4 ms·
Incidents like this one don't help, where bank robbers wore full suits of body armor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout http://en.wikipedia
by codex 13y ago
Incidents like this one don't help, where bank robbers wore full suits of body armor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout
... probably because they expected SWAT. It's a bit of an arms race, literally, between the cops and the robbers.
- betterunix 13y agoThat is also an exceedingly rare crime. It would have been acceptable to let the robbers get away, and then catch them later (if at all). Our cities are not war zones (thankfully). To put it another way, this is no different from saying that the police should be armed with anti-aircraft missiles, because of the 9/11 attacks.
- cglee 13y agoIt's rare because police can handle it now. If you let head to toe kevlar robbers get away all the time, well, you'll have a lot of those types of attacks.
- dantheman 13y agoIt's rare because bank robberies are rare and are usually done by people who can't afford kevlar gear and you'll most like get caught.
- betterunix 13y agoIt was rare before SWAT, before the LAPD carried AR-15s in their patrol cars, and before it occurred. It is just a rare crime, even in a large city. I think the theory that there would be copycats is easily disproved: this was their third bank robbery, yet there were no copycats following the first two, nor following their successful armored truck robberies. Those crimes occurred over a period of several years, more than enough time for a copycat to get the guns and armor. On the other hand, paramilitary police teams targeting the wrong house or killing innocent people happens with frequency. It happens every year. Even if only 1/1000th of the raids that occur each year were done in error, you would expect about 40 such mistakes to occur per year. SWAT teams do not need to hide their existence, they are rarely punished for attacking innocent people, and they exist even in small towns.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoI wonder if with a slightly less thuggish police there would also be less killings of innocent people? Who knows what the bottom line would be.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoYeah, they showed a lot of improvement in the Dorner case.
- hga 13y agoNowadays, the police shotgun, with a maximum effect range of 100 yards shooting a slug that can be stopped by soft body armor, is largely being replaced by the much more versatile and accurate "police carbine", i.e. an AR-15. Only hard plates will stop the .233/5.56 NATO rounds those shoot, and they're way too heavy to do more than protect some of your torso. The Hollywood Shootout, as the link notes, had "Several officers also appropriated AR-15 rifles from a nearby firearms dealer." and mentions how this incident propelled the move to patrol carbines. (Given how obnoxious they were afterwords about returning them, the gun dealer should have insisted they come back after the normally mandatory 2 week waiting period....)
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago>Incidents You mean there is another one? There is no justification for the widespread militarization of police in this country.