The General Question is at the end of the OP. “Is this typical British law enforcement hostage procedure for someone armed with a knife?”.
One cannot dismiss the testimony of a police officer on the scene, who says that they knew what was going on because they heard it, that easily. Nor is the fact that they didn’t go on the record with their name, rank, and serial number that relevant to me; I have to hope that there’s some reason for the journalist to believe the first-hand testimony of someone on the scene. And actually, you have no evidence that the person interviewed was not privy to all information either.
And second point, look - if someone has been diagnosed insane by a physician, are they not certified by a physician to be insane? Is or is not schizophrenia a form of insanity? What exactly is your dispute here? What definition are you quibbling over? Explain exactly what in your mind is the substantive difference is between “certifiably insane” and “had been diagnosed as schizophrenic”. This is simple.
While there appear to be some factual components to the questions raised by the OP
seems to have been answered and
seems unlikely to yield a singel factual answer here. I’m going to move it from General Questions to Great Debates, where I think it will thrive.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
One is a layman’s description of a legal concept. The other is a medical condition.
I’m very sorry to hear about your experiences.
But police negotiators have studied hundreds of previous cases, and have to judge the course of action based upon their experiences.
Their opinion based upon years of experience may differ from yours.
Maybe so, but he could have done her serious injury at least. Maybe she would have survived stabbing in the throat, but perhaps she would have lost the power of speech, or maybe she’d have been stabbed in the eyes and blinded.
I see no evidence of cowardice.
I can’t believe you are actually advocating that.
In that particular case they acted without full information, and shot an innocent man. That is exactly why they need to be careful.
Could the police be certain this man only had one hostage? Maybe he was also holding a few other people as well. Could the police be sure he wasn’t?
If they burst in and shot the first man they see, you could have a repeat of the table leg incident.
Nobody is claiming otherwise.
a situation like this, every possible course of action is risky. No matter what you do there is going to be a risk to the hostage. Anything they did would have been a gamble.
Trying to negotiate a release puts the hostage at risk.
Storming in with guns blazing puts the hostage at risk.
They have to judge which is the most likely to succeed with the least amount of harm to the victim. And whatever they do, the victim is likely to get hurt.
As far as I can see, they minimized the damage as best as possible, and nobody could have done any better.
I don’t get it. Or at least I don’t get why there was such a dispute.
But I don’t care - I am not participating in this thread any further as it appears that it comes down to a lot of opinion-based work on both sides of the issue, and on this specific issue I am not going to change my opinion. I will however respect the opinions of the others in this thread, and leave this thread not thinking ill of them in any manner.
No offense, but this sort of equivilizing analysis just burns my britches.
The police needed to find a way to take control of the situation. They did not do this. In fact, they sat around and waited - for what? The Hand of God to come down and solve the problem? The problem I have with their conduct is that nothing they did made the victim the least bit safer. Now, the situation was not their fault.
But failure to act was. Once it was established that they were dealing with a possibly deranged armed man, and he is at least willing to kill his victim, they cannot refuse to act. Simply put, the victim is a lot more endangered when the police are not doing anything. Odds are, even a madman is going to be a lot more focused on the police busting in his windows and doors than on his victim (and as mentioned, he probably couldn’t kill her quickly enough, or even do serious injury). The police had no reason to wait, essentially. Not acting would not make the victim any safer, and she would be in the dangerous situation much longer. They accepted some immediate physical injury AND massive psychological trauma AND no assurance that the nutcase would not simply cut his victim’s throat at leisure against the possibility that he might manage to do so while the police are smashing their way in.
As a final note, if the police didn’t establish that the man was the only one in there, they’re pretty dumb. there are a number of neat sensors which should be able to tell you that, even through thick stone walls. Thermagraph, etc.
Firstly, they were negotiating with him, trying to get him to release the hostage and surrender.
Secondly, they were waiting for an opportunity to move with minimum possible risk to the hostage.
When they had the opportunity, they went for it.
I’m not sure how it works in Scotland, but where I live (Alberta, Canada), the way physicians I know use the term “certifiable” is different than simply having a psychiatric diagnosis. AFAIK, “certifiable” means that a doctor feels that you need to be involuntarily committed to hospital for treatment. So you can be diagnosed as schizophrenic, but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily “certifiable”.
