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Comment by aketchum | Hacker News Reader

This story is insane and infuriating. The police had no need to destroy the house. They could have "sieged" the house and waited for him to come out when he ran out of food. This could be expedited by cutting the water to the house so the suspect had nothing to drink. This would probably be cheaper for the police in the end anyways as the extra few days of salary are offset by not having to use and pay for "tear gas, robots and police negotiations".

The homeowner deserves to be made whole and I think that should be the police departments responsibility, in order to encourage alternative approaches when possible.

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The entire situation of a "high-speed chase" followed by such a stand-off for shoplifting a shirt seems ridiculous to me. I don't want to defend the shoplifter here, but the reality is that these kind of chases and stand-offs come with real risk of injury and death to innocents. The police should be wiser than pursue at all costs for such petty crimes.

The issue isn't that he stole a shirt, the issue is that he ran from cops, which is a pretty serious crime. Trying to evade arrest and capture is extremely dangerous and if police were to say "well he ran I guess we'll just let him go" crime would skyrocket because thieves would know all you have to do is run and you're home free.

edit: I'm not sympathizing with cops or trying to say the use of force here was justified (it wasn't). I'm just saying we need to make attempts to pursue (within reason)

This is the police policy we have in the Netherlands – and I believe in much of Europe – and last time I checked crime is not "skyrocketing" here.

I am not claiming the police should just give up once someone runs, but there is a cost/benefit ratio to these things, and endangering random people in a high-speed car chase to catch a shoplifter does not seem a good cost/benefit ratio.

It's also hardly the case that you can just "run and you're home free". There is CCTV, license plates, the guy can be caught next time he shoplifts, etc. etc. There is more than one way to catch criminals than this kind of brute force.

A lot of what is wrong with America seems to boil down to broken short-term thinking that places too high a value on "heroics" with a big emotional zing attached to it over actual solutions.

We tend to want to "help the homeless" rather than designing a system that reduces the incidence of homelessness. We get all bent out of shape about "justice" and "righteousness" for some detail, like a stolen shirt, completely missing the big picture.

America is a fairly religious country. That's probably related. We have this Puritan ethics thing going on, which is often about guilt and shame and being judgy rather than creating a civil environment.

We're a young country, founded by misfits who so couldn't make life work in Europe that a very dangerous move to a new land made sense to them. I think this still impacts the culture here, a la the biblical phrase about "the sins of the father...unto the fifth and sixth generation." But I usually get a lot of negative reactions when I try to talk about that. Other people seem to see no connection between the details of how America was founded and the culture it fosters.

My own – perhaps controversial – take is that a lot is explained once you realize that the United States, as a country, is deficient in empathy.

One example is The American Dream: the idea that anyone can be rich if they just work hard enough, which also implies that being poor is a personal failure: you didn't work hard enough. What this misses is that in the end, you're still going to need people to pick up the garbage, and serve McDonalds, and so forth. turns out not all of society can be composed of lawyers, doctors, and computer programmers. Who knew?

There are many more examples, but I don't want to sideline this too much by various political issues.

I'm not entirely sure what the source of this is, or if it's recent or more rooted in history. It's just my observations of the US as an adult.

the United States, as a country, is deficient in empathy.

That doesn't really contradict what I said. Social misfits often do lack empathy. This is sometimes at least partly biologically based, but is frequently compounded by more "normal" types behaving monstrously towards them because they are different.

I've raised two special needs sons. They don't intuitively get a lot of social stuff. I've had to carefully explain many things.

But the reality is that a lot more social stuff is learned than most normal people want to admit. Needing to actively and intentionally teach it to some people who don't readily pick it up without instruction isn't as bizarre and alien as the world wants to pretend it is.

Plus, the lesser emphasis on empathy in America does have positives. Differently wired people tend to have a higher tolerance for things more empathetic people can't cope with. High empathy is not a good thing for being a soldier or a surgeon, both important roles in the world.

the idea that anyone can be rich if they just work hard enough

The origin of that idea is that we had escaped entrenched class structure in Europe. America was conceived of as the land of opportunity.

This was a positive thing, not a way to blame poor people for their poverty.

For a lot of people, that proved to be true for a long time. Those ideas aren't fundamentally broken, but some things have changed and we aren't coping so well with some of those changes.

