Or perhaps he hoped to break free, run into a crowd, and detonate there.
right, which is why you kill him as soon as you have a chance.
And other scenarios argue against killing him. What to do, what to do.
Yes, they were taking a risk. That's my point.
everything was risky. If they didn't shoot him they risked the above scenario
And if they do shoot him they risk other scenarios.
How about letting the bomb squad deal with all bomb detonator scenarios?
and you expect the bad guy to just stand by and wait for them to arrive and work on him?
It was argued upthread that the fact the suicide vest hadn't already been detonated argued against a dead man's switch. But that same fact, that the suicide vest hadn't already been detonated, also argues against a detonation switch. What kind of suicide vest has no switch? A fake one.
The video shows he was already being held on the ground by someone who was pulled off him so a police officer could kill him. Probably the vest was fake, but the possibility it was real means that calling the bomb squad was the best option. Continuing to hold him on the ground until the bomb squad arrived is all that needed to be done. There was no need to kill him.
quote:I wasn't having it both ways. I never called it a "panicked response." Earlier I said that it reflected badly on British police training regarding bombs and guns, and later I called it an execution
How else could there be a significant risk of hitting the vest?
Oh, geez, what was I thinking. When people don't panic nothing ever goes wrong. Doh!
quote:I'm still wondering about the suicide vest. Is a suicide vest in the shape of an actual vest in that it covers the trunk of the body where a "kill shot" would be aimed?
It does cover the body, but in an execution style shooting the target would be the head. And that’s what it looked like to me in the video.
So we agree that it was an execution?
quote:I don't understand the source of your certainty about "minimal risk of detonating the vest."
A head shot isn’t at all likely to hit the vest.
Okay, I understand your reasoning now.
quote:I'm probably not following you. Why do you keep mentioning a detonator? Did you read somewhere that the suspect reached for a detonator? Where, because I couldn't find a mention of that at Google News?
Because that would be the usual way of setting it off. And for this particular point it doesn’t matter. If he was holding a dead man switch all he had to do was let go. If he had to reach for the detonator it would take more time.
This comes back to a point I made upthread. What kind of suicide vest has no dead man's switch and no detonator switch? A fake one.
quote:Yes, of course, but I must be missing your point because this sentence seems as if you intended it to support your point about reaching for a detonator. What were you actually trying to say?
No, it’s to support the point that if he was using a dead man switch the vest would have already gone off.
Not if he was still holding the button/switch/whatever in the "activate" position.
He had a suicide vest, he was down and surrounded by armed police. He’d been stabbing people. If he had a real suicide vest what else was he going to do ?
We can only speculate and enumerate the possibilities of what the suspect was thinking.
A head shot is not likely to detonate the vest. The police shooter had aimed and was using a carbine, not a handgun
I'd previously heard that police aim for the center of mass. Looking this up I found nothing about aiming for the head, but I of course accept that a trained marksman can hit the head from seven feet or so.
If he had a dead man’s switch he had the opportunity to detonate the vest, and why wouldn’t he?
There are enumerable reasons why he wouldn't detonate the vest, and the type of switch (detonator switch versus dead man's switch) makes no difference to this aspect of the discussion. Maybe he thought a better opportunity might present itself. Maybe he decided he wanted to live. Maybe he didn't have the courage to kill himself. Maybe something else. How could we possibly know what was going through his head?
So what is the source of your certainty that the vest could not have been detonated, if he hadn’t been shot? Even if he had a dead man switch? Because without that certainty your arguments don’t make sense.
I have expressed no certainty at all. I described a range of possibilities and concluded that the best solution, given all the many possibilities, was to keep the man pinned on the ground and call the bomb squad.
That’s a distortion of the argument. The argument relied on the fact that a dead man switch should be easier to operate than a manual detonator. Given the situation it is entirely possible that he could not have triggered a manual detonator.
Of course it's possible. I've been pointing out that there were many possibilities all along.
The suicide vest wasn’t noticed until they were pulling people off him. By that time it was too late to maintain the pile-on.
This isn't consistent with the video, which shows police in position to execute the man as soon as the last person, a civilian, was pulled off him. Can you point me to your information?
quote:Oh, geez, what was I thinking. When people don't panic nothing ever goes wrong. Doh!
