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How is it any different from a classic swat team pointing their guns at a house, ready to fire in a blink of an eye?
by toss1941 10y ago
How is it any different from a classic swat team pointing their guns at a house, ready to fire in a blink of an eye?
- hoodoof 10y agoOr indeed from a policeman standing by a car window. The method is not so important. They key thing is that the police are permitted to deal death swiftly whereever they feel the slightest or the largest degree of threat. He was a "bad guy", and we know from the movies that justifies instant death by the good guys.
- sampo 10y agoA bomb robot is cheaper than a swat team, at least.
- twinkletwinkle 10y agoIs that better, or worse? I would argue the expensive tool might be more appropriate in cases, if it means it will be used more judiciously.
- sampo 10y ago> Is that better, or worse? If you trust the police to mostly do the right thing, be responsible, and accountable if they sometimes make mistakes, then it would be a good thing that they can get their job done cheaper, and save some tax money. This would be for the benefit of all of society. In my country in Northern Europe this would be the case. But maybe there is a real danger that when busting and blowing up places becomes N times cheaper, the police will get trigger-happy and bust and blow up stuff N times more often, irresponsibly, with lots of false positives, and with no accountability. Then the net effect of making attacks cheaper and safer to execute might be a net negative for the society.
- twinkletwinkle 10y agoThis is HN so I don't want to make an argument without data, and certainly people are on edge because of events of the last few days. But characterizing police actions (in the USA where I live) as > irresponsibly, with lots of false positives, and with no accountability sounds spot-on to me.
- Nadya 10y agoSometimes I think people forget officers are people, not tools. When the more expensive tool is a human it shouldn't be used at all if there is an increased chance of death. The fact we do is because there haven't been or aren't other options in certain scenarios.
- twinkletwinkle 10y agoThe suspects are people also. Remote warfare trivializes human life, and not the humans that signed up for the risks.
- kodis 10y agoI think that the answer is in the article: paraphrasing, "when something (in this case, killing someone rather than waiting him out) becomes easier to do it tends to get done more often".
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago> How is it any different from a classic swat team pointing their guns at a house, ready to fire in a blink of an eye? They don't shoot until there is an imminent threat +. A trapped animal in a hole is not a threat so long as it stays in the hole. Blowing him up as an expedient is unprecedented in the civilian realm. + Unless you've been trained on the shoot-first-cleanup-the-mess-later tactics that many of our newly minted veterans turned police seem to cling to.
- sampo 10y ago> shoot-first-cleanup-the-mess-later tactics that many of our newly minted veterans turned police seem to cling to. Yesterday, regarding the Falcon Heights MN shooting, there were commenters in Reddit who said that that they were Iraq veterans and that they had tighter rules and discipline about shooting people who are not shooting at them, than the US police has. And that these careless shootings are done by inexperienced policemen who are too scared of the situation to be able to think clearly.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoYeah. And we've only killed 116 civilians by drone. I wouldn't seek the unbiased truth on Reddit.
- sampo 10y agoThere should be enough unjustified police killings to gather a dataset and see, in how many cases was the policeman an army veteran?