I think we can resolve our problems. It's not hopeless.

I'm just not entirely sure how we get there from here.

I didn't intend to contradict your post, but rather add to it, or have a conversation.

> A lot more social stuff is learned than most normal people want to admit

People tend to have an innate ability to socialize with their immediate surroundings: family, friends, coworkers, and other people they personally know.

Beyond that, things are harder, and more learned. Fiction probably plays a very large role in this by the way.

> High empathy is not a good thing for being a soldier or a surgeon, both important roles in the world.

I'm actually not so sure about this; empathy isn't some sort of binary toggle, or uninfluenced by intellect; we have some control and choice over it. All other things being equal, a surgeon empathic to a patient's concerns (rather than indifferent) would make for a better surgeon, and a soldier highly empathic towards their fellow comrades would probably be a better soldier.

> The origin of that idea I that we had escaped entrenched class structure in Europe. America was conceived of as the land of opportunity. > >This was a positive thing, not a way to blame poor people for their poverty.

I appreciate that, but that was almost 250 years ago and things have changed rather a lot since then. Especially in modern context, "it's your fault if you're poor" seems to be a natural (though often unspoken) consequence of "you can be rich if you work hard enough".

> For a lot of people, that proved to be true for a long time. Those ideas aren't fundamentally broken, but we some things have changed and we aren't coping so well with some of those changes.

I think they are, because at the end of the day what a society needs if a fairly small group of people doing knowledge work, and a fairly large group of people facilitating that. One reason we can work as computer programmers is because other people do our food growing and construction and cleaning etc.

None of this is unique to the US, but in a lot of countries there seems to be more recognition of this in the form of worker protection, better social welfare, etc.

I think they are, because at the end of the day what a society needs if a fairly small group of people doing knowledge work, and a fairly large group of people facilitating that.

The industrial revolution changed that. We now need relatively few people growing our food.

At one time, you needed like twenty farmers for every non farm job to feed that non farmer. Thanks to modern technology, modern farmers provide food for many people per farmhand.

This frees people up to be teachers and scientists and any number of other things that are about developing new knowledge or preserving and passing on existing knowledge.

There is a long history of human cultures collapsing. Some of them collapsed when people no longer knew how to effectively maintain extensive irrigation systems that supported farms and helped keep the people fed.

If our current system collapsed, the sudden die off could be to the tune of billions of people.

There is no shortage of work that can be done. What needs to be done varies as cultures evolve.

There are endless people with problems too trivial to address in a subsistence culture that can be worked on by more advanced cultures that have freed up workers to do things more trivial than just try to come up with enough food to not die of starvation this year.

Sexual satisfaction.

Emotional contentment.

Good social relationships.

Health issues.

> This frees people up to be teachers and scientists and any number of other things that are about developing new knowledge or preserving and passing on existing knowledge.

I think the problem with this is that not everyone is cut out to be a teacher or scientist, or other kind of knowledge worker.

I left school at 16 and before I worked as a computer programmer I worked various minimum wage jobs for about 10 years. Some of those people are suitable for knowledge work (like me), but the vast majority ... yeah nah. At the risk of sounding condescending, but I don't think they have the interest, aptitude, or both.

I mean, in principle I agree with your reply, but I think it will be a lot harder than it sounds.

> all you have to do is run and you're home free

But you're not. Police might get you in half an hour, or tomorrow, or in 2 weeks.

Of course that requires proper documentation of the case (photos or even videos, fingerprints, ID of the stolen goods, ...) and follow up, both of which is less exciting than trying to outrace the perpetrator on the highway.

Retail videos are garbage 99% of the time.

You aren't going to get reliable or useable prints from the scene of a retail store.

Even if you did, you have to have a match in AFIS for them to be useful.

Even if you do, congrats, you know the guy exists, his name, and social. Now you just have to find him before he robs someone else at gunpoint, and/or ends up killing someone.

