Surely they have better tactics to neutralize someone without ending up in a gun battle.
A night raid, tailing the suspect, gas masks?
Note: I am a Brit not American, therefore genuinely interested to hear from law enforcement people on this.
If they don't have high profile violent raids to point at they risk people questioning the armament and spending.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/us/georgia-toddler-stun-grena...
At the city council meetings we were assured that the vehicle would 'hopefully never' need to be used. And people fought back saying that the there is no need for this in our small town. There are literal gun ports out the sides of the thing like a tank.
They ended up buying it, and now that they have spent massive amounts of money on it, they are probably going to find some excuse to use it.
For reference they bought the Military warzone model not the SWAT model.
It's moving the overton window that more violence is normalized alongside sliding military tools into civilian countermeasures.
But hey, they brought out the bearcat for a "possible gun domestic disturbance". And the sliding window goes further to fascism.
Recognise newspeak when you see it.
The hierarchical element means that the people at the top in charge of making overarching decisions that the entire bureaucracy then has to follow has very little visibility into the "facts on the ground". Even worse, they can have zero insight into how said problem space actually works because they're often political appointees and not people that rose from the ranks.
This normally isn't that much of a problem in other types of endeavors. But when the use of legitimate force comes into play, decisions from 'on high' can be amazingly arbitrary from a public interest standpoint. The military generally solves this by making it so there aren't any purely political appointees in the chain of command. That, plus the fact that the military generally doesn't exercise force within the borders means that any problems can be hidden from public scrutiny.
But law enforcement does not have this luxury.
Maybe he had some mental issues that might get better with proper medication, but then he most probably wouldn't be able to hold a steady relationship so I don't believe that.
I am far from a fan of gun-ho US style of police force, but in this case it really seems dangerous person was removed from society.
Also the target seems to have known they were being surveilled and may have been fleeing. This may have been the agents last best chance.
There's also confirmation bias at work: a raid isn't high profile unless it's big and flashy and potentially violent. You hear more often about violent raids than quiet arrests. Even if they're reported as frequently, quiet arrests are just less memorable.
It's just that because firearms are so widespread the US does a lot more raids, so there are more to go wrong. And the US has no equivalent of HMIC or IPCC, so the standards are a lot lower.
They believe they have trained like the military, and treat everything like a war. I doubt many drill sergeants would agree that they've trained like the military though, and in these threads we occasionally hear from a few who very clearly don't. Last time I read one of these there was a guy ranting about the sad state of trigger discipline even on SWAT teams.
1) Finances. US police seems to hoard military grade equipment. Creating a high risk situation demonstrates the need for superior firepower because it doesn't even suggest the possibility of a less expensive/dangerous alternative.
2) Politics. Violent raids against armed criminals make for good optics. Escalating the situation demonstrates the threat of violent criminals while also demonstrating a strong police force, allowing politicians to appear "tough on crime".
Additionally Americans have a more Puritan idea of how criminals should be treated (cf. capital punishment, jokes about prison rape, felonies being permanently banned from voting, etc). And a fairly well-established dehumanising "us-vs-them" mentality in media coverage and pop culture.
Whenever I've heard of the arrest of high profile suspects , there is almost always some smart plan to get the person before they can engage in violence.
This is done to get them to cooperate and get the network that supports the high profile suspect.
I'm not sure why it went down as it did. But I know reality is complex, so I'd guess they were aiming for better but things went badly and they preferred to take him out for sure than let him get away. That would be my guess. That or someone wanted him dead, but the latter is less likely (stupidity being more common than malice and all) - There are probability other probabilities I'm not considering and the fact that multiple factors could be at play... it's hard to tell, the article was short on details.
And tailing the suspect is incompatible with assembling a sufficiently concentrate force to have a decisive advantage
I think the intent here was to have the fentanyl put the assailants to sleep. Granted, it went horribly wrong. But violent isn't how I would describe the intent.
The FBI tried that once upon a time in Texas. Most formulations of tear "gas" are actually a powder that happens to be flammable powder. It makes nasty poisonous things when it burns (burning already poisonous things has a tendency of doing that). It didn't go well.[1] It's generally not prudent to use tear gas if you're not ok with substantially increasing the likelihood of many people in the target area dying. What's acceptable when you're trying to gas some enemy combatants out of a tunnel in a war zone is not necessarily acceptable for a civilian law enforcement agency to do domestically.
(possibly NSFW) https://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f240/14...
That said, there are a lot of different gas varieties, and I've only been exposed to that one.
As far as I know this is also a factor why chemical weapons weren’t used in WW2. They are way too hard to control to be useful.
It was pretty damn shitty that the Russian government did little to assist doctors treating hostages in the aftermath, but aside from that their gas plan worked pretty damn well, considering the circumstance they were up against. The only other realistic option was for the Russian government to give in to the demands, as they did years before during the lesser known but larger Budyonnovsk hospital attack after conventional attacks failed (over the course of which something like 150 hostages were killed and hundreds more injured.)