guy
in the car, for instance, and you rarely have multiple containment officers and a tactical team on hand for one) but the similarities are stronger than you might think.
As to instances in which tactical teams conducted public takedowns that went awry, I have no links and I have no stats, and the main reason for this is that they don't do them that way. Why? Well, read on.
Officers
every day of the week try to arrest people, in public, on warrants. Sure, they're not tactical teams, but if you know Joe Dirt the Rag Man with his bench warrant for Agg Mopery is going to be on the corner of 3rd and High selling contraband, you try to get multiple officers in the area, achieve some level of containment, then move in and arrest him.
Or, you wait outside of his crib with a half dozen of your buddies and try to get the snatch on him when he walks out.
Or, you wait for him to go to the carry out and arrest him there.
Or, you wait for him to get in his car, wait for him to get stopped at a light, and swoop in on him and block him in with your cruisers.
We do this, the sort of things that THR members advocate doing in lieu of doorkicking by SWAT, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Only we're doing it with low-grade offenders thought to be unlikely to be armed, a threat to the public, or flight risks.
And what happens?
HOLY HECK, it is a rodeo.
Sometimes it works great. Actually, it often does. I'd even go so far as to say "usually", if the officers are skilled and luck is on your side. But when it goes wrong?
"GOT ONE RUNNING!"
Now, "So what?" you say. He runs. Get him next time. You can do that when the guy has a misdemeanor warrant for failure to appear on a traffic ticket. BIG DEAL. Except for the fact that this means he will learn that all he has to do is get a good head start and he won't be chased, that's fine. And, truth be told, we will chase him, but those chases get called off all of the time, and sometimes rightly so. You need to balance the danger of letting him go with the danger of trying to reenact
Bullitt over an unpaid seatbelt ticket.
When the guy you just lost is wanted for a violent felony offense, however, you have to ask yourself just what you flushed out into the open. You have to go get him, he's an fleeing felon. If he knows he's hit for something really big, he will be desperate. Hostages have been taken. People have been run over. Carjackings occur. Auto accidents. Shootouts with innocent bystanders catching stray rounds.
Does SWAT do some 'in public' arrests like that? Yes, but my watching-from-the-sidelines opinion is that the only do them when they believe one or more of the following:
1. It's the only option
2. They think he's unlikely to start hosing bullets everywhere
3. They can get a really tight noose around him before springing the trap.
even then, I've been assisting SWAT on cases like that where we ended up running through yards and hopping fences when the target turned out to be a little more wary or a little faster than anticipated. If I had plowed my cruiser into a minivan full of nuns on their way to a baptism, I
know the first thing the media would be screeching would be "Why did you have to do it that way???" And, frankly? They would have a point.
The first thing SWAT will tell you, just like any special forces soldier/airman/sailor/marine will tell you, is that they are not superhuman, they're just highly trained. The same things that are problems for patrol officers will be problems for SWAT when it comes to working arrests in the open. Can they overcome them a little better than patrol officers? Probably...they're better trained, can be in plainclothes (though, then...how do you know it's the cops arresting you? Hmm!), have more resources to throw at the problem, etc etc etc. But they know, from their days on patrol, that trying to snatch up a guy in the open is not as easy as it sounds, and certainly is a heck of a lot more dangerous for everyone involved, including the target. So, the lesson they seem to have learned is, whenever possible, Don't Do It That Way.
But they didn't arrest him, did they? They shot an, as far as any of us know, innocent man, playing a video game in his own home. Regardless of the arrest powers of the state, regardless of a reasonable supposition that the suspect is in fact a criminal, the presumption of innocence lays with the suspect until he's convicted of a crime, and it behooves the people affecting the arrest to remember that.
Again, absurd. The attempt was to arrest him, not shoot him. What are they supposed to do when faced with what they perceive to be a threat, just stand there? This same argument can be leveled in any police-involved shooting. "Well, he's innocent until proven guilty, so why did you shoot him?"
It's unfortunate that you can't grasp the difference between a situation where you know with a reasonable degree of certainty that a person is committing a crime and one where it's secondhand conjecture.
The issue is not the commission of the crime, but the degree of threat. This lad was not shot for robbing a person of a PS3, just as our hypothetical intruder
better not be shot for his mere presence in your home. Both were shot for the perceived threat they presented the shooter.
Regardless of how you slice it, police are in a dangerous situation by their own choice. They could chose another method of apprehending the suspect, another time,
True, and I'll stand by my assertion that you attempt to arrest people in their homes for valid reasons like officer safety, suspect safety and public safety. The vaaaast majority of such arrests go down with no force used, which means that no one, suspect included, got hurt.
or for that, matter another line of work with less risk.
Irrelevant.
I can't imagination that explaining to a judge or telling the robbery victim that you're going to hold off a couple of hours on the arrest was a more difficult task than delivering the news to the suspect's parents that their son was dead. But that was a choice someone made.
Right. And, though it did not work out that way this time, the choice is made with an eye to minimizing risks to everyone. Including the bad guy.
Mike