Every non-tiny police department has a pursuit policy. It tends to be some form of one of the following:

1. Only pursue if the danger of the pursuit is less than the danger of this guy to society. Consider the crime, how easily we can find this guy, current traffic conditions, weather, etc. Guy robber a liquor store and is going 100mph on a well lit, perfectly straight 5 lane highway at 1am on a Wednesday with no other traffic? Get em. Same guy is going 100mph through a residential as the school busses are about to drop off kids? Terminate pursuit. Sadly, it is never that cut and dry

2. Don't pursue unless it was a murder/attempted murder, and the conditions are safe for it.

3. Don't pursue.

#3 Works amazing for about 5 years. Somewhere 5-10 years later, the local gangs and career criminals learn that if they just drive fast enough to endanger lives, the cops will leave them alone. State police departments, which usually spend more time on highways, tend to have a policy closer to #1. Because of this, they will often assist local agencies that have a policy of #2 or #3, when they are doing stuff that they expect a vehicle pursuit may ensue.

Someone usually brings up "Oh, well if you have the license plate why not just arrest them later." Because it doesn't work that way. You see a masked guy rob a store, jump in a car, and peel out of there at 1am, and don't pursue? If you run the tag, go to the registered house at 1:30am, find the warm vehicle in the driveway, knock on the door, registered owner can answer, and will tell you that a lot of people have keys to his car, he doesn't know anything, he was home asleep.

And theres not a thing you can do about it. The only way you can prove it was him was if you saw the driver and are 100% sure its that guy, or you convince him to talk himself into getting caught in a lie, or give up his cellphone, or some other dumb decision.

> If you run the tag, go to the registered house at 1:30am, find the warm vehicle in the driveway,

More likely, the car was stolen.

>Trying to evade arrest and capture is extremely dangerous and if police were to say "well he ran I guess we'll just let him go" crime would skyrocket because thieves would know all you have to do is run and you're home free.

Talk about minimal returns. There are 1000 other factors (in police, laws, and culture) to fix before crime skyrockets from not "catching with excessive force random guys who did minor/no offenses and tried to run away". Starting from social support for poorer districts and a legal/prison system that doesn't encourage recidivism...

While we're at it, in no civilized western or eastern country is "getting out of your car when stopped by a traffic cop" something that's met with a shooting...

It's like the police force is not professional over there, but just a joke with a gun, and on the first adverse situation (which could be as "adverse" as merely meeting a black guy) they get their guns out rather than doing any critical assessment, handling of the situation, etc. Sorry, un untrained thug can do the same exact thing. There should be higher standards from police officers...

that doesnt mean there isnt discretion. running over a baby to catch someone who stole an apple is letting principal get in the way of pragmatism.

if your choices are "put everyone in the vicinity in massive immediate danger" and "let someone non dangerous escape" Id hope the need to make running itself a serious crime doesnt overrule the duty to the public's overall safety.

Generally police must assess the risk to public safety (including the suspect's and their own safeties) and balance that with the need to apprehend the criminal.

Capturing a non-violent criminal would not typically justify a high risk of causing a deadly road traffic accident. In the UK for instance, the National Decision Model must be used to evaluate whether to pursue a criminal; authorisation must be requested to conduct a pursuit.

Armed robbery probably doesn't count as non-violent.

>issue is that he ran from cops, which is a pretty serious crime.

That isn't the issue either (that he ran from cops), the issue is that he began shooting his gun at the cops.

Why did I have to scroll so far down to see this comment? It most likely would not have escalated to that level had he not shot. It probably doesn't help that they later mistook something else for being shots too.

Yes but for a shirt? Capturing a shirt shoplifter is worth the same effort and potential damage to innocents as a murderer? Or a bank robber? Or an organized group hitting electronics retailers? If someone refuses to pay a parking ticket, how much collateral damage is worth getting them to pay their ticket?

Also I feel your comment may be implying that this sort of hyper aggressive enforcement is the only thing keeping crime down - I would suspect that crime at the level of shoplifting a shirt is more often due to need and desperation than to purely malicious intent, and while hyper aggressive enforcement may have some deterrent effect those crimes would probably be better resolved by trying to eliminate the core issues driving them in the first place.

no, it's just ridiculously punitive to go scorched earth in order to recoup $10 for some already uber-profitable business.

hell, there are no chase policies in washington DC among other cities because it's dumb as hell to engage in military style warfare, bystanders be damned, for things like illegally riding an ATV in the street/sidewalk.

i'm not sure where this attitude for vengeance/retribution comes from but it's eerily deeply ingrained in the US.

