No matter what the methodology was, it had a good outcome and that’s all that matters. The guy got himself and the woman out of the house alive and the couple responsible were arrested and jailed. It’s easy to second-guess days after the event and from a thousand miles away, but the fact is, none of us were there and I’ll bet very few of us here are professionally trained in these kinds of situations. Whether the outcome was as good as it was, or if it ended in tragedy, no amount of armchair quarterbacking is going to change it. Even when everything turns out for the best, there always seems to be people who are eager to rain on the parade. I don’t know what to call it. No one seems to be outraged, but some of it sure seems to be recreational to me.
That’s silly. It’s perfectly OK to critique methods, regardless of their outcome. We do it all the time, for all kinds of situations - and sometimes the conclusion is the diametric opposite of this one; i.e: “he did everything right, but was unlucky”.
Nobody is disputing that the outcome is good.
Let’s be clear: armchair quarterbacking is what everyone in this thread is doing, including you.
Nope. It’s not that at all - it’s just that enquiring minds want to understand what happened, and why.
That’s not a bad or wrong thing. “What would I have done [better] in that situation?” is a perfectly sound and sensible question, and perfectly in keeping with the ethos of this message board.
I’m not saying it’s bad or wrong. It just seems unproductive to me. Unless you’ve got a time machine and can go back to observe the situation yourself. And I’ll stand by my opinion. Everybody lived, the bad people got arrested, and nothing else matters. I’ll also stand by my opinion that if you want to figure out what you would have done differently, that’s fine, but unless you can directly influence anything that happened in the aftermath, you’re still doing it for recreation. So, have fun.
Saying someone is not the sharpest knife in the drawer is a putdown. You could have just said he didn’t realize it was involuntary until the second night.
Saying someone didn’t have their hearing aids on is not an insult, and is actually vital information that can’t be left out. It’s completely unlike your post.
It’s not as though this situation could never ever happen again, perhaps to one of us, or some other situation that shares some common features (i.e. you discover some friends doing something bad).
For me, analysing this situation (even on the scant information we have) is about mentally preparing myself for adverse situations - in the same way that I hope I’m never in a building that catches fire, but I’m damn sure I want to take part in fire drills, and know where the exits are, and how to use them.
I certainly did not mean it as one. To me, saying that someone is not the brightest person ever and saying that he’s stupid are very different things; in fact, my own description had him above stupid, whereas you read that I was calling him stupid.
But hey, you’re the one who took offence…
No, but that’s not what you and other Dopers are being accused of doing. You’re being accused of overly focusing on the problems and ignoring the positives.
This thread is an anomaly. Most of the time, when heroic actions are mentioned, there’s a general acknowledgement of the heroism before people start questioning everything. I don’t think that’s an accident. I think it feels kinda crass to immediately jump into the problems without an acknowledgement. It feels like you are devaluing the heroism.
And Nava’s post, with the swipe about him not being all that bright, didn’t help that perception, either.
It’s not surprising to me that some people would jump in to give the acknowledgement your posts lack, while disparaging you for not doing it yourself. Nor is it surprising that Nava’s post would ruffle feathers a bit.
If you’ve never noticed, this board is pretty touchy and awfully argumentative. (And I wouldn’t have it any other way.)
So I’m being accused of doing something different from what I am actually doing. That’s not a first.
Personally, I find it more distasteful when there’s an initial period of happy-clappy celebration, then everyone turns hard and starts analysing. That always seems two-faced to me - not to mention that people often end up applauding a villain that way.
Because creating a hostage situation with a bunch of heavily armed cops surrounding the house would have automatically worked out so much better.
Perhaps Higgs could have handled it better–I can’t say; I wasn’t on the spot. But the captive is free and the crooks are in jail. Works for me.
For me it has nothing to do with parade raining and everything to do with “WTF?!”
