The police had complete control over how they approached this. Why then are they even in a position where they feel threatened?
When we look at the outcome here, they just killed some dude for no reason. If this is acceptable to the police force; why not have them call out to the room with a megaphone? What is the worst case scenario then? Hostage gets shot by a criminal instead of a policeperson?
In this day and age, they could just fly in a drone in with a microphone and and a speaker while they sit 200 meters behind a bullet proof screen. Instead they proactivly put themselves in a situation where they felt at personal risk from ... turned out to be some dude sitting in his house. How could they have come up with a worse plan?
UK police for example tends to respond with overwhelming force, clear the area if possible, and contain their potential adversary, and if possible often wait the situation out. They will use violence if they have to, but it ends up being rare.
Stupid accidents still happens (e.g. an unarmed man was shot because police worried he might be a terrorist a few years back), but serious ones are predictably few when police defaults to avoid violence, and defaults to not even carry guns. But even firearms teams who are specifically called out when a suspect is armed have few serious accidents because they're not there to shoot their way to a resolution except as a last resort.
In the end it was labeled a police-assisted suicide i.e. he still shot himself and the police have 0% responsibility. The irony is that at the same time across town, the police chief of Portland was giving a conference about how the police will use less deadly force in such encounters in the future (because this wasn't the first time).
Not clear why a sleeping dart couldn't have been used though. Animal control does a pretty good job in such situations.
As mentioned, he shot the ground directly in front of himself. Once.
And as mentioned elsewhere here, German police would in that case shoot e.g. a leg to disable the threat, not aim to kill. Someone gave the kill order and a lot of shots were fired. Of course your suggestion to use a sleeping dart (or something similar) would be ideal.
On top of all that but less relevant to this thread, they left the body uncovered on the street until late in the afternoon, approx. 8 hours. I took a lot of pictures of the entire thing (starting after the shooting, because I was afraid the police might think I had a gun too with my huge black camera with telephoto lens).
I honestly don’t believe anyone gave a kill order, I rather feel (maybe not fairly) that police had guns trained on him and heard gun fire and instinctively pulled without even taking a second to analyze situation. If I’m right (good video footage could help prove the theory), this should scare everyone (but likely won’t).
“If a police officer hears and sees the perp’s gun go off, they likely won’t stop to think even long enough to see who got shot, but likely instinctively pull to neutralize the threat.”
In most places outside the US, they’d aim for legs / arms as that would “neutralize” but not “kill”. In this scenario they’ve got snipers trained on him after all, no excuses about handgun accuracy. Yet in the US, you’ll virtually never see that, all shots will be into the chest.
That was 2005, 3 weeks after a successful terrorist attack on the tube, and 1 day after an unsuccessful one. It was news for weeks and resulted in a criminal prosecution for the head of the police force involved.
More broadly, the whole episode made them look incredibly incompetent, callous and uncaring. No action was taken against the officers who were clearly culpable through their abject incompetence (for example, if he was a potential suicide bomber, why wasn't he stopped before he got on a train?). Furthermore, the force took far too long to apologise and admit errors publicly. And they never adequately explained the tactics that led to an innocent man being shot without warning.
This is very similar in character to the issues which plague policing in the USA and has served to sow a great deal of distrust of the police here. Witness the "London riots" in 2011, for example.
And that's also set against a background where they have been publicly found to be "institutionally racist". Subsequently to the de Menezes incident, armed police also "accidentally" shot an unarmed suspect in the shoulder while running upstairs in a house in the Forest Gate raid (which again, just makes them look like amateurs).
And so on.
So our police are very far from perfect - it's just that being better than some of the worst excesses seen in the liberal world is not a hard standard to meet.
I think this might be more of a difference between the legality of guns in the US and UK. Guns are so rare in the UK because they are illegal to own for almost everyone. I can imagine that makes a big difference for a police officer's expectation of the likely potential danger of public adversaries... yes there are still knives and acid and whatnot but those are close quarter and improvised weapons that don't emerge so suddenly from a distance, I think those make you far less "jumpy" for lack of a better description.
PS. Please don't start an "anti guns" thread under here because we all know that never goes anywhere on the internet. I'm simply pointing out that the prevalence of guns will have a big impact on personal risk felt by law enforcers and that is a relevant difference between these two countries.
Some of the differences:
1. a different gun culture. Most weapons in Norway are actually for hunting, and no that does not mean semi-automatics etc.. A few are for firing on a range, but there's no culture for seeing a firearm as intended for self defense, and the laws specifically makes it hard (you need to store the weapon locked down and inoperable, and generally you'd e.g. store gun and ammo separately; if you have time to arm yourself, police will question whether or not you had the ability to get away and call for help instead - if the threat is not immediate enough you risk a murder charge).
2. A culture for not meeting suspects with force unless they're armed, and generally focus on de-escalation, and for taking weapons use extremely seriously. E.g. officers need to account for every time they take their weapon out and every bullet fired.
