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That didn't work in England when they wanted to arrest a terror suspect, so they secretly followed him to work one day, then shot him dead as he entered the tra
by Normati 12y ago
That didn't work in England when they wanted to arrest a terror suspect, so they secretly followed him to work one day, then shot him dead as he entered the train station. It turned out he was a plumber, not a terrorist.
- pjc50 12y agoContext: this was two weeks after the Tube bombings in London. It was a tragic error, but it is absolutely not routine. Wikipedia has a convenient list of UK mainland police shootings, which happen less than once a year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_firearms_in_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_firearms_in_the_U... (The word "mainland" there excludes Northern Ireland, where the RUC behaved as an occupying force with the support of the army until the peace agreement with the IRA, at which point the police were reconstituted as PSNI with an explicit effort to be police for all the community equally.)
- grkvlt 12y agoIf you want an idea of what a western 'police state' would look like, then Northern Ireland, say Belfast between 1970 and 1995, is a good proxy. Police and soldiers on patrol togetrher, an official shoot-to-kill policy, military checkpoints, internment without trial and conviction without jury, all that good stuff. That was all in the name of terrorism and was orders of magnitude worse that the policies that have been put in place in the UK and USA since 9/11, for the next round of terrorism. So until we are at 'Troubles' levels of policing, I think the GWoT policing responses have actually been pretty restrained.