Yeah, you scare me. 
Esprix
Sadly, the bomb could have ‘worked’ without setting any fires. It was initially a low speed explosive designed for mining or other engineering uses. On its own it makes a big bang and knocks things away. No problem.
Then some FUCKING IDIOT MACHO MORON MIXED IN A BUNCH C4 INTO THE BOMB’S EXPLOSIVE. You can just hear the dipshit “Hey! Let’s give this a little extra kick by packing in some of this killer stuff I got!”
C4 is a high-speed military explosive. This is why you do NOT mix explosives. The fast explosive burns, and spreads the slow explosive, which is of course burning. On its own the slow explosive would not start any fires. But when it gets spread out it is like any other explosive: just a combustable, and in this case one that is already burning thanks to the C4.
OK, so there is a fire. Fine. Put it out. These houses were built deacdes ago and are mostly timber and tar roofs.
Nope. Fuckheads let the damn things burn. MORONS MORONS MORONS!
I have no sympathy for MOVE, however. None, nada, zip, zilch. I am sick of their rhetoric and they’ve milked this incident (and Mumia) for all it is worth. They still cry for their cop-killing bretheren to be freed (which they were doing via loudspeakers before the seige).
I had a jury duty a few years ago, and in the pool I was in my walking partner (you line up in pairs) was former mayor Wilson Goode. He had been called in for jury duty (not a chance of serving, but gotta show you are a good citizen) and here i was walking with the man whose, decisions, along with those of his staff, burned a large portion of West Philly. I managed not to say anything, and I know why:
Nobody likes re-opening old wounds.
That, and no matter what idiocy Goode may have perpetuated: MOVE started the whole goddamn thing.
Don’t think you had to be in Philadelphia to have heard of these people. The story was widely reported on the national news.
I was with you 100% until this line. One hundred percent. Even when you declined to ‘converse’ with Goode when you had a chance.
Disproportionate force is never justified, doubly so when perpetrated by the police, triply so when mixed with fucknuttery. MOVE could have been starved out if it came to that (that is, if they couldn’t be enticed to move any other way). Tear gas could have sped the process along. Hell, they could have gone Noriega on them and blasted Norwegian death metal until they came out begging for a truce. Anything would have been better than lobbing a bomb into the compound, and the police should have known that.
The police force doesn’t exist to fight enemies. It exists to protect and serve, which includes protecting and serving criminals. As a society, we’ve decided that criminals are best served in our judicial system, so it is the job of the police force to get them to court as safely as possible. The only time a police officer is justified in using deadly force is when someone is credibly trying to kill him. That is complex and messy and open to long, acrimonious debate, but nothing I’ve heard from either side suggests that MOVE presented that kind of a threat to anyone.
Therefore, your statement is a non sequitur: It doesn’t matter who started it, because the police force acted incompetently.
A few points. Attempts were made by PPD to breach walls from adjacent units such that tear gas could be introduced. Those efforts failed owing to the fortifications of the MOVE compound. That said, I’d have favored shaped charges to breach those walls in lieu of the rooftop IED delivered.
Regarding “fuckheads let the damn things burn”: PFD made attempts to extinguish the early fire, but were repelled by gunfire from the MOVE compound. Firefighters don’t have body armor, we’re not equipped to deal with that shit-we’re not law enforcement. If you fire at me and my engine or truck company, I’ll withdraw the assignment, and if you burn, that’s your problem.
Are you kidding me? That’s the tactic that Rizzo tried and managed to get the whole world looking at Philly as some kind of despot nation that was starving children. Why don’t you look into the first MOVE seige and what a fiasco that turned into.
Yes they did. But MOVE built a fort. In a populated neighborhood. Are you telling me that wasn’t asking for trouble?
This much is true. However, the bomb on the roof was to get the bunker off.
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No. I can’t buy this. That entire morning they had a freaking water cannon blasting the bunker for hours. There seemed to be no danger to the operaters of said cannon. At the very least they could have kept the fire from spreading.
It’s one thing to set up an unmanned aerial master stream devices and let it go. We do that with regularity in large scale fires. When the dynamics of fire changes, that device may need realignment. Unless I can have personnel perform that service safely, I refuse to deploy them. Having people shot at qualifies for an unsafe condition.