Under the Alberta Mental Health Act, the criteria for involuntary commitment are:
I guess the crux of the problem is deciding at what point the risk of going in outweighs the risk of not going in. Do they decide to act the first time they hear her getting raped? How about the second time they hear her getting raped? How many times does someone have to get raped before the higher ups decide that something should be done?
Is it possible that law enforcement really dropped the ball on this one?
Marc
‘Sectioning’ is the British equivalent. You are quite correct, that a diagnosis of a particular disorder does not equate to being considered a danger either to yourself or to others. (NB that article outlines the situation under English law - the references at the bottom link to the equivalent Scottish legislation which works on the same principles.)
They ‘dropped the ball’? How many rapes would you have said was an appropriate number before the all-guns-blazing approach became your preferred option (especially bearing in mind that it wouldn’t suddenly erase all of those assaults)?
All I know, is that if some guy had me tied up and was periodically butt-raping me Pulp-Fiction style, I’d damn sure want the Dallas SWAT team to come in and shoot the motherfucker, regardless of whatever risk it put me in.
That aside, don’t the Edinburgh police have snipers? Seems to me that the first time he gets in front of a window and is positively identified… one shot, one kill, no questions asked.
I can’t speak to the laws in Canada. However, in the U.S. states that I’m familiar with, it works like this: if you’re determined to be a danger to yourself or others, you can be placed on a 72-hour mental health hold (the terminology varies).
If you’ve been certified, it means that a court has found you to be severely disabled due to mental illness and are in the care of the state.
So, the involuntary commitment is short-term, Certified is long term.
St. Urho
Paramedic
This approach is very different from one country to another. Yes, every police force has armed response teams, from my experience staffed with a lot of ex-army guys. But they simply don’t go for ‘one kill’. Except if they’re Brazilian or have a funny Irish accent (see earlier link).
I asked if they dropped the ball I didn’t say they did. Perhaps you didn’t notice this little symbol at the end of my sentence which was “?”. This symbol is commonly used to indicate that the sentence is in fact a question instead of a statement. For your edification I shall provide a list of common symbols used with sentences.
“.” is used to denote that a sentence has come to an end.
“?” as we’ve already discussed means the sentence was a question.
“!” might be one you don’t see very often but indicates that the tone of the sentence is that of excitement. You might possibly see a combination of “?” and “!” at the end of a sentence to indicate a tone of puzzled excitement.
Once you’ve mastered these we can move on to hyphens, colons, semi-colons, commas, and my personal favorite the ellipsis…
Marc
Well, thank you for your helpful statement. So, in answer to your question, my answer is yes. Does that get us anywhere?
It is pretty typical for them to camp outside and await developments. If guns get involved it can take them many hours to go anywhere near the scene of action, while people are bleeding to death inside it. Also demonstrates the dismal quality of leadership in many senior police officers today, many of whom are quite unfit for their posts and owe their positions to pushing the right response buttons in Political Correctness tests and are walking around thinking “Oh my god, what if something goes wrong, this could ruin my career, best do nothing, refer upwards, and await developments”.
Well, if you are in a Keanu Reeves movie, you shoot the hostage. Of course, you’re also supposed flirt with gorgeous brunettes and make semi-witty comments while Dennis Hopper chews up the scenery.
You really need to stop basing your opinion on police tactics on what you’ve seen in Lethal Weapon movies. Aside from the lack of details about the construction and layout of the house, this whole business about raming or driving a vehicle through the house is nothing but Hollywood bullshit; apart from the infamous and disasterous raid on the Branch Davidian compound by the then-BATF (widely regarded in the law enforcement community as brutally incompetent), I can’t think of a single real-world incident in which this alleged tactic has been used. Ditto for “swing[ing] in through a window, etc.”; aside from the hazard of being severely cut (soda glass windows don’t just shatter harmlessly like the sugar glass used in movies) and interference with anything that might be in front of the window, it’s actually pretty hard to enter into a room through a window-sized opening and enter into a firing stance quickly, which is why police and military personnel typically enter via mechanical or ballistic door breaching, or (in extreme cases) explosive breaching through a wall, which requires expertise with explosive placement and is a great hazard to occupants.
What you’re talking about here is generally referred to as “dynamic entry”, and in a hostage situation it is an absolutely last ditch scenario, owing the hazard to the officers effecting entry, and the hostage(s) from the perpetrator, accidental shooting by police, and incidental injury from the entry operations themselves. In addition, if this is an attached structure (given that they’re referring to it as a flat I’m assuming that it is) they also have to consider damage to surrounding structures and injury to inhabitants. And despite the claim that it isn’t easy to kill someone with a knife, it is, in fact, quite easy to do mortal injury with a large, fixed blade knife in a few seconds, well before an entry can be assured.
