And thank you for accepting that the manner it was intended. I apologize for the poor wording of previous statements.
I fully understand that opinion, particularly given your experiences. However, no police department is likely to perform a forced entry in this situation unless they believe that there is a high probability of success, or that the situation is so desperate that there is no other option. Their job is to maximize the chance of getting the hostage(s) out alive. We don’t know why they made a decision not to enter in this case, or whether it was a good decision in retrospect, but it was certainly made with this in mind. And although it will not have prevented injury to her, I hope they put this rapist away for the rest of his life so that he is not free to harm anyone again.
Stranger is pretty obviously the only one in the thread making any sense, albeit in a somewhat insensitive fashion. Here’s why:
All the people saying “well why didn’t they just kick the door down and shoot him?” would do well to note that the kick-door-shoot-perp approach is a lot more effective for rescuing multiple hostages. One can pretty safely assume that in the 10 seconds (minimum) required to effect entry, reach the evil captor and shoot him, he’d be able to kill the hostage. And here’s the kicker- even if he couldn’t, have* you* ever tried shooting someone holding someone else in front of them? Probably not. Your available target would be a section of his head perhaps six inches square- and guess what happens if you hit the girl, too? Fail.
Just because RoboCop was able to hit that guy in the nuts through the victim’s skirt…
From the point of view of the police, “burst in, hostage killed” is a much more serious failure than “don’t burst, hostage safe, though victim of multiple sexual assaults”.
On the other hand, if the guy was holding a dozen people, and one gets killed, the door-kicking technique is an instant success. That also happens to be the situation you see in the movies. Think about it.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that he did not have a knife to her head for 12 hours straight and that multiple opportunities arose to use a swat team. This is their function and they are specifically trained for it.
I don’t think anyone disagrees with this except that is not the scenario at hand. Unless this was a palace, the room in question would be relatively small. Pick any room in any house you’ve been in and run the length of it. What did it take? Less than 2 seconds? I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a pile-on but it’s very effective. All they need to make this work is to survey the situation and react when the opportunity arises. You make a big display of sirens and cruisers, the guy goes to the window to see what’s happening and he’s away from his victim. He also becomes a target.
Yes, I agree to a point. But we do know this guy was smallish and he was using a knife versus a gun. I’m not from the UK but in the US we have SWAT TEAMS available in fairly small areas.
I’m not talking about anything beyond the simplest of technology and a trained group of people busting down a door. I live in a city of 150,000 and we have a SWAT team. What do you think they’re trained to do?
This is from a local SWAT TEAM WEB SITE: Members of the team train eight hours a month to maintain their proficiency and skills. Each member of the team attends a basic SWAT school as time and finances permit. There are instructors within the membership of the team to provide training in tactics, firearms, less-lethal force, distraction devices, and gas deployment. Members have attended various tactical schools taught by instructors from the Los Angeles (California) Police Department, Miami-Dade (Florida) Metro Police Department, Dayton (Ohio) Police Department, Lexington (Kentucky) Police Department, and the United States Military. Tactics are taken from the various schools and evaluated and adapted by the team membership to form specific operational procedures and protocol for the team.
I don’t know what they use as distraction devices but I know they use them. Again, this is what they are trained to do. They’re not trained to stand around and wring their hands and hope everything goes well. They’re trained to observe, distract and deploy. They ARE the real world.
You totally missed the point there. It’s not the camera technology that’s an issue - it’s “how the hell do you expect to put the cameras in the window?”
If you can safely get close enough to place a camera in a window without being seen, you’re close enough to shoot the guy in the head anyway.
Jeeze, I dunno. I thought the guy was raping the women for extended periods of time per the police who were monitoring the situation.
Take a pinhole camera and put a piece of tape on it and then put it on the end of a tool grabber. I did this with a microphone years ago. Some kid was stealing my newspaper so I rigged a mic up to a baby monitor. the trasmitter was in the house and the mic was stuck high in a window frame. Worked pretty good once I figured out I had to ground the mic to stop interference. I nabbed the kid the next day.
If you looked at my earlier post the SWAT teams train with various agencies including the military. I would expect them to have better toys than I can buy.
‘Clearly’? We have no way of knowing what he was like at the time he was assessed.
I’ll agree that there seems to have been a failure in the third case, and I’d put money on this including failures in the ongoing medical treatment necessary for somebody like that to stand a chance at rehabilitation.
The OP asked about the police response, which set the tone for the thread. Because of the complexity of the situation surrounding the guy, with the combination of criminal history and serious mental health problems, it’s hard to know where to start directing blame for the situation occurring in the first place. But these questions are being asked.
I’m curious. when police policy is made, who makes it? Lets see, we won’t do high speed chases because of x,y, and z.
We won’t do this because we have experience about a,b & c.
We will not risk any physical harm when a woman is being repeatedly raped because we are men and we know that is not really that bad. We will not ask the thousands of rape victims what they would want because they are excitable women and we don’t need to ask.
Yeah, sounds about right to me.
I wonder what they would have done if it was a captured police officer in there with electrical wires applied to his testicles for 12 hours?
“Oh, we are sure he would rather take any amount of that, than the risk of us coming in after him.”
All the male advocates of the wait for 12 hours plan, go home and tell your SO that that is what you will actively ask the police to do if it ever happens to them.
A detail that isn’t clear from some reports is that it isn’t a ground floor flat. This local newspaper article refers to the stairwell (and a landing) of what I believe is probably a fairly new 3 storey block of flats with relatively small windows. Access through other than the door would be quite difficult although the report does mention preparing to force an entry via the roof somehow.
I’m reasonably sure that street dosn’t have any of the solid old tenements as described up-thread.
If you search for the street name at espc.com*, you’ll see what I think is the building to the left of the picture of the house that’s for sale.
Flash-bang grenades and tear gas/OC gas have been around for a long time. They are quite effective when used as part of a SWAT deployment in hostage situations. Those UK cops screwed the pooch on this one.
I know that Una would be the first to say she’s just giving her opinion, but it still feels very much like she and others are saying “if you’ve been raped then you necessarily agree and if you haven’t then your opinion is not sufficiently informed to matter”. Well, I disagree with both parts strongly, and find both implications to be irrational and somewhat insulting. Again, Una, I know you don’t mean any harm and have noted your reactions here are emotional, so I’m not attacking you for this, but I think it needs to be said that even rape victims are not monolithic in their responses to things, and that actually being raped doesn’t necessarily confer in the victim special insight about rape in general.
So, when you ask a 1000 victims and they 98% agree concerning a statement, that is still not to be considered by calm right thinking people who shall decided what they are to be required to endure so as to protect those who chose to serve and protect from any possible harm? Sounds about right to me.
OK go to your front door. Now kick it in. How long did it take? It would be quicker if you had a ram but subtract the effectiveness of it if there was no run up room or it was at the top of a narrow stairway. Now go to your neighbors house (since your door is already kicked in). Have him put random heavy objects in front of the door. Even with a ram how long would it take to get in? A lot longer. It may take a while to ever get enough room to push a flashbang in. Now go to your wife/girlfriend/whatever. Stab her. How long does it take? Not very long.
Dynamic entries are made when the suspect will be surprised by the entry. Barricaded suspects are contained, except as a last resort because anything else will often result in dead hostages. Everything has to go perfect for the police. The world rarely works that way. The suspect only needs 10 extra seconds.