When I read the story I just genuinely could not get my head around the idea of finding a kidnapped girl, going away, having about a day to think about it and then deciding the best course is to go in there and effect a citizen’s rescue from an armed person. Not calling the police just wouldn’t even come close to happening if it were me.
When he went home? He left and thought about the situation and apparently finally realized something wasn’t quite right, so he returned. Instead of waiting a whole day and returning, he could have called the police.
Or some shortish time after they said “We’ve got a girl in a cage back here” - make an excuse (“Hey, that reminds me, I forgot to get bird seed!”), leave the premises, call the cops.
Maybe he is not the kind of person that runs to the cops with problems. He might have thought “what can they do that I can’t?”. It’s weird to me to think that cops are going to be better at negotiating with these people that he is obviously on friendly terms with, than he is himself. The cops having nothing to offer in exchange for the girl’s freedom.
I think he’s a brave guy, and maybe lucky he didn’t get hurt, but calling the cops would really be no guarantee at all that no one will get hurt, even if it is safer for him personally.
There are some who would complain if he’d left her there and went to the police. Especially if the police went to check out the situation and didn’t bother to check close enough.
Oh but that never, ever happens.
It amazes me that people think the police are less suited to dealing with this situation than some random bloke, merely on the basis that It Worked Out OK This Time.
The police force are (or damn well should be) trained and equipped to deal with this sort of scenario, and their training will have been evidence-based.
If anyone in this thread is a professional trained hostage negotiator/kidnapping retrieval expert, they’re keeping mum about it which means all the armchair quarterbacking is just that: uninformed kibbutzing. Maybe it would have been more effective to immediately contact the police. Maybe it would not have. I don’t know; I wasn’t there and presumably neither were you. If the local police chief comes back later and gives some sort of analysis or breakdown of Higgs’ actions with an eye towards educating the general population, I’d be more than happy to read it (and I readily admit, it may consist of nothing more than "Contact the police ASAP, dum-dum.) and talk about it. But I don’t have a hard time believing that the surrealness of the situation could make the correct course of action less obvious. You see a purse snatcher, you yell stop thief and dial 911. Your exwife shows you her partner’s naked sex slave, wtf? The chapter and a half you read of 50 Shades of Grey did not prepare you for this.
So you have to first be a professional, just in order to opine on whether it would be better for the professionals to handle something vs a random person? That’s absurd.
Next up: putting out large fires - best left to the Fire Brigade? or by a person we pulled off the street? I couldn’t possibly say, because I’m not a fireman.
I’d say it’s about as absurd as getting pissed at someone for not rescuing another person the way you think you’d rescue someone.
It would be, if I were. I’m perplexed, not angry.
In a perfect world, the police force would of course be the ideal people to handle the situation. But it’s not a perfect world, and recent events here in the U.S. have lead many people to view the police with a high degree of skepticism.
What if a SWAT team and mobile command center rolled up to these folks house, leading to a siege situation with at-risk hostage? Would the couple have surrendered? Would they have killed their hostage and themselves? Would they have engaged in a shoot-out with the police in which several officers were killed in addition to the hostage and the kidnappers? That may sound like a ridiculous extrapolation. But until recently, most people here would have thought it was ridiculous to imagine police officers wearing combat gear, in armored vehicles, explicitly threatening to arrest journalists and even shoot unarmed citizens for being involved in peaceful protests.
Everyone’s personal experience with the police will vary. Now in a situation such as this, I imagine I would have tried to call 911 at my first opportunity. However, I’m a middle-class caucasian male from the suburbs in the mid-west and even I have had a few experiences in dealing with law enforcement that make me hesitant to call on them. And who knows what Higgs’ past experience with LE has been? And can we be so absolutely sure that it would have lead to a better outcome?
It sounds like this was the best possible outcome to the existing situation already. No further harm to the hostage, no harm to the ‘negotiator’, and the kidnappers in custody. Sometimes the best person to handle a situation is the one who is already in place and who is most familiar with the details.