That’s something that a fire department would do before responding to a fire. Not police going to make an arrest. There would have been no reason to expect the balcony would not be structurally sound.
Not at all. I never suggested that and I have no idea why you read that into my post.
The guy is dangerous and whatever it takes to keep society safe.
I have no patience for some sort of calculation of the absolute bare minimum number of officers needed to arrest a predator who preys on children. Id feel the same about any other serious felony. It’s not a traffic offense.
ETA: To be clear, I’m just saying he should have been arrested, no vigilante violence or anything, but let’s not play around with giving him any chance to get away or resist.
Well yes, because I am advocating police should deploy as many officers as they have a plan for.
Police agencies can do just as much planning as fire departments. This event was not an exigent pursuit of a discovered felon, it was a pre-planned capture at the police’s time of choice. Except they seemed to have forgotten about the planning part.
It’s interesting how many unexpected hazards one encounters when not looking for them.
I am a firefighter; we will preplan commercial & industrial buildings; an invited walk-through to learn about the building in case of a fire - where are the elevator control room(s), where is the sprinkler controls, what chemicals/solvents are being stored & where, etc. but even that can be dated as something like non-load-bearing walls in an office building come & go as different tenants need.
We dot not do that for private residences & absolutely do not take the time when we get a call to study anything in advance of getting on scene. There is a list in the CAD of conditions if we somehow learn about them - hoarding, structurally unsound, etc. but unless some official has been in your house no government entity would know about them.
That’s what I’m referring to. There have been some horrific fires here where firefighters lost their lives because no one had passed along to the responding firefighters that there was a basement, or other important information. The fire dept here has gotten much more proactive about it since then.
Most likely, worker’s compensation would pay first, and then go after the property owners and whoever insures them, or doesn’t.
Even if it was built to code, that doesn’t mean it was maintained afterwards. Building officials today scrutinize deck connections because shit like this keeps happening (though usually it happens during parties, not police raids). The trouble is that even if code is met, the wood ledgers that attach the deck joists to the building are vulnerable to rotting, and they’re difficult to flash properly. If the flashing fails then the ledger starts to rot, and there may not be any obvious outward signs that this is happening until a big group of people goes fwoomp to the ground.
Good point. At the point it would be the owner’s responsibility unless the renter contractually was responsible.
“RAIDING PARTY!”
Yes, Discourse, it looks like shouting because it is shouting. 
But where would all of those officers have been if there hadn’t been an arrest going on? Not just idle, I hope. I expect that, if nothing else, they’d be out patrolling, distributed more or less across the department’s entire jurisdiction, so that if some surprise call came in, there’d always be someone close by to go take it. And with them all on this arrest, they were not out patrolling, or doing whatever else it is they would have been doing. The question should be, was the marginal benefit of additional officers at this site greater than the marginal cost of pulling them off of other duties? It probably is, for the second or third or fourth officer at the arrest site, so you can do things like cover other exits. But at some point, it’ll cross over to being worth less than their other duties. And at that point, more officers at the arrest is worse.
Once again, this was a U.S. Marshals operation. The majority of them were Deputy Marshals. They don’t do patrol duties, they do ops like this.
OK, if operations like this are all that they do, then the relevant question is how many of them we, the taxpayers, should be hiring. We should hire enough to do the job, but we shouldn’t hire more than are needed to do their job, because that’s a waste of taxpayer money.
It’s not all they do, but it’s what certain squads do.
And your ignorance is showing. First of all you have no idea how many is needed for these operations but they do. Insisting you know more than them is tremendous gall.
Secondly, there is a serious hiring crisis in law enforcement across the board. Local, county, state, and federal. Nobody is crazy enough to join the cops in 2026. This is leading to huge amounts of overtime and burn out. You’re paying more tax dollars in overtime/comp time pay than you are in too many officers at a scene.
They spend the whole day on this mission. For some of the fugitives, they need a lot of people. For others they may need fewer. They go out with the worst case number.
But you also say that they have no idea how many they need, either, and instead just go with a philosophy of “more is always better”. Except it isn’t, because assigning people to any job always carries an opportunity cost.
I don’t know what the optimal number is, because it’s not my job to figure it out. But an optimal number does exist, and it’s someone’s job to figure out what it is.
All the more reason not to assign more people to a mission than needed, then.
Somebody did. You just don’t like the number they came up with.
Who? The only number anyone in this thread has quoted is “as many as possible”.
I didn’t say as many as possible. I said as many as available. Sometimes that’s just one some times it’s 20. If an officer/agent/deputy marshal is not on another assignment and if available, take them.