I’ve lived and visited a lot of countries. So I do, I also know a fair number of police officers in different countries.

You don’t need to disarm them, you just make them less armed by default. The UK manages it fine, and it actually still allows firearms(still has a right to own a shotgun and it’s not actually hard to get a firearms license for rifles). You don’t need a gun to deal with people with knives, you just need the right tools…

It was probably more a concern he was bringing out something like a lighter, the call stated he had used accelerant on himself and hostages and was going to set them alight.

It’s not, because you are automatically putting yourself in an opposing stance. It shows you don’t care about the facts, don’t care about the situation, don’t care about the why, you just want someone to blame. Even by saying “fellow citizens” you are contributing to an “us and them” mentality that’s again not…

Fuck you to banger.

Maybe calling them cowards with badges isn’t productive, I don’t know many cops that actually are cowards. But their is a big difference between bravery and foolhardy, cops are men and women with families working crappy government jobs.

That’s the final outcome, that wasn’t evident in the process.

They can only really go on the information they have. If this was a routine knock on the door that would be totally reasonable. But if they are responding to a call that’s essentially a hostage situation looking to turn murder suicide they don’t have as much room for evaluation time.

A drone would have been a good shout here wouldn’t it, they could have seen if the call was a hoax or not before they got close. An armored vehicle would have allowed them to get much much closer to the building where they could see clearly what he was reaching for.

Of course they can, they can even make it look like an accident.

It’s not actually the job you know. They aren’t paid to take bullets. A police officers life isn’t less valuable because they are a police officer.

No you pay them to protect the community, unfortunately that community has chosen to have certain privelages that make it occasionally neccesary to shoot people to protect themselves and others.

I’ll stick with my usual milk, orange zest and chilli powder when I’m making real hot chocolate. Although it’s good to know it works well with water I suppose.

Because they are doing the job they were paid to do. It’s not like they are doing something outrageous in this case, they acted mostly appropriately for what they believed was the situation.

It wasn’t available on any of the news sources I use at the time. Have actually since watched, and have to say I can totally see why they did. At that distance, in that light level you can totally see why they shot home, he did reach and it did look like he was lifting something.

Criminal is the guy that put them in that position, they didn’t randomly pick a house and shoot someone.

Isn’t armed civilians the problem? If you want cops to stop shooting people you need to put in place the legal and regulatory structures in place to make it easier for them not to. You can’t have your 2nd amendment cake and eat it too.

From what I read of the story he wasn’t complying, he wasn’t really doing anything other than panicking. They followed the procedure, that says go in heavy, that’s the definition of swatting, the guy making the call knows exactly what to say to get the most extreme possible reaction from the police.

Yes, unfortunately criminals don’t take days off and people just can’t stop being generally shit to each other.

Because you can’t judge people working in a broken system when it fails. Especially when you actually penalize them for not working in that system.