So after hours of negotiation with one of the suspected snipers in the deadly police shooting last night in Dallas, the authorities decided that the suspect wasn’t backing down, and further confrontation was going to put more lives at risk. So an RC vehicle was pulled out with an explosive device attached that could also be remotely detonated and was driven to the suspect and exploded, killing the suspect.
How long have law enforcement agencies in the US had such technology and when was it developed?
Sounds like something the Israelis probably developed a decade ago.
Police and the military have been using bomb disposal robots for many years. Nothing particularly new about them at all. Basically they are fancy RC units so the tech is not really that advanced either. Of course the robots are a lot fancier than your typical RC car (bigger, can climb stairs, gripper arms, cameras, etc.).
This is certainly a novel use for one though. What I do not understand is how the robot got close enough without the suspect noticing it. They are not small or stealthy or speedy things. I’d think the bad guy would see it coming.
Likewise they can be pretty expensive and while it is of course better to sacrifice the robot over a human I do not think the police would lightly choose to blow one up (they can cost over $100,000).
Uhm yeah. Why not? Some of those things are built tough but not all. At the least try and shoot cameras or whatever it is holding. If nothing else run away from it.
Maybe he was pinned and had nowhere to go. I dunno.
Does anyone know why, and I’m assuming the area had been secured, it wasn’t possible to wait this guy out? I haven’t read anything about why it had to be ended like this.
Is it built to survive a bomb going off? Do bullets bounce of it, like Superman?
If he ran away, the police could shoot him.
Perhaps he didn’t know what it was, or that it carried a bomb.
Yes, no, maybe. They take lots of shapes and sizes and some are certainly more durable than others and might be able to withstand a bomb. But then bombs come in all sizes so you can’t protect against everything.
Of course the more durable the robot the more expensive it probably is. Some may be made (relatively) cheap and intended to be semi-disposable.
Bomb squads regularly keep explosives on hand. They can use them to detonate other bombs in a more controlled fashion. IIRC the shooter claimed he had set explosives all over the place so doubtless the bomb squad was on the scene.
I’m wondering about the bomb robot with a bomb at the ready. I believe that one way of disposing of suspicious packages is “controlled detonation.” That is, to evacuate the area and use a robot to place a bomb on package, then remotely detonate the bomb, blowing up the suspicious package too. I’m guessing that in this case, they used the robot to bring the bomb near the shooter and detonated as soon as it was within range. I’m wondering if that’s what happened and if so, how they knew that the bomb would even be powerful enough to disable or kill the shooter.
I assume they didn’t wait forever because the shooter was still agitated and unwilling to surrender. He was still armed and could theoretically hit targets a few hundred yards away. They probably couldn’t safely evacuate everything within shooting range and he was still mobile and could fire at officers who were trying to remain out of his way. It seems to me that he presented an imminent threat of deadly violence to which they permissibly responded with deadly force.
It seems strange to me, too. A criminal justice expert on NPR this morning said he’d never heard of anything like it.
Regardless of how horrible the guy’s actions were (making an assumption that there’s ironclad certainty that this suspect was actually a shooter)…well, I understand that if he’s not going to surrender that he’s probably going to die at some point by the police. That’s fine. But I admit I’m not a criminal justice expert or legally trained in aspects of when deadly force is authorized, but I’ve always gotten the impression that “imminent threat” and the like was one of the requirements for killing someone. “He’s not talking to us anymore, and I’m tired of waiting, so let’s just send in a bomb and blow the shit out of him” seems like kind of an extraordinary tactic. I guess it’s possible he might’ve been threatening some kind of remote detonation of his own, or his position had a vantage point to possibly do more shooting (though usually I think they would evacuate the area). I guess what I’m saying is that yes, this seems kind of lazy and dismissive of the usual process of actually trying to bring a suspect to justice with deadly force as a matter of last resort. Unless they come up with some other credible threat he was expressing, I can’t see any way that “he’s holed up in there and won’t come out” constitutes last resort.
And Czarcasm gets at a good point. Where, and why, do they have a BOMB in their arsenal to use for this sort of thing? Again, I guess it could come out that it was a flashbang or something intended to stun him while they stormed the room, and it killed him accidentally. EDIT: yes, good points made too that the bomb squad does indeed blow shit up on purpose all the time, and would have explosives…
The full story is bound to be interesting one way or another. Right now, it’s certainly bizarre.
That is what they did and from what I have seen and read about bomb squad people is they know their business very well and are very clear on what lethal range would be for a given explosive (or at least 100% sure incapacitate if not outright kill).
It makes a lot of sense to me that the bomb squad would probably have pretty good training on the lethality of explosives. They would need it so they can do things like cordon off a minimum safe area and determine whether a bomb is too dangerous to transport along a particular route. If they built the bomb, they’d have pretty damn good information about how dangerous it was.
