Elite Anti-Terror Police Went After Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom

I think this is just the tiniest bit of spin here.

In New Zealand, like the UK, police don't regularly guns. Most officers aren't trained with firearms. You have a number of elite armed response units who are. In addition to the various piracy offences, Kim is also charged with possessing an unregistered firearm. Apparently he also had some legal, registered firearms. There seems to be some confusion there, but the bottom line is the guy had guns.

Now, I don't know about you, but if you're going to arrest someone who you know has a gun maybe - just maybe - you'll want to send some officers with guns as well. Because even if it's the smallest, tiniest chance things are going to kick off you don't really want to be at a disadvantage.

And since your regular officers don't carry guns you send along your specially trained officers.

So you can make a very good argument that the guy shouldn't have been arrested. But I'm not totally convinced you can have a go at the police for sending some armed officers along to arrest somebody who was known to have guns and was also known to be a flight risk.

i joined eff yesterday. i don't have a clue about megaupload [this is just something that reminds me of a much more general problem], but something is clearly wrong when commerical interests start to be "enforced" by counter-terrorism forces [and governments get strong-armed into passing laws and people have to launch campaigns to stop other laws and ...]. i don't know what else to do; eff seemed like one obvious player on the side of sanity.

https://www.eff.org/ [jeez; paranoid life - perspectives is flagging the cert as a bad one - anyone else?]

It took a lot of "think of the children" politics to get to the place where we send armies after white collar criminals... and then nobody thought of the children, bashing into the nursery and pointing assault rifles at them. I'm just glad they decided not to use the dogs.

These accounts are strikingly different. I'm sure the true lies somewhere between "he was locked up in a safe room with a sawed-off shotgun" and "all you had to do was ask".

I don't really know about that dumb waiter though. It certainly does not look like the entrance to a safe room and I'm not even sure Kim could fit through it.

There were weapons on the property and Kim made sure everyone knows that and he had (armed?) bodyguards and was obviously prepared for whatever assault that might occur on his property, hence the "plan" where to take and hide him. Let's just say that those two facts are enough to put this case out of the regular patrol officers' yard into the hands of "some-sort-of special ops" unit. What would LAPD do if they have to deal with a suspect locked up in some place, with guns and bodyguards? They would sent SWAT and run a boat anchor through the wall, just like we saw in the movie we downl... saw in cinema.

Why is it so extraordinarily strange then that the New Zealand police sent their own special unit? Quote wikipedia: "...formerly known as the Anti-Terrorist Squad, is the full-time tactical and counter-terrorism group of the New Zealand Police." A police unit was sent, not the military. And they probably just have that one unit, so that unit has to counter actual terrorism AND measly secure private property with armed douche bags on it.

So, they sent a team of specialists to take control of an unknown situation with an armed suspect - sounds very rational and calculated, exactly what any efficient police would do. You do not endanger regular patrol officers in potential close-quarters gun fights.

And to claim now that Kim would have invited them in and talked to them is completely besides the point. An arrest warrant was out on him, the police had to deal with it and it is not for Kim to "negotiate" or comment on how he would have dealt with being arrested. His potential hospitality is irrelevant. He was a suspect, he was knowingly armed with bodyguards and they had to seize him - they obviously decided this arrest was more than an average patrol officer should handle. End of story.

Everything else is nothing but speculations and propaganda and feeds right into the natural suspicion that a lot of US Americans seem to have of the police. As a European, I am glad they are there and do their job. Was it a bit "too much"? Probably... but that unfortunately comes with the terrain.

And I am speaking as a former paramedic who has seen a similar situation and was glad we had the police special ops there to secure the apartment before we could do anything about the patients in there.