by the way junyo, how many times have you personally confronted a potential deadly force encounter? just wondering how much experience you have. when you encountered the potential deadly force threat, what did you do? did you shoot? did you not shoot? did you use an alternative force option, like less lethal?
if you're busy judging the officers then perhaps you should lay your credentials out on the table so we can have a better grasp of what your qualifications and experiences are.
i'd be glad to list mine. yes, i'm calling you out. it appears to me that Coronach is a peace officer and has a pretty good amount of experience dealing with real life potential deadly force issues.
Ah, the chickenhawk card. Since I've never been on a SWAT team, I have no right or ability to question any action that the police take? Please. So I take it you don't vote since you've never been the president and therefore aren't qualified to judge the candidates job performance. You don't form an opinion on movies since you're not a professional actor and therefore can't speak to whether the performances were good or not.
List away, oh great one. Show my unqualified eye the skills and training that give you the superior analytical skills and reasoning required to properly understand such weighty matters, the superhuman expertise that is denied mere mortals. I'm touched that you've even condescended to write in a language I can understand, rather than super-secret-ninja-master code.
You're calling me out. Apparently we're 12 now.
My qualifications are a misspent youth doing a lot of stupid things, which on more than one occasion lead to a gun being stuck in my face or fired in my general direction. I handled it mostly with running, crying, wetting myself, and watching my braver friends die. Then I went to school, and I spent a lot of time studying systems and process control. I went to work and I occasionally watched people die there. And I found out over the years that true accidents i.e. unforeseenable events, are astoundingly rare, and that people or the people around those people, usually died when they were put in bad situations and had to think their way out. That what most people call accidents are in fact poor procedure, poorly executed procedure, or the utter lack of procedure. That a lot of times after someone dies, everybody finds out that somebody's been doing something in a piss poor manner and assumed that it was fine because it was less work than making another procedure, and they'd gotten away with it with minimal loss/breakage/injuries thusfar, so why stop. And then when an exception happens, a high pressure, time compressed situation occurs, sooner or later the flaws of that procedure are revealed and somebody's bleeding. And that trend is darn near universal, and affects every discipline and industry that I've been in.
But I've never been a high-speed-low-drag assault master like you Spread, so I'm sure the laws of physics, human nature, common sense and reason don't factor in Ninjaland. So I won't waste your time with feeble, human, reasoning.
That's one way to spin it. Another is to say that they chose the method that would be least likely to result in resistance due to the rapid succession of events. I think that if you look at warrant service in the US, you'll find that, statistically, this is the case. The actual outcome in this instance, while tragic, is an aberration.
I've seen this explanation before and it's flawed in that it assumes that a)resistance is if not likely, then at least a decent possibility, and b)that the arrest can be executed so rapidly that suspect/bystander reaction can be neutralized. If either of those is wrong, then it's probably not safer. And now you're executing the arrest in a manner that highly compresses the decision making time for everyone involved, whiched mixed with guns, greatly increases the risk of something bad happening. Therefore there's some point on the curve where the risk of A or B being true is high enough to de-prefer this manner of arrest. The question is, does that analysis occur? Well, you assure me that it does:
I suspect that is a debate that will never have a real answer. Suffice it to say that nearly all tactical teams, police administrators and local politicians spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out when SWAT teams can and should be used, and when they should not be. The exact policy of each department will be unique, and some places are more thoughtful/conscientious about this than others, I am sure, but the general effort is toward at matching the tool/tactic to the job at hand. It does no one any good if your SWAT team is being used improperly. If nothing else, politicians lose jobs over such things (in most places outside of Chicago, anyway), and if you want the definition of a 'feces storm', take a look at a mayor fighting for his electoral life when his PD is the percieved cause of his woes.
...But I still question that in light of
"...some places are more thoughtful/conscientious about this than others, I am sure..." and
"You might be frightened to know how many warrants are served in a decent-sized city. One guy on a tactical team in my PD is somewhere over the 3,000 mark for his career." I'd also love to see some actual stats backing up your point. But my WAG is if this massive load of warrants is being served, human nature would dictate that at least some of them get a pencil whipped rather than carefully scrutinized. And if one of those 'less than conscientious' decisions coincides with one of the "few isolated and highly publicized tragedies" then that's not a mistake, that's a problem.
And to your point about being a mayor, frankly if it were me, I'd err on the side of a dead citizen rather than a dead cop. Mistakes will happen either way, but as long as I'm percieved as "tough on crime" there are enough people that'll cover me. But I'd be boned if the police say one of their own died because the mayor countermanded use of a tactical team. So cynically I don't see political hacks as much of a check or a balance.
If the cop in question is not doing it, someone else will be. Those same risks apply to the next guy in the role.
But the shot/don't shoot decision is in the hands of the individual shooter, and based, above and beyond the objective risk, on his/her subjective perception of risk. A less risk averse officer many take an extra second to determine what an object is; maybe it get's them shot, maybe it saves someone's life, but it definately lowers the objective risk to the suspect.
First off, who from the PD is being flippant? If someone is talking out of an orifice on a internet forum, that's one thing. But I have yet to hear anyone from the PD in question being flippant. Second off, you can play the "was it worth a human life" angle in any sitaution save active defense of life. Fact is, they tried to arrest him, not kill him.
First my statement wasn't directed at you, the PD in question or even this specific incident, more the general dislike with being questioned on the topic. For discussing it, you're labeled as a cop hater, a libertarian, and even worse
called out. Sorry, but somebody dies, somebody needs to look at it long and hard. Second, I do question the worth of shooting someone over property in any instance, not just with the police.