(no subject)

[mrph]

From the Guardian:

It emerged yesterday that the Met's guidelines for confronting bombers allow armed police, in some cases, to fire a 'critical headshot' without even challenging the individual to stop, if it is feared an explosion is imminent. Until now, it has been assumed that suspects would be given a chance to surrender.

I can sort-of understand this, given the situation they describe, but...

Comments

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

I was reading this last weekend - as far as I can tell the number one rule of engagement has always been that there should be a clear audible warning ("Stop! Armed police!") before any shot can be fired *unless* the team at the scene believe there is an imminent risk to themselves or the public from giving such a warning. I don't get the impression that this has been kept secret at all, though observers may not have thought too carefully about what that meant until now.

[the_axel]

The thing is that the group of people who will cause an explosion if they are challenged is a subset of the set of people that a police officer believes will cause an explosion if they are challenged, and therefore innocent people will inevitably be executed under such a policy.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

There was a colum in (probably) the Guardian last week saying that the real problem isn't the policy (whatever it is) but that people were not aware of it and blissfully walking around thinking that if the police did shoot, it wouldn't be to kill, and that the police need to publicise exactly what the policy is.

Not, I think, that it would have made any difference to the particular innocent person they did shoot.

[paulw.livejournal.com]

Being a armed officer is the job I would like least. They get grief if they shoot someone and they would get grief if they didn't and that person then blew himself and a load of innocents with him.

Also if I thought someone was a bomber you wouldn't find me running towards him trying to stop him. I'd be pushing grannies to the floor putting as much debris between him and me as I could!

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

The real pain here is that it's a completely lose-lose situation. You have to choose which of two evils is best - that your guardians of the peace should shoot and an innocent person, or that they should shout a warning that could potentially kill dozens. In the former case, you will have regular incidents of individual deaths leading to continuous outcry. In the latter, you get very sporadic but massive incidents instead of continuous limited ones. Which one causes the least unwarranted death? Absolutely no way to know. If you shoot to kill, it's slightly less likely that there will be a suicide bombing incident - but you'll be killing innocent citizens far too regularly for a civilized nation not to be ashamed of itself. If you don't, well, you can anticipate that there will be a higher incidence of such bombings, and sooner or later you'll have to deal with the death toll and the outcry at the police "failing to protect" the citizenry, and you will be letting them down. Catch-22.