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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
dksuddeth, you've made your views on guns and the police abundantly clear in the past, but I think that you need to take a deep breath and think about what the police had to go on here. They get a call from the guy's sister saying that he's suicidal and he's got guns in the house. They've been there before, and there's apparently some history there. Given these facts, what would you have the police do?
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That they've been there before would imply that they SHOULD have a reasonable expectation of his reactions being the same as they have been before, since I would think that if they had implemented a 'siege' before, he would no longer be armed because his weapons would have been confiscated. Now, the article makes no mention of what his sister told police when she called, but again, they've been out there before without a major incident like this in the past.
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Please explain how they "crossed over the line". There's an armed, suicidal guy barricading (despite his semantic argument, that's what he did) himself in the house. In countless similar circumstances, the suspect ends up taking shots at the police or bystanders. What would you have them do instead?
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Already knowing a history with this guy, they should have had a reasonable expectation of predictable response. Did they know he was armed before? Don't know because the article does not state this BUT if they'd been there before, they should have known this. What would I have them do? The same as they'd done before. It seems to me that one of two things happened. Either the sister SERIOUSLY exxagerated the circumstances when she called the police, or the police got tired of dealing with him. Either way,
the police department, its Strategic Emergency Response Team, hostage negotiations team, and a mobile command center -- and later a replacement team from the Woodbury County Sheriff's Office and a tactical robot from Des Moines seems like an awful lot of firepower for a guy thats depressed and possibly suicidal.