Then there’s the whole “shoot him before he kills the hostage” arguement; I don’t know how many of the critics out there are hunters or have participated in practical shooting-type events, but making the critical stopping shot, especially when missing may very well mean that the perpetrator kills the hostage, or worse yet is using the hostage as a human shield, just isn’t nearly as easy as Don Johnson or Kiefer Sutherland makes it look on the televisor. It is excellent marksmanship under ideal conditions to hit a target within a five inch circle with a pistol, and only moderately easier with a carbine or pistol caliber submachinegun. In the real world, under stress, poor lighting, uncertain layout, et cetera the probability of missing the perpetrator and indeed, hitting the hostage, is uncomfortably high.
And as much as people here want to second guess the tactical situation without actually having any details (Were there multiple entry points or just the front door? Could the police get layout and surveillance inside? Did they know the perpetrator was armed with just a knife, or did they have reason to believe that he had other weapons?), the police also have to consider how their actions are going to be questioned after the situation, especially if the hostage ends up dead. I’ll leave if for the handful of active law enforcement officers here to explain what goes through their head in every potential confrontation, but even a completely successful breach and rescue is not going to be without criticism, even if the perpetrator is clearly in the wrong. This is especially true in many European countries which have an entirely different standard for the use of force. See the Garda Síochána/John Carthy controversy where the moderated response of the Emergency Response Unit was criticized as too meek on review by American law enforcement while simulataneously held to public criticism for being too aggressive.
Regarding the assessment of the mental state of the perpetrator, his legal state of mind is really irrelevant to the tactical situation. What is pertinent is whether the police believed that he could, regardless of disposition, be convinced or compelled to release the hostage and/or peaceably surrender to custody versus the probability of success and ramifications of an attempt at a dynamic entry. Since no one here was at the scene, or indeed, even has a layout of the flat and surrounding area, the degree of outrage and armchair expert opinion expressed is hysterical and disproportionate. Perhaps, in retrospect, they misjudged the situation; maybe the commanding officer in charge bungled or was too indecisive to handle the issue. Nobody here knows. I do find it curious, however, that the cited article reports that:*“The public need to know that this wasn’t the only time police had been up there to the flat. Just weeks earlier, there had been a call out to the same address.”
The court heard McKay was a “high-risk” serial sex offender who was monitored by police.*Where is the outrage over allowing a high-risk serial sex offender with a history of mental disturbance out of custody? Why was this situation permitted to occur to begin with?
Una Persson, I sympathize with your point of view, and had this perpetrator been killed by police in ending the standoff I’d call it a good day for all involved. However, lacking knowledge of the on the ground situation and layout, I find it hard to see how anyone can baldly criticize the police in this situation. Someone in authority made a decision based upon the information they had and capability there; the opinions of an anonymous officer with unstated responsibility (and filtered through a journalist whose primary interest is selling a story of outrage) may very likely not tell the whole story. At the end of the day the hostage walked away alive and (physically) uninjured, which is better than a dead hostage, even if police “get” the perp.
Stranger
Jesus, have you even been closer to a gun than seeing Bruce Willis wave one around on a movie screen? A jacketed lead bullet going through glass will almost always deform and has a nasty tendency to be deflected, going someplace other than where it is aimed. And a large bore rifle caliber suitable for sniper duty (7.62×51mm/.308 Win, 7mm Rem Mag, .300 Win Mag) will typically penetrate through-and-through a human target posing a lethal hazard for anyone in the backdrop. The only time a sniper should fire in a hostage situation is when he has a clearly identified target, an unimpeded trajectory (even striking a small twig can cause a significant deflection), and a clean background, which is pretty hard to do when your target is a sillouhette behind plate glass. All of this crap you see in movies about shooting through the wall, diving rolls into a room, shooting the gun out of a perpetrator’s hand at 200m, shooting a perp through the hostage’s shoulder, et cetera is pure, unadulterated Hollywoodism, untainted by any actual knowledge of how firearms and entry tactics work. I wish a few of our “experts” here in this thread had actually spent some time at a tactical range training in defensive firearm shooting, reading up on assault tactics, and/or performing experiments in penetration ballistics so their opinions would have some basis in reality rather than the silver screen.
Stranger