Because things are always likely to go catastrophically wrong when a skilled professional is doing his job properly,
Right, everything always goes according to plan.
quote:So we agree that it was an execution?
Of course not.
Then when you pointed out that the shot was most likely to the head and that "in an execution style shooting the target would be the head," what did you mean if not that it was an execution?
The fact that it was done in much the same way does not touch on the central question. That is whether there was a perceived threat that justified the action.
In my view executions are never justified.
quote:This comes back to a point I made upthread. What kind of suicide vest has no dead man's switch and no detonator switch? A fake one
If you can think of a way that the police could know that there was no detonator switch - not just a convenient possibility but a reliable way of telling - then let’s hear it.
I explained this upthread. You said there was little likelihood of a dead man's switch, and since it would look pretty much the same as a detonator switch, there was also little likelihood of a that, either.
quote:Not if he was still holding the button/switch/whatever in the "activate" position.
Which would have been noticed.
What is the source of your certainty?
Besides he would have had to arm it first.
Press switch to activate, release to explode.
And why would he when he could cause maximum carnage by releasing it?
I addressed this already upthread.
quote:We can only speculate and enumerate the possibilities of what the suspect was thinking.
He wasn’t getting out of that.
What is the source of your certainty?
And the nature of his attack and the wearing of a suicide vest suggest that he never intended to.
Again, there are many possibilities, and we can't know what the suspect was thinking. The nature of the attack, i.e. by knife, would suggest, among other possibilities, a fake vest.
quote:I'd previously heard that police aim for the center of mass. Looking this up I found nothing about aiming for the head, but I of course accept that a trained marksman can hit the head from seven feet or so.
Which shows that a little knowledge without understanding leads to error. Generally a body shot is better. In this case a head shot is far better.
Well, sure, but I also could find nothing about where the suspect was shot. Upthread you said video suggests a head shot, but I don't see how you can tell. Perhaps you can point me to what you're looking at.
quote:There are enumerable reasons why he wouldn't detonate the vest, and the type of switch (detonator switch versus dead man's switch) makes no difference to this aspect of the discussion. Maybe he thought a better opportunity might present itself. Maybe he decided he wanted to live. Maybe he didn't have the courage to kill himself. Maybe something else. How could we possibly know what was going through his head?
But he clearly planned to die.
Where does your certainty about the mind of the suspect come from?
Taking the chance that he changed his mind doesn’t seem to be a good risk.
Since you don't know the mind of the suspect, you also can't know if he changed it.
quote:I have expressed no certainty at all. I described a range of possibilities and concluded that the best solution, given all the many possibilities, was to keep the man pinned on the ground and call the bomb squad.
Which means that you DO think that there was very little chance of him being able to detonate the vest. Even if it was real. But you’ve given no reason to think so, and your ability to think of possibilities seems curiously one-sided - failing to consider the possibility of a head shot being the most obvious.
Aiming at the head and hitting the head are two different things. The possibilities of setting off the vest and of a dead man's switch must still be considered.
they prevented him from breaking free and running off into a crowd to detonate his bomb
Yes, I agree, executing the suspect did eliminate this possibility.
They should have ordered the suspect to remain on the ground as the passersby were removed from on top of him. When the last passerby was pulled away then any attempt by the suspect to rise would justify shooting him. In the leg. I of course don't buy the argument that every police use of their weapon must be a kill shot.
When the last passerby was pulled away then any attempt by the suspect to rise would justify shooting him.
how does shooting him in the leg prevent him from detonating the bomb?
It doesn't. Shooting him in the leg is to prevent him from running off to find a crowd in which to detonate his bomb.
The policemen are already within range of the bomb and would remain within range after shooting him in the leg, so this doesn't increase the danger to the policemen, and it doesn't expose them to the possibility of a dead man's switch.
The goal is to follow a course of action that leads through the least worst situations by accounting for their lethalities and probabilities.
quote:Of course it's possible. I've been pointing out that there were many possibilities all along.
But funnily enough you seemed to miss that one, even though it was a part of the argument.
I think this may be reading something into the argument that wasn't there.
