Wow. This feels incredibly wrong. I know it is just an extension of the militarization of American police, but should they be allowed to issue a death sentence like that? I argue no. Expend the time and resources to non-lethally incarcerate him.
I concur. There seems to be a lack of thinking and willingness to wait things out or backoff. Rather than backoff or retreat the police seem too trigger happy. The Baton Rouge shooting the police didn't want to wait for the suspect so they got aggressive and tried tackling him leading to a scuffle. The MN shooting, if the officer felt threatened he could have slowly backed up to his vehicle until backup arrives and only shoot if/when the suspect actually makes a truly life threatening move. (I know, easier said than done. But we need to de-escalate and disarm regular beat cops [slim chance of that happening now I suppose].)
I guess this also destroys evidence?
If this is what it took to end the suspect's life, thereby preventing further harm, then so be it and congratulations.
Your reasoning is based on a premise that hasn't been established: that killing the suspect was necessary to prevent further harm. It seems like most of the discussion here is questioning that point: if the suspect had been located and surrounded, was there a credible threat of further harm? If there was time to repurpose the bomb-dispoal bot, were there not also non-lethal ways to apprehend the suspect?
The intention to commit further harm is evident from statements by the accused and the vile nature of the crimes. Given the potential for harm, that the negotiations failed, and threats of explosives this was the safest course of action. Whether or not the suspect was surrounded has little bearing on if the threat was reduced or increased.
> If there was time to repurpose the bomb-dispoal bot, were there not also non-lethal ways to apprehend the suspect?
That is a flawed argument in that it guesses a quantity of time to modify a robot and time to neutralize an armed suspect are equivalent. It is also flawed in that it presumes there is a choice to be made. Another flaw is that doesn't account for the fact that the robot might already have been modified earlier in case negotiations failed, and if so then the robot is already modified and immediately ready while the suspect isn't.
More importantly, it is NOT the jurisdiction of the police to pass judgement and penalties on the suspect. Deadly force is only legal when the officer reasonably believes that the suspect poses a significant, imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to the officer or others. Note that the threat is a future threat, irrespective of whether harm was caused in the past.
But I suspect that your reasoning becomes clouded when it's your friends and coworkers who have been shot. Giving the accused a lawyer and a chance to defend himself in court is his right, but that's hard to do when you've seen someone you love die.
That is a huge guess. After 10 officers are shot I doubt the SWAT team was in a guessing mood.
> he wasn't going to get the opportunity to leave.
This is perhaps the most commonly fallacy I have read in this thread. Immobility does not immediately equivocate to either a reduction or increase in potential threat. The guys on the ground have to make that determination based upon the evidence available in the moment. After 10 officers were shot I am sure the suspect vocalizing additional threats likely didn't help the SWAT team believe the risk was diminishing.
Asking anything less than that from them is basically discarding the idea that we live in a civilized society.
What many people don't understand is that a wrong decision is better than no decision at all. The world isn't going to wait for you to call an assembly and have a cordial discussion about how to delicately make a possibly-suicidal suspect feel happy. It sure as hell isn't going to wait for to conduct an online survey to discover what makes people less sad. People are dying. The suspect is threatening to have explosives and claims to want to kill more people. The first order of business is to eliminate the threat. This is an active shooter incident. Once negotiations failed the only right decision is how to terminate the suspect. This is operational doctrine.
Stalling and feeling it out is a horribly bad decision to make and indicates a lack of professionalism for active shooter scenarios.
My claim is that it should not.
Operational doctrine here suggests that, with active shooter, you prioritize removing the shooter once negotiations have failed. The "probably would have" the poster is referencing is a what-if they didn't have time for.
... to save hostages, of which there weren't any.
Except if he'd had planted bombs on a deadman switch, which would have been triggered by taking him out.
They're lucky he was lying. Not smart, not skilled, lucky.
They killed him because they were mad and didn't care about the consequences (unfound bombs) to civilians.
100% wrong. That reasoning justifies all decisions.
This is what's wrong with our institutional thinking these days.
> This is an active shooter incident.
This stopped being an active shooter situation when they pinned him down without hostages.
> he suspect is threatening to have explosives and claims to want to kill more people. The first order of business is to eliminate the threat.
Fatally wrong again. Eliminating the threat would involve eliminating the bombs, not just the gun.
If they truly believed there were bombs they'd have had more motive to question the shooter, not less, because a single missed bomb could sit for days until triggered inadvertently.
They said he was wanted; he wasn't one of the shooters; they're yet to apologise or delete the tweet.
When the police take a life we lose the ability to understand the detail of why that deterrent failed. The deterrent is more important that the cure.
Whilst the police have suspects, they don't have this one and everyone's motivations are slightly different. The death of this individual also creates a martyr for others on a similar path.
In my humble opinion they should have used a stun or smoke grenade.
Reading the article it's clear the man was committing a crime. He was however not immediately threatening anyone was refusing to cooperate.
I think a question we should continue asking is at what point does Lethal force become acceptable?
The problem isn't that we don't know when lethal force is acceptable, the problem is that people keep ignoring the answer.
This is way too subjective.
This case though, with an armed suspect cornered during an active ambush who had been engaging in fire with the police, only a particularly obtuse person (or HN user) would deny the notion of "imminent threat".
That's exactly what happened here.
Obviously a slow ground robot with C4 is a little disturbing, but having UAVs with C4 is a whole new level of concerning. Are we going to start seeing targeted bombings when the driver of a traffic stop is being uncooperative?
"The driver reached for his glove box and wasn't responding to police commands, so we launched a hellfire missile to help ensure officer safety"
(turns out driver was deaf and getting his insurance papers)
> Five officers were killed and seven others were injured, as well as two civilians.
Even NBC is referring to non-police as "civilians" here which really drives the point home.
In some specialized contexts, non-civilians only include members of the military. An example of such a context would be some of the treaties that govern international armed conflicts.
Outside of those specialized contexts, the ordinary dictionary definition applies.
From the Oxford New American Dictionary:
civilian |səˈvilyən|
noun
a person not in the armed services or the police force.
2 a : one not on active duty in the armed services
or not on a police or firefighting forceIt makes just as much logical and legal sense to refer to programmers as non-civilians as it does to refer to civil law enforcement as non-civilians.
That's not the slang usage. That is the informal usage. And that is not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to the formal usage of the term civilian, which according to numerous dictionaries [1] means someone not a member of a military or police force.
Is it your contention that these major dictionaries all got it wrong?
[1] Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, Random House
If not, then of course the word is being misused. Dictionaries simply update their definitions to reflect common usage, however wrong.