I'm generally pretty fair and balanced when it comes to police versus public issues, but this is the same kind of shit that excuses the cops that shot the fleeing 16 year old in the head.

Cops are public servants. They have a duty to the public to safely enforce the laws and apprehend lawbreakers. This "get the bad guy at all costs" shit has to stop.

I think all cops are bastards and I don't sympathize with them. I just want a rule of law along with accountability. I'm not of the opinion we need to use overt force when pursuing, but we need to pursue.

High speed police chases are also dangerous and police should not engage in them.

I agree.

In most departments now the officer is required to weigh the crime against the potential danger of the chase. Traffic infraction? Don't chase. Felony warrant: Chase?

Source: Family members that are in the CHP.

But where's the fun in that? Gotta get to use all that weaponry after all.

Exactly.

Recall an NYT article[1] on the topic.

It describes how police chiefs will make a spectacle out of their newly purchased tanks or whatever, even bringing them to schools for kids to check out.

Best quote was from a police chief who hadn't been swept up in the mania for military gear and vehicles:

“I go to schools,” he said. “But I bring ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’”

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-poli...

>The homeowner deserves to be made whole and I think that should be the police departments responsibility...

It sounds like the homeowner was likely made whole by their insurance company, the article hints that the home was insured and the Police department paid for both temporary housing and the insurance deductible.

It is unknown, but in all likelihood the homeowner probably got the full policy limits on the insurance claim. Then, either: a) the insurance limits didn't cover the full amount of damages and they sued for the difference (and additional damages); or b) the insurer was behind the suit in a subrogation claim against the Police station for the claim amount.

One of the problems with insurance cases is your not allowed to talk about the insurance companies. Nevertheless believe it or not these kinds of cases (house destroyed in emergency responses) are quite common, but usually it has to do with fires (not armed police chases of criminals) where in order to stop fires from spreading from house to house a team of firefighters may purposely damage/destroy houses that are not on fire to prevent the lateral spread of the fire. Of course homeowners/their insurers sue the Fire departments with similar outcomes to this case.

>This story is insane and infuriating.

Losing a family home/all your belongings can't be minimized, but as a kidnapping victim myself, I also want to point out the gunman broke into a home where a 9 year old boy was alone and the boy was permitted to leave unharmed. Consider the guy blindly opened fire on the police, things could have been a lot worse had he kept the boy.

> Consider the guy blindly opened fire on the police, things could have been a lot worse had he kept the boy.

Yeah - the boy could have been hit by a projectile, much like that 2-year-old in Georgia who was burned by a flash grenade thrown by cops into his crib. Just one more reason to avoid this kind of destructive approach except when absolutely necessary.

If the gunman kept the boy the Police would not have been so indiscriminate in their use of force. However, the gunman being alone in the home permitted them to be as indiscriminate as they were, presumably to keep the police out of harms way of entering the premises.

> Consider the guy blindly opened fire on the police, things could have been a lot worse had he kept the boy.

Exactly right. I'm shocked and saddened that the Hacker News community has reduced this to a "shoplifting."

I agree that armed robbery is not shoplifting and shouldn't be portrayed as such. But I don't see how that hypothetical changes things; from the article timeline, the boy had left the house before the cops even got there. It's not like he decided to let him leave due to the bombardments.

Before the police used force the gunman opened fire on the police.

Plus down voting to censor truth rather responding or acknowledging the fact the home was insured and the Police paid the insurance deductible.

The article just said they offered $5k total to go toward the deductible and temporary housing. It says nothing about how much that actually cost, which was surely more. That wouldn't even cover fairly modest housing for a family during the time it'd take to tear down, clear the lot, and rebuild. The homeowner claims he's out $400k total for various reasons, beyond what insurance covered. Even if he was underinsured (likely), sure, that's on him, but the police did choose to do an absurd amount of damage to the house with all their fancy toys rather than just shutting off utilities and waiting. It's not like the guy took hostages, and there's no indication they even thought he had. For attacking the house to make sense in such a time-insensitive situation they must have thought they had a pretty solid perimeter set up. They chose to wreck the house.

>The homeowner claims he's out $400k total for various reasons, beyond what insurance covered.

That is not what the homeowner claimed. He claimed his damages were $400k total, and the house was covered.

What wasn't covered were the contents of the home because it was a rental and the renter didn't have renter's insurance.

