If what you’ve described is an accurate account then don’t get me wrong, I
appreciate the complexity of the situation.
I guess I’d like to know what led them to think she would be able to
remotely trigger an explosion (or was wearing an explosion), aside from
being shot at that’s the only justification for a ‘shoot-to-kill a fleeing
woman scenario’ - that’s a big call. As otherwise a taser or similar would
have sufficed.
I don’t know the details, but it may stem from this line of thinking:
I would think that with our technology their should be a non-lethal alternative, I don’t know if there is a working one in the real world.
Yup, a law that’s saved no-one, but killed an innocent man.
You’d have thought they could have penned her in between four squad cars without resorting to shooting.
They’re cars, not cargo trucks. Anyone capable of running can hop over the hood/trunk.
I believe they tried to ask questions at the White House, and she ran a secret service officer down in response, then led police on a high-speed chase towards the Capitol. Then they tried to ask questions near the Garfield memorial, and she almost ran down a bunch more officers. But otherwise, great point.
When they pin your doors either side? ffs.
Exactly. The actual description of this is “Category Error”. Without identifying a given threat properly, defending against it is impossible. Or, as the memorable blog post by Dan Simmons said in 2006:
“Let’s imagine,” said the Time Traveler, “that on December eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked them to declare war on aviation.”
http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm
Terrorism is a MEANS, a TACTIC. It’s the people who support, violently, a given end-goal who are the threat.
Ah. She was, IIRC, on foot when shot, so I assumed you were offering alternatives to that.
or vampires
Perhaps there was additional video that I didn’t see aired on the national news last night which featured questions rather than shouty “lawful orders.”
The fact remains that an unarmed woman was shot in the back by officers who, in theory, should’ve been capable of capturing her sans deadly force. If DC and Capital police are so out of shape that shooting her in the back was the only available option for stopping her, then I posit the heads of those organizations have some explaining to do about the abysmal physical condition of their officers and their lack of the less-lethal taser in their rather heavy arsenals.
Aha - I hadn’t got to the bit about on foot. That would be somewhat uncool of the fuzz.
So what, in your mind, is a reasonable course of action for the police to take in such situations? After driving into a barricade and hitting a secret service officer, then leading police on a high-speed chase, she should be approached in a calm and quiet manner (as she tries to drive through you), asking questions in a non-agitated manner without shouting?
If we want to talk about things that are possible “in theory,” then in theory she was carrying (though not bearing) a firearm, in theory she had a detonation device that could be used, and in theory continued to present a threat. I used to walk along Constitution Avenue past the guard station where she was shot every day, and the median where her car ended up is about 75 feet from the corner of the Hart Senate building; based on what these officers knew at the time—only 8 minutes after what happened at the white house, and given the probable difficulty of communicating the context of her initial encounter (as opposed to only what actions she had taken) between the Secret Service, Metro Police, and Capitol Police — I think they probably had reason to believe she was a serious threat. It’s far too easy for us to sit here in the benefit of hindsight to say she was obviously a lost individual who made a wrong turn and then reacted very badly to the Secret Service and in an increasingly worse ways thereafter.
Also, can anyone point me to a link that says she was shot in the back?
What can I say? I’m the guy that makes facetious comments and you’re the guy that calls the guy who makes facetious comments an asshole.
In your universe there’s a terrorist boogeyman behind the wheel of every Infinity? As I’ve already asked, why no tasers? I can’t stand the damned things any more than guns, but at least we’d have a much improved possibility of enquiring of the woman why she behaved as she did and a little girl would still have her mother (a mother in jail is better than a dead mother, no?). As it stands, we’ll never have a definitive answer because the police shot to kill. Frankly, I have an unsettling suspicion that they shot her dead because she injured other officers.
I have to agree with our non-Usian Happy Mutants. Police in the US resort to deadly force as the first option, rather than the last, all too often.
In my universe there are hundreds of thousands of Infinities on the road, and only one of them has been used to hit police officers, ram police cars, drive over barricades, and lead high-speed chases through DC. Of course, none of this makes anyone a terrorist, but it’s a pretty good sign that they’re dangerous.
I believe police always shoot to kill. I don’t think they shoot to injure. I don’t know why they don’t have tasers or why they didn’t use them if they are so equipped. Perhaps because it possible to still do things, such as trigger a detonation, even when you’re tased?
And in your universe there’s a trigger-happy, hell-bent-on-revenge sociopath behind every badge? Again, if you think police use deadly force as the first option (though this is incompatible with your suspicion they shot her because she injured an officer), why wasn’t this woman shot dead at either the White House or the Garfield memorial?
By the way, I’m not American, and I have no love for DC Metro Police, but in my experience the Capitol police have always been highly professional.
It’s true that we don’t have all the facts yet, and we should wait to reserve judgement (though the past suggests most people will not wait) on both the assailant and the police. But I commute daily on a bicycle in heavy traffic. Road rage is brandishing a weapon. A car easily has enough kinetic energy to maim or kill. As with a gun, it’s operation comes with certain obligations for the safety of those around. When those obligations are ignored through negligence, it’s dangerous enough. When they are abandon willfully, a car becomes a deadly weapon.
I’m still just trying to figure out how she had that many encounters with law enforcement from various agencies, and not one of them seems to have observed that there was a child in the car.
If you have someone driving to endanger, does the fact that they have a child in the car make it less important to stop them doing so, or more important?
I’m not sure what they could do differently with that information, just as I’ve never been sure what to do in response to “BABY ON BOARD” signs other than to assume that the driver is distracted and exhausted.
That’s why pretty much any building important, or self-important, enough to be worth driving a vehicle full of explosives into has barriers (like the ones that stopped her cold, barriers done by competent contractors are generally designed with trucks in mind) that make car bombing impractical.
Either you go subtle (as in multistory buildings with basement parking garages) or you are just aiming for pedestrian concentrations (in which case you have more options than one could ever hope to watch); but ‘ramming speed!’ hasn’t been an effective car bombing mechanism for years now.