If we consider the same type of switch for both a detonator and a dead man's switch, say a thumb on a button of a cylindrical switch held in the hand, then they're both very easy to operate. One sets off the bomb when the thumb muscles flex, the other when they relax.
But what you said about the suspect no longer being able to trigger a manual detonator is certainly among the possibilities. For example, maybe he had let go of it and ended up lying atop it.
quote:This isn't consistent with the video, which shows police in position to execute the man as soon as the last person, a civilian, was pulled off him. Can you point me to your information?
The video. Obviously they couldn’t see the vest while people were piled on top of him.
Where in the video? The video appears to show police in position to execute the suspect before people were pulled off. Here it is again, please provide the time in the video I should be looking at:
The goal is to follow a course of action that leads through the least worst situations by accounting for their lethalities and probabilities.
or you could just shoot the guy in the head and be done with the possibility of him command detonating the bomb.
Ah, the Gordian Knot solution. But what if instead of tying a cart to a post the rope instead suspended a giant bolder overhead of the knot? In other words, you're forgetting the dead man's switch possibility. You're also endorsing an execution.
This was't a kid with a toy gun or a driver reaching for his ID, this was a suspect in multiple attacks with a deadly weapon,...
This appears to argue that committing an attack makes you fair game for execution instead of just arrest. I'm afraid I could never agree to that.
...wearing what appeared to be a suicide vest the police acted appropriately.
The police were already positioned for an execution before the fake suicide vest was revealed. Was that their plan, to execute the man once the last passersby had been pulled off? Or was aiming their guns just a precaution and they only fired after seeing the vest. We don't know because that's not public information at present. Maybe there will be an investigation where more information will come out.
As I argued earlier, most people are fine with the killing of the suspect because after it was all over it was found that two of the people he attacked had died and that he had served time in prison for terrorist activities. But that's post facto information that wasn't known to police when they executed the suspect. For all they knew everyone's wounds were superficial and the suspect was a schizophrenic who was having problems with adjustments to his medication.
My argument is that given what they knew at the time, execution was unjustified.
Yesterday in Florida gunfire erupted all over when two men attempted to rob a jewelry store in Coral Gables. First the shopkeeper exchanged gunfire with the robbers. A female employee was shot in the head, her condition is unknown at this time.
The robbers fled and a bullet pierced a window at City Hall across the street where fortunately no one was hurt.
Then the robbers rode their getaway truck north for about 20 minutes when they commandeered a UPS truck and its driver. They were pursued by police who caught up to them in afternoon rush hour traffic in Miramar and began a shootout that left four people dead: the two robbers, the UPS driver, and a motorist caught in traffic.
This whole affair is just one huge cluster fuck. The jewelry store clerk should have allowed the thieves to steal the jewelry and flee. Police had already been alerted via silent alarm. The police should not have engaged in a shootout on a major highway during rush hour, or ever. Just let the robbers get away. There is such a thing as detectives.
There are too many people in Florida with guns who are ready and willing to use them in inappropriate situations, and some of them are police.
I'm endorsing the police acting in defense of themselves and others.
You're endorsing the reason this thread exists: police get away with murder by arguing they felt threatened, and they are trained to aim their shots where they will be as deadly as possible.
This appears to argue that committing an attack makes you fair game for execution instead of just arrest.
nope, you're leaving out the part where wearing a suicide vest makes you an imminent threat
I am not ignoring any possibilities. This is a possibility that I fully endorse taking into account. Striking the vest inadvertently or a dead man's switch are also possibilities that must be taken into account.
Or was aiming their guns just a precaution and they only fired after seeing the vest.
Have you never seen any footage of police aiming their guns at people?
I don't see the relevance of the question, but yes I have, usually captured by bystander cellphone video just before the police murder someone.
You aim the gun so that if you have to use it you're ready and you don't waste time acquiring your target. This wasn't preparing to execute the guy, it was preparing to respond to his actions.
What action did the man take that police responded to by shooting him dead?
For all they knew everyone's wounds were superficial and the suspect was a schizophrenic who was having problems with adjustments to his medication
What they knew was that he was wearing what appeared to be a suicide vest, he was an imminent threat to their lives and others.