Also there were some runaway costs to the owner in the rebuild because the owner repoured the foundation (which wasn't damaged) in order to build a bigger home.

>They chose to wreck the house.

And he choose not to rebuild on the existing undamaged foundation and lay a new foundation to build a bigger home, but the damages to make the homeowner whole were otherwise covered by insurance.

Ah, good point, I read those were his expenses and didn't catch that was before insurance reimbursement. Looks like the actual damages beyond that are just loss of personal property in the house and whatever it cost to deal with the whole, you know, police-blew-up-my-house situation, which is surely non-trivial but likely well under $400,000.

All for what, maybe $40-60 in 1 shirt and 1 belt? 19 hours of police OT, paying for all their toys, this ongoing legal battle. Insanity

Any neighborhood with $2million homes behind gated community barriers like Greenwood has cops who will shoot at shoplifters and roust bums (jail them and or drive them to the designated poor people zone).

>All for what, maybe $40-60 in 1 shirt and 1 belt?

No the use of force was in response to the guy opening fire on the police.

It was an _armed_ robbery. That's a very serious crime. Not "shoplifting".

It seems like the gun was present for but not used during (even to threaten) the crime, which doesn't change the fact that he was armed while shoplifting or that he was probably a dangerous dude to be around, but does make it a bit different from a guy waving a gun around in a store while robbing it.

I mean, does getting away with one belt and one shirt sound like something someone drew a gun to do? That's some comically bad armed robbery if so.

In California, and probably the rest of the Nation, just carrying a gun during a robbery makes it an "armed robbery." (And for good reason, too.)

>This story is insane and infuriating. The police had no need to destroy the house. They could have "sieged" the house and waited for him to come out when he ran out of food.

That's how it was done in my country at least in a famous case back a couple decades ago...

Just to play devil's advocate:

The guy involved led the police on a high-speed carchase, and fired his gun at them from the garage of the home when they arrived. He definitely posed a threat, both to police and innocent people around him (from the car chase, etc)

As it was, the siege took 19 hours. It could easily have taken days or weeks to starve him out if the family had emergency rations stocked up (i.e. winter power blackouts, etc). How many police officers would have to have camped out to make sure he didn't escape? What would that do to people who might otherwise have needed those police officers elsewhere in the city?

To be clear, I don't know that I find any of those arguments convincing or sufficient justification. He had homeowner's insurance, and the city offered to cover the deductible and provide rental assistance. Nothing will be enough to make up for irreplaceable items, trauma or time lost. Hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment, would it really have been the right call to tie up the police and SWAT for a week or more when they might be needed elsewhere?

> They could have "sieged" the house and waited for him to come out when he ran out of food.

Both 2nd amendment activists and anti-gun people make the same mistake here: the physical presence of a gun changes everything. Guns favor the offense, not the defense.

The solution is always the same: if the opponent has a weapon, you bring bigger weapons to subjugate them. APCs will allow you to move forward without risk of getting shot at, while heavy weapons like grenades and rocket-launchers destroy the cover and concealment of the defender.

The first step is recognizing the root of the problem. The handgun. Remove the gun, and the heavy-weapons wouldn't have been necessary. But as long as the general citizenry has access to firearms, it is necessary to give bigger and better weapons to law enforcement.

----------

Consider this: how would YOU form a perimeter around the house safely and effectively? An APC is the natural weapon: thick plate to provide immunity to small-weapons like handguns. If the local police only has one APC however, that's not enough to form an effective perimeter: you can only cover one side of the house.

So you put men around the house, and hope that they don't get shot. And those men remain at risk throughout the duration of the siege. Thick body-armor doesn't protect the head, and it still gets hurt to get shot at.

I'm actually kind of appalled that you think a handgun justifies not only arming police departments with military surplus, but also the use of them.

Unlike in a military conflict where the combatants are actively trying to create casualties in enemy forces and all the horrors that entails, the police have a lot more things to consider. That's why in a high speed chase police tend to back off and track the suspect from the air rather than endanger the public more. However, by your logic if they knew the suspect had a handgun they would be justified in using a surplus drone or gunship to just destroy the vehicle with little regard to anything else.

Force escalation is not defensible for civilians, why on earth is it acceptable for the police?

