Still, he was raping her. I gotta think that is one hell of a distraction.
And w/re to the question of would you rather be raped or stabbed, having been both I would pick stabbed hands down.
Having been shot I would still pick that over another sexual assult, even to the point of my own death.
But then again, I have never been mortally stabbed, only in the hand and arm. And I have never been maliciously shot, it was a hunting accident, same damn arm though.
The sexual assult involved sodamy, fear, humiliation, minor physical injury, who knows what long term psycological effects, all the best one can hope for for a 12 year old boy.
My opinion, if he was being listened to then it was known when he was distracted. Unless he was pissing on himself he went to the toilet at least once in 12 hours and it is possible that this was known as well. It sounds to me like buracratic bullshit and middle command trying to cover their own asses.
One person, through a window, close range, one shot while distracted. After being shot the one time, the perp would most likely lose interest in the victim. Slay his pedophilic ass.
Well if we’re going to make things up, I’ll just point out that the “storm the room regardless of the danger to the hostage” plan seems to be based on the idea that rape is a Fate Worse Than Death. What does it matter if the woman lives or dies? She’s been soiled anyway. Nobody will want to marry her and we’ll just have to send her off to a convent.
The reality is that the police are going to do whatever they can to prevent a hostage from being raped with the exception that they’re not going to get a hostage killed to prevent his or her rape.
Storming a room is not like what you see in the movies. I’ve actually done it in real life. I’ve also negotiated with people inside barricaded rooms. So I know from experience that negotiating people out is a lot safer for everyone than storming the room.
There appears to be 2 debates going on: 1 is the desire of a rape victim to risk injury or death, and the other is the timely use of force.
No rescue is 100% certain and it’s somewhat futile to deconstruct a situation without more facts. When I read the original story I was under the impression that the police who were on-site felt they could have engaged the rapist. Maybe I read more into their frustration. I’m also of the opinion that it is fairly easy to use modern technology to monitor the situation. They were able to hear what was going on so a microphone would have enhansed that. They were certainly capable of viewing the house using telescopes, cameras and infrared cameras. All of which should be available to police and SWAT teams. Combining the survelance equipment into a single base of operation allows a great deal of information to be focused for decision making.
Given that the rapist was busy raping this women there was sufficient opportunity to apply technology to the situation for the purpose of gathering information. In my opinion, more could have been done and most women would prefer to risk rescue when an opportunity presents itself.
I find the argument that a single hostage presents more danger a valid point. But I don’t agree that it is a constant threat. And to assume that a crazy person will not kill his hostage is the other side of the waiting coin. I would like to think the plan was to look for opportunity and weigh risk against time (maybe it was). This guy was taking drugs which could easily have been meth. If he started to stab the woman to death the police would not have the element of surprise to offset the event.
Produce these 1000 victims who 98% agree and then we can talk about that. So far by my count in this thread, we have three rape victims, and one doesn’t agree that risking death is preferable to continuing being raped. Clearly we’d need a much larger sample to determine distribution, but even if the majority was as overwhelming in its agreement as you suppose, it still wouldn’t be monolithic, would it?
Frankly, the idea that a person who would rather die than be raped more should be the one who decides seems a bit irrational to me. We don’t normally let people who are obviously not in any state to be thinking clearly make decisions to put their lives in immediate danger.
You can argue that but lets look at the situation. Crazy person threatens to kill his victim and states he won’t go back to prison. I think the police lucked out when he smoked himself into a docile state. Could have gone the other way. They weighed time against a crazy person and won.
They don’t just make up these things. Hostage situations are intensively studied and statistics are kept of what works and what doesn’t. And the odds of a hostage being rescued alive by negotiation are much higher than the odds of a hostage being rescued alive by storming the room.
If the police had done what several people here have suggested and stormed the building, it’s likely the criminal and the victim would both be dead. And then we’d have a recreational outrage thread asking why the stupid police had stormed the building instead of waiting. And anyone who suggested “But if they had waited, the guy might have raped his hostage” would be met with shouts of “But at least she’d be alive.”
As always, a salient and learned contribution by one of our most erudite and sagacious members. Please don’t hesitate of offer any other tidbits of thoughtful wisdom as they occur to you.
100% disagree on this. We don’t have police forces to make “maximize the chance of getting the hostage(s) out alive”, we have police forces to institute law and order.
It’s a quaint fiction that police officers are anything other than law enforcement. That generally involves providing protection to the public as a virtue of law enforcement activity. However, the primary reason we have police forces is to enforce law and order in society.
While the victim’s situation is horrifying–the police have to be primarily concerned with the greater societal harm in letting a criminal wantonly commit sexual assaults repeatedly with police a few feet away.
At that point, you need to go in and roll the dice, not so much to save the victim but just to show that order is going to be maintained.
More than likely this guy will get a relatively short sentence even though this is his third incident of multiple rapes.
While the victim isn’t British, the British people in general deserve offenders like this since they are completely unwilling to protect themselves from violent offenders.
In America if this guy wasn’t staring down a mandatory life sentence there would be riots in the streets and politicians looking for new jobs.
How so? SWAT teams in the US train with the military, have access to all the equipment I listed and have a mobile unit for the situations they are tasked with. What is so hollywood them doing the job they are trained to do using the equipment they have? I’ve watched them storm houses on the news after assessing the situation. That’s what they’re trained to do.
That reminds me of the uproar over a Vermont judge who tried to give a child rapist 60 days. There was such an outcry that he reversed his own decision.
Child rapists are not held in high esteam in the states and neither are the judges who give them light sentences.
That’s not what people are talking about. It’s not that she’s “soiled” it’s that she was being forcibly fucked several times in that 12 hours. The disgust for the police officers’ inaction would be substantially the same if she were being tortured for that length of time.
If some guy had been treated to a good vigorous beating session with a rubber hose every couple of hours by his captor, all he’d have is some minor internal bleeding, some bruises, and some screaming nightmares from it. The relatively minor nature of his injuries probably wouldn’t keep him from being royally pissed off that the police didn’t take a chance and get him the fuck out of that situation hours before they did.
Yes. Perhaps in this case, the police’s training took over, and they concluded it was too dangerous to proceed. But you watched a TV show, so you’re the expert. Or something.