So you believe that the police were aiming their rifles at the suspect as a precaution, then when the last person was pulled off they saw the suicide vest and fired fatally. The kill shot came so quickly after the last passerby was pulled off the suspect that I very much doubt this.
There will likely be an investigation that will draw upon many cell phone videos, and only then will we know whether police really saw any suicide vest before firing or if that was just post facto rationalization. That the police didn't call the bomb squad to assess the danger before approaching the dead body themselves argues against the fake suicide vest being any factor.
It's all optics from here. The consequences for the police from what emerges from the investigation will be minor to non-existent. The whole affair will be viewed as a big success for the police because the suspect murdered two people and had served time in prison for terrorist activity, information the police were unaware of when they shot him.
But if everyone's wounds had been minor and if the suspect had turned out to be a mental patient then the optics would invert and the police would be much more exposed to the possibility of censure and worse.
An objective approach demands that we judge police actions based upon what they knew at the time. That our judgment of whether the police are guilty of any malfeasance is colored by post facto information says clearly that we're not being objective.
quote:Right, everything always goes according to plan
Because just trusting that everything will go right as long as we do what Percy wants - no matter what the evidence suggests - is always right.
I think I am only guilty of arguing for my position, as are you.
Really, why can’t you just admit that I was right?
Uh, because you're not?
There was little chance of the suicide vest being detonated by the shot?
And you know this how?
quote:Then when you pointed out that the shot was most likely to the head and that "in an execution style shooting the target would be the head," what did you mean if not that it was an execution?
I think it is rather likely that I meant what I said - which clearly refers only to the way the killing was carried out, not the reasons why it was done. As I already explained in the previous post.
I'll interpret this confused explanation as an indication that you'd like to drop this point.
quote:In my view executions are never justified.
Defense of self and others from an immediate threat is not an execution. That would be the justification.
That's always the police defense: they felt threatened, and the threat justified use of deadly force. Courts and the public are very gradually diminishing their acceptance of this defense.
quote:I explained this upthread. You said there was little likelihood of a dead man's switch, and since it would look pretty much the same as a detonator switch, there was also little likelihood of a that, either.
That is a newly-invented misrepresentation.
It is neither newly-invented nor a misrepresentation. I described this before, though not in a post to you. Read the thread.
My argument was not based on appearances at all, but in the fact that a dead man switch should have been easier to operate than a detonator switch that was not in his hand. As I already explained.
If you had "already explained" this then the words "detonator" and "hand" would have appeared in one of your earlier posts, but they don't.
quote:What is the source of your certainty?
If he had something in his hand wired to the vest it would have been sort of obvious.
How small can they make switches these days?
quote:Press switch to activate, release to explode.
That’s not significantly different from a manual detonator, and doesn’t help you. Which was the reason for raising the point.
You raised the fact that "he would have had to arm it first" as an objection to the dead man's switch possibility, so I pointed out that one only has to press the switch to activate the bomb.
quote:I addressed this already upthread.
And I answered it upthread.
No you didn't.
The board software makes it easy to advance forward and backward in a subthread, and it does have a search facility. Prior posts are not a black box.
quote:What is the source of your certainty?
The fact that he was on the ground surrounded by armed police.
We were talking about your certainty of the mind of the suspect. The question wasn't about the reality of the unlikelihood of him escaping. It was about your certainty about what the suspect believed was possible, because what he believed possible would govern his decision making about what actions to take.
quote:Again, there are many possibilities, and we can't know what the suspect was thinking. The nature of the attack, i.e. by knife, would suggest, among other possibilities, a fake vest.
Upthread you suggest that the risk of the vest detonating is so severe that shooting him had to be avoided at all costs. Now you suggest that that risk must be taken in case the attacker changed his mind or was wearing a fake. This hardly seems consistent.
When there are many possible ways something could play out, i.e., many possibilities, of course they're not all consistent with one another. We mustn't become stuck upon one scenario based upon what actually played out but must keep in mind the variety of ways things could have played out.
quote:Well, sure, but I also could find nothing about where the suspect was shot. Upthread you said video suggests a head shot, but I don't see how you can tell. Perhaps you can point me to what you're looking at.
Mainly where the gun is pointing at the time of the shot.