> I'm actually kind of appalled that you think a handgun justifies not only arming police departments with military surplus, but also the use of them.

My argument is a bit more subtle than that. The military surplus culture is IMO due to local-police departments trying to out-compete their local rivals.

If you're a Police Officer candidate, with a criminal law bachelors, aiming to join a Police department... which one do you pick?

* Dangerous area with military-grade weapons for officers?

* Dangerous area without military grade weapons for officers?

That's where the fundamental issue comes in. Police departments want to attract the best candidates, and the military surplus items provide an aura of protection, as well as assurances of a "Police-culture".

>And those men remain at risk throughout the duration of the siege.

It's almost like police officers signed up for a career that puts them at risk. They need to accept this risk and act like more civil servants than bullies with dangerous toys. There also needs to be more focus on deescalation than "fuck it let's just bomb him" which would also make officers much more safe.

> It's almost like police officers signed up for a career that puts them at risk.

That's how you lose Police Officers. Workers prefer to work in safer jobs, and are even willing to take pay-cuts to work in a safer area.

A US-police department is in constant competition with rival cities for the same pool of applicants. If your local police department gets a reputation of not backing its officers, your officers will LEAVE to other cities. Period.

There's a reason why all cities back their Police Departments with as much support as possible. Its a necessary part of attracting the best candidates. Some Police Officers have degrees in criminal law theory, college-educated. Other police officers are just high-school graduates with some muscle.

When police departments struggle, they lose the higher-quality officers to their local rivals. Which means either fewer officers, or being forced to hire low-quality officers.

-------------

The fundamental issue here is that Police Departments are too small, making the politics of "local rivals" a toxic culture. Police departments need to be forced to merge together and cover larger areas.

A nation-wide police force would probably be too big, but we can start by eradicating all town-level police forces (less than 20,000 citizens) and merging them into a larger regional area. As long as there are Police Departments that only protect $1-Million homes (where virtually no crimes are committed), you'll have the quality Police Officers leaving the dangerous areas where they're needed (ie: typical inner cities) and working to move towards the richer areas.

You gotta fix the fundamental politics: the underlying driver of the culture.

I never see a shortage of cops anywhere due to a lack of people applying. The idea that they're going to flee to other cities because we don't allow them to blow up houses and murder people with impunity is ridiculous. If we need higher compensation to adjust for not having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy then I'm fine with that. We need cops to stop being murderers.

> I never see a shortage of cops anywhere due to a lack of people applying.

There are different grades of Police Officers. You want the college-educated, criminal law graduates in your city. That's how you get fair-cops. This pool is smaller than you'd expect.

There are PLENTY of high-school thugs who want to be Police Officers. But its very short-sighted to base your police force primarily on that pool of applicants.

> If we need higher compensation to adjust for not having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy then I'm fine with that.

Its not just compensation. Its perceived safety, and other issues. A college-educated cop might be willing to take $50,000 / year if they only have to patrol safe neighborhoods in suburbia, but the same cop will need to be paid $70,000+ to patrol a dangerous ghetto (which happens to be the areas which most need a fair, well-educated officer).

Bonus points: safe neighborhoods in suburbia also want officers to patrol their gated communities. "Rent a cop" services provide ample opportunity for overtime with very low risk. The ghettos simply don't have the money to offer this opportunity.

That's why I'm saying that there are too many small police departments out in Suburbia: taking away the good officers from the areas that truly need them.

I suspect if we make cops accountable and change their training to quit fucking shooting people at the drop of the hat, the high school bullies will quit trying to be cops because they can't lord their impunity over everyone. Ultimately the situation we have in the US is unacceptable and something needs to change. It doesn't matter how expensive it is, cops need to quit murdering.

> I suspect if we make cops accountable and change their training to quit fucking shooting people at the drop of the hat

That's called sensitivity training and its widely deployed in the richer areas... but poorly deployed in poor police departments.

Sensitivity training, Diversity training, De-escalation training, etc. etc. Police departments know about this style of training and have names for these programs. It costs money though, money that not all Police Departments have.

If you think your local Police don't have enough sensitivity training (or whatever), either talk to your local Mayor, or local Sheriff, or police commissioner, or board (every town's political structure is different), and try to push more of it. There's probably budgetary constraints involved, but I don't think anyone's really against the idea of good training for their local cops.

