If this is what it took to end the suspect's life, thereby preventing further harm, then so be it and congratulations.
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.
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.
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.
They said he was wanted; he wasn't one of the shooters; they're yet to apologise or delete the tweet.