The YouTube video is a sequence of shorter videos of the event concatenated together. I can't know what you're looking at unless you tell me the point in time in the video that you're looking at. Here's the video again, it would be appreciated if you could tell me the time in the video I should look at:
quote:Where does your certainty about the mind of the suspect come from?
The nature of the attack and the fake suicide vest. A real suicide vest would only underline the point.
How does it undermine the point?
quote:Since you don't know the mind of the suspect, you also can't know if he changed it.
I didn’t claim to know. I argued that it was too great a risk to assume that he had changed his mind.
This repeats the same error. If you don't know the mind of the suspect, you also can't know if he changed it.
quote:Aiming at the head and hitting the head are two different things. The possibilities of setting off the vest and of a dead man's switch must still be considered.
And I did consider them. Both are far less likely than the attacker detonating the vest if he was given the time to do so.
I could agree that they seem less likely, not "far less likely," but even "far less likely" is not the same as "can be ignored" given the catastrophic consequences of being wrong.
I of course don't buy the argument that every police use of their weapon must be a kill shot.
That is not the situation in the UK.
Firearms are only allowed at all in situations where an imminent lethal threat is realistically evident. When a tactical firearms team is called in their policy is to shoot to remove the threat. That usually means shooting into the chest area because that is the biggest target but that, of course, carries a risk of being fatal.
How is that any different from what I just said?
quote:To prevent an immediate threat to life by shooting to stop the subject from carrying out their intended or threatened course of action. In most circumstances this is achieved by aiming to strike the central body mass (i.e. the torso).
Again, pretty much what I just said.
The last 2/3 of your post was a cut-n-paste, but you provided no link or attribution. It appears to have come from Operation Kratos - Wikipedia.
This appears to argue that committing an attack makes you fair game for execution instead of just arrest. I'm afraid I could never agree to that.
Would it make a difference if we changed your wording to:
This appears to argue that committing an attack makes you fair game for being shot dead instead of just arrested.
Because of course it does.
Calling it an 'execution' - and I believe earlier you've called it 'murder' - burdens it with delayed, deliberate, unnecessary and inevitable sanction.
There was no intended allusion to the end result of a legal process. I meant execution in the sense of a mob hit or something like this, it's positioned to the exact right spot:
The police are following policy, making split second decisions based on that policy and training are are subject to the same criminal law against murder that I am. Force of any kind must be reasonable according to the circumstances. Anybody acting outside that law will be prosecuted.
At least in this country, police are almost never prosecuted when they kill someone. That fact is why this thread exists.
The terrorist also knows what to expect if he goes around knifing people in the street and wearing a suicide vest - he WILL be shot dead. I do not support the death penalty but I do support shooting people dead that are attempting to kill others.
The suspect was not attempting to kill anyone prior to the moment he was killed but was being held down by passersby. He was killed immediately after the last passersby was pulled off.
If he had a detonator in his hand and if the police officer standing right over it couldn’t tell how he was holding it you might have a point.
If you knew the suspect's hands were visible while passersby were atop him then you might have a point.
But that was not in the argument and it looks like just another of your unlikely possibilities.
I can tell you think an argument was made where the point about a detonator was necessary but missing, but without more information I can't tell what argument you're referring to.
Since he was attacking with two knives, however, it’s far more likely that he wasn’t holding a detonator.
Sure, if that were the whole story, but 2019 London Bridge stabbing - Wikipedia says the knives were taped to his wrists. Was that done in a way that left his hands free? We don't know at this time.
quote:Where in the video?
The first twenty seconds. It’s clear that there were multiple people piled on top of him and obstructing the view.
You said, "The suicide vest wasn’t noticed until they were pulling people off him." Where in the video do you think you're able to tell that they noticed a suicide vest? It's not in the first 20 seconds, and you say yourself that the people piled on top obscured the view.
The video also doesn't show any shots being fired, and if you start watching at time 30 seconds you'll see a video taken from a bus that shows the policemen at some distance from the suspect, who, if you watch carefully, is still moving. Some part of him bobs up above the divider fencing just as the camera is panning away.
I think the initial reports are, in a "fog of war" kind of way, probably inaccurate about a number of things, but that people are taking those initial reports as gospel, and are seeing things in the videos that aren't there.
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