On another note, thanks for a level headed discussion

> Workers prefer to work in safer jobs

Police officer isn't a bad choice, then. It does not even break into the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America.

> Police officer isn't a bad choice, then. It does not even break into the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America.

Police officer in an area with $1 Million homes in gated communities is even better.

If you're a college-educated, high-quality Police Officer, there's basically no reason to work in the inner-city Ghettos. There's always a suburbia which is safer, quieter, and simpler to work at.

If you can't work in rich-suburbia, then working in those cities with military-grade weapons is still better than inner-city ghettos.

It's exactly the same for teaching. Around here the nicer schools even pay worse because they get the best applicants anyway! The job's way easier, more pleasant, less full of horrors that haunt you for years after, and you don't have 3rd graders swearing at you and threatening to stab you with alarming frequency. Well worth 10-20% lower pay.

Pretty big fallacy bro. Its not in the top 10 most deadly jobs in America. "Danger" is a relative term. If a squad of 20 soldiers get in a gunfight every day over 3 months, and none of them die, was their job less dangerous than the 20 guys who work in an office, where Jerry was killed by a vending machine tipping over?

The FBI tracks Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA)[1]. There are around 540,000 police officers in the US, and about 58,000 recorded assault. Now, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Some of those assaults are undoubtedly some Kelly Thomas type BS where the cops beat the crap out of a guy and got blood on their uniforms and counted it as assault. There are also likely assaults that don't get listed/reported. E.g. a man who just murdered someone is running from the cops, car chase ensues. 10+ cop cars behind the suspect, who starts shooting at officers. This did not get recorded as 10 assaults, though 10 cops were shot at.

Also keep in mind that these statistics are of all reporting agencies. Every Mayberry town with 100 citizens, 1 sheriff, and 1 deputy. Every command staff and supervisor who are effectively just managers with a badge. The cops who do entirely admin work and don't wear their vest anymore. The High Tech Crimes guys who don't respond to calls, but do computer forensic analysis in pedophile cases. These are all less likely to be assaulted than the cop doing a solo patrol, responding to calls.

_____ [1]1https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka

... or you DEescalate the situation, because we're talking about policing a crime, not fighting a war.

Firearms favor defense, hence the standoff between one guy and many police. The solution is not to elevate the stakes of standoffs with bigger weapons, nor is it to make police more armed than the citizenry. In fact, that misguided approach of arming police with bigger weapons is a root cause of this incident.

The whole situation started with basic theft and kept escalating, which is an explicit choice of each party. At any time, the police could have simply broken it off and tracked him down later. But instead they chose to play heroes with their toys, and somehow managed to get indemnified for it.

> At any time, the police could have simply broken it off and tracked him down later.

You'll let a criminal go free because he forced a high-speed chase, and took shots at an officer with a handgun? Take a guess what the local criminals will do if that hits the news.

That's WHY criminals enter high speed chases: because they know that officers sometimes let them go at that point. You have to continue pursuit if the criminal escalates, or else the other criminals will change their strategy.

You do realize that police keep investigating crimes and tracking down suspects afterwards, right? Showing up at his home the next day while he's eating dinner and less likely to act as a scared animal is not letting "a criminal go free".

> You do realize that police keep investigating crimes and tracking down suspects afterwards, right?

You realize that most shoplifting suspects are never caught, right? Some stats suggest a 2% chance of actually catching a shoplifter after the crime. Letting them go at this point means 98% chance that they'll get away.

For the officer: keeping up the police chase is your best bet. You keep chasing until the Helicopter comes in, and then the Helicopter can follow the car no matter where it goes.

This is why criminals force a high-speed chase, because they can (and often do) get away with it (as long as they disappear before the Helicopter arrives). The mistake for the criminal here was shooting at the Police Officer, which enrages officers to a severe degree. Once you apply lethal force to officers, they'll chase you down basically forever.

If the offense is limited to shoplifting, then the lack of desire to spend resources on a full investigation obviously leads to that 2%. So that stat would be relevant for a shopowner who went after a shoplifter themselves, but not this situation - the police expending more resources is already taken as a given.

But sure, let a few more incidents of shoplifting escape justice because the perp manages to get away. It would take an awful lot of shoplifting to rise to the level of harm of blowing up a house, or (in other incidents) killing innocent bystanders in a high speed chase.

