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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Yup. After living through this traumatic experience, I bet Dotcom's kids will hate the police for the rest of their lives.

> where we send armies after white collar criminals

They sent a POLICE unit after an armed suspect (put such pictures on the web) surrounded by (potentially) armed bodyguards - sounds reasonable to me.

My point is that the police have become so militarized that it has become unreasonable (and there's little difference between SWAT and military). I have kitchen knives in my house. Am I an armed suspect that would require 20 men in full armor with assault rifles, vehicles that are essentially APC's and friggin' air support to take down?

Not to mention the possibility of taking 5 minutes to think about a safer way to apprehend him (perhaps wait until he leaves his house, or at the airport clearing customs?) instead of "storming the castle" (where they knew there were young children) as it were? The fact that they thought there might be a shootout and they knew the kids were there makes their actions doubly unreasonable.

It happening more in every arrest, in just about every country. The police have been given new toys. They want to play cowboys and indians with them.

Did Kim Dotcom ever leave his house? Could it possibly have been cheaper, safer, and easier to, say, pull over his car and arrest him on the side of the road? Wouldn’t that also leave Dotcom less cause and opportunity to activate Megaupload’s alleged self-destruct mechanism?

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