3. A legal system that is generally lenient but where there is a clear path of escalation in response based on how dangerous a crime is. E.g. a robbery carries a sentence up to 5 years if unarmed, of which you'd generally serve less than half (and most people won't get the maximum sentence) - as an example, a robber that participated in a stealing one of the instances of Scream and Madonna by Munch got 2 years and 6 months a decade and a bit back.
Arm yourself, and you risk an additional 7 years. Kill or seriously injure someone during a robbery, and you might get 21. As an example, one of the largest armed robberies in recent Norwegian history, that ended up with one dead poice officer, (the "Nokas" robbery) ended up with one of them getting 18 years, and several others getting 16. That's a pretty substantial extra risk on top of the risks involved in a shootout with police.
Combine that with #2, and criminals have a very strong incentive in general for not being armed - by not arming themselves they don't risk being shot at by police, and they cut the worst case punishment from 21 to at most 5 years in a robbery, for example.
Compare to the US, where a robber has little reason to want to take the risk that police won't shoot even if they're unarmed, given how often we hear of police firing even at innocent civilians. Couple that with high sentences and the incremental cost in using firearms to prevent police from catching or killing them is low.
legality_of_guns * gun_culture * gun_ownership_legal_details * gun_crime_sentence_details * police_gun_use_rules * police_descelation_emphasis
Specifically the differences between culture and usage laws between US and Norway that you describe.
I don't think so; UK gun restrictions are relatively recent (~20 years). I would attribute it to the Peelian Principles¹, which post-date US disconnection from Britain.
This statement is misleading. Yes there were gun laws made twenty years ago, as there were ten years before that, twenty years before that, thirty years before that ... right back to 1594. Source Wikipedia.
The reason for this is simple. It just takes one situation (or at least one believably plausible situation) for people of power to justify a quicker resolution that ultimately gives them more power and meets their KPI goals (more arrests, less bad guys living).
In this case, imagine a real armed gunman shoots a hostage or a stray bullet hits an innocent bystander. Imagine the outcry of the public and SJW's: "OMG they should have just run in there and killed the SOB! Or better, shoot him in the leg! Do something police!"
Solution? A more swift resolution to the problem - i.e. SWAT style infiltration.
Americans seems to be perpetually caught in a victim-aggressor-rescuer drama triangle...
Cops need to go to jail for this. Its as simple as that. And they will find the way to not shoot like that anymore.
I'm disturbed by that line of thought. A normally educated human being from a developed country should feel bad about using deadly force, and worse after using it. The whole point of military training is to break the human instinct no to kill and even with the pressure of actual combat situation (where the upside is much higher, the downside much lower than for SWAT teams), killing breaks the soldier mentally.
What kind of people is the US is selecting (or what kind of training) for its police force that only some fear of criminal prosecution is keeping them from shooting people ?
After shooting dead an innocent, you would expect a police officer to be mentally wrecked. Even worse as he utterly failed at his primary mission of protecting the citizen which, as a Police officer, should normally be pretty high up in his list of personal priorities. So I can of understand going easy of the Police, from a legal point of view. But if the kind of people you have in the police are the one looking for the license to kill to assuage their most primal instinct, the problem is not with the legal side, you are hiring/training really wrong. That's not a police force, that's a criminal cartel.
The ghost of a 1% danger vs a 0% consequence makes it a pretty rational decision. Bear in mind that criminals, even those with hostages, dont make the decision to shoot so fast: they know that if you shoot the hostage you die or get captured immediately. So the criminals do respond to the punishment. Why wouldnt cops?
The police is also under an immense pressure when they are assigned to a hostage situation.
Yes, I suppose much of that comes from their own feeling that they must achieve a quick resolution to a distressing situation, and if they are not well trained, not experienced and do not have the right incentives to work in a professional way, this kind of tragedies will happen.
In my country of 5 million people, the police force (8000 policemen) often uses less than 10 bullets in action per year, per the whole force (including warning shots but excluding ammunition used in training), but on the other hand, police officers being killed in the line of duty is also extremely rare, so they can usually approach most situations without being too aggressive.
(This is not because we wouldn't have a lot of guns in the country - we do. We just don't have violent subcultures that would shoot each other or the police.)
As a son of a cop and former service member myself, the whole thing makes me sick. And the COMPLETE lack of repercussions makes me furious. God forbid some idiot doesn't get his "gold watch." The thin blue line will rally around that idiot to protect him.
And it takes advantage of US police officers' lack of training in de-escalation. Compared to other western countries, American police officers receive less training, and their training is more focused on shooting, less on de-escalation. Better training would go a long way towards preventing them from being abused like this.
Policy changes, and collective action, are.
I agree with this, however, do you realize that the officers were told this was a hostage situation? I think in this case they were thinking about the hostages, not themselves since they weren't the ones being threatened.
How I see it is that the officers of their own freewill took on the role of law enforcement and public service.
Fully aware that they would be put in life threatening situations.
Their first instinct shouldn't be to fire first to save their own skin, but be trained to take time to assess the situation and risk erring on restraint of force.
Most of the talk coming from police departments usually state their actions in terms of the officer's personal safety.
Though that is important, due to their choice and the role in society that they play, their safety should be a secondary concern to the safety and lives of those they are to protect.