Either way, municipalities and police departments aren't even able to properly weigh those options if they can simply escape responsibility for the damage caused by their choice. Instead, shirking any potential harm pushes them into that same must-act mindset that you're arguing from.

Society is not going to fall apart from a little more shoplifting, but it will fall apart when people see the police as a source of chaos and injustice.

> If the offense is limited to shoplifting

The offenses in this case started with shoplifting, but then quickly turned into running from a police officer, a high-speed chase, as well as firing a handgun towards chasing officers.

Are you saying that:

1. Police shouldn't have pursued the shoplifter?

2. Police shouldn't have engaged in a high-speed chase?

3. Police shouldn't have further escalated after taking gunfire?

At what point did the Police go wrong, in your opinion?

I was directly responding to your stat that only 2% of shoplifters are caught after the fact, pointing out how this differs.

I have already stated my general judgement for when the police went wrong - escalating into causing some serious public safety hazards.

You keep trying to drag the conversation into a simplistic paradigm where the heroes can always do something more to win, with its corresponding blindspot to all the resulting destruction. Watching a movie, nobody really cares when some extras die. But in reality the entire mandate of the police is to protect the extras.

> I have already stated my general judgement for when the police went wrong - escalating into causing some serious public safety hazards.

The high-speed chase already appears to meet your criterion. So are you suggesting, that the Police should have not escalated and pursued the high-speed shoplifter?

Escalating to a high-speed pursuit innately increases the risk: the police may crash into innocent civilians. The criminal may crash into innocents. Etc. etc.

So that's why I'm asking: what is the correct decision, in your opinion, when a criminal floors it and reaches 90 mph in an attempt to evade officers? Should the officers just let them go?

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If the pursuit was "morally correct" by your judgement, then the next point of escalation was when the criminal started to shoot his handgun at the Police. Should the Police stand-down now that gunfire is involved? Stray bullets have a high chance of harming innocent civilians (even if the criminal isn't intending to kill someone, the risk remains).

Should the officers let the criminal go at this point?

Etc. etc. There's a series of decisions here which make up the story. I'm trying to figure out how your point of view lines up to the reality of the case.

We all can agree that deescalation should be prioritized. But we have a realistic case here. How would you have de-escalated the situation? Furthermore, we have the benefit of analyzing this from the safety of our desks, with all known information. So surely you can come up with a better decision with careful analysis, compared to an Officer who has to make a decision on the spot.

> what is the correct decision, in your opinion, when a criminal floors it and reaches 90 mph in an attempt to evade officers

They've got a suspect description, car description, and license plate. There is no reason to believe the car is stolen, so there is a registered address. There is likely a helicopter on the way, and ANPR cameras will flag the plate. It was a property crime. Yes they should let the perp speed away and catch up with them later, rather than using the situation as an excuse to engage in their own sanctioned criminality.

If you call any police station and ask this question in terms of say a hit and run collision and whether you should pursue, they will give you a similar answer.

Apparently, I've been making up details without realizing it.

I've pulled the affidavit for the case, so that we can go through these details with more accuracy.

https://www.greenwoodvillage.com/DocumentCenter/View/13916/A...

The timeline of events:

1. Shoplifting at 1:22pm.

2. Abandoned his Lexus (with temporary tags)

3. Ran around town... jumping a fence, ran across a highway, attempted hitchhiking, eventually entering a private home.

4. Police eventually caught up, blocked the garage with their vehicles, and the siege started. The time was 1:54 at this point.

Apologies for wasting your time with unnecessary hypotheticals, but its important to stick with what happened. The car was already abandoned, the Police caught up because the people's home was invaded by the shoplifter.

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> They've got a suspect description, car description, and license plate. There is no reason to believe the car is stolen, so there is a registered address.

With regards to this hypothetical: The car was registered to David Seidle. NOT Robert Jonathan Seacat. The car also had temporary tags. I don't know if Seidle was related to this case at all.

Under your hypothetical, Mr. Seacat would have gotten away, and Officers would have at best, gone to David Seidle's house.

> And those men remain at risk throughout the duration of the siege.

Assaulting the house seems to me many, many times more personally risky than hanging around a block away behind cover watching the house for a day or three.

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