Rules of Engagment changes? -LAPD

Control Freak Yahoo's giving authority when most were lucky to finish High School. Im convinced authority given to almost anyone corrupts. 90 Shots? what else was destroyed by the idiots in uniform? I bet the spinmasters are working overtime on this one. and im sure they will find the dad killed the baby, not those 90 rounds that were hitting anything and everything. Guess they never heard of a sniper. I have as much faith in the yahoo in uniform as i do in the Yahoo running this country.

Where do you buy paint brushes that wide?

I think there needs to be reliance on solid statistical evidence as to what strategies work best to achieve the overarching goal of providing for the public safety.

And that (hoepfully) dispassionate evidence should be used as a counter to the very strong emotional responses within police departments around "engagement".

For instance, in the case of high speed chases, I believe the evidence suggests that it's just generally a bad idea, that the ratio of "apprehending dangerous people" to "injuring or killing innocent bystanders", in fact, makes clear that entering into a high speed chase is almost always foolhardy and counter productive.

But I've seen interviews with cops where they talk about how hard it is to break off, once a chase has begun. There is a powerful urge not to be "beaten", to control the situation and to prevail.

I would think that changing that behavior (and I would guess it would apply to things like shoot-outs, where "letting the bad guy get away" violates every cop instinct there is) requires vigorously enforced policy backed up by real world data that the instinctual thing isn't necessarily the effective thing.

In other words, prove to the cops that sometimes "letting the bad guy get away" is the better option, from a public safety stance, make it clear that "public safety" trumps "winning", and then make damn sure that everybody is on board by being willing to put some steel into your enforcement policies.

I have a book in my shelf about "Police & Pursuit Driving" and its recommendations are pretty clear. It's always about risk/payoff, and that should be assessed not only at the start of the potential pursuit but continuously during it.

It might be that pursuing is a good idea in only 10% of the cases.. (pulled that number out of my hat) but when that 10% is before you, there's no excuse for not knowing how to pursue. A total ban on pursuits is counterproductive. For one, it would increase the amount of people who *attempt* to get away with high-speed driving.

We need more information about this before we make judgements.

Coroner says it was an LAPD rifle bullet that killed her. The question is how the shooting started, and if there was any way for it to have been avoided. The article makes it sound like once the shooting began, it was an all-out gunfight. I'm amazed he got off 40 shots before being killed.

COPs in cities like LA are out of control menaces that are really no better than the people they deal with on daily basis.

Supposedly this is only the second time that a hostage has died in the 38 year history of the SWAT team, and the first time it was the perpetrator that killed a hostage. So it looks like the SWAT team's rules of engagement are working very well, and will probably not undergo any major changes. That being said, this particular incident needs to be investigated very throughly to see what went wrong. Since it was a rifle bullet that killed the girl it was probably fired by a SWAT sniper... I wonder what caused the him/her to miss? (SWAT members are highly trained and capable of making extremely accurate shots under adverse conditions.)

Damn - this is so sad, I have a niece that age...

i understand the emotion involved in this but if the LA SWAT statistics quoted above are accurate, then that is a generally very successful track record.

if a sniper of SWAT team member f*ked up, then it should be investigated and dealt with accordingly.

people seem to have put SWAT and highway patrol and small-town cops all into one big basket that they're now hitting with a chunky baseball bat.

me personally, i'll put all the blame on this idiot father.. hell, i don't even trust myself to have and take care of kids.

Statistics are nice, but it's one of those jobs where they don't matter. You can't screw up, even once!


Yeah, that's what NASA said about their techs who applied foam to Columbia... everybody is trained and accurate, but dang... we got body bags!

Unless her father was a trained combat pro, the SWAT should have taken him without a shot fired!