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isn't that the crux of the matter here, really....potential is not a crime. you can't act against potential because it's just that.
seems to me that "law enforcement" is necessarily a reactive game and that military action is more proactive and that somewhere along the line the distinction has gotten blurred and so now we're seeing police trying to act as if they were in a military.
but war is not about guilt and cannot be about guilt---it's about strategic conflict with an adversary. so potentials are not for criminal action---they are about tactical advantage or disadvantage. and it doesn't really matter if the people you kill are or are not actively engaged in imposing a disadvantage. (back in the day of vertically oriented militaries fighting each other things were easier because the uniform was a fair-game target)...
potential can only be acted upon is the frame allows for intent to drop away as a problem-but if intent drops away, so does the idea of crime.
logically, you can see why police departments would want to expand that reactiveness though, why they would push at it---from the statistics-based, governmentality viewpoint anyway, entrapment would be just one of a range of kinds of actions they'd undertake in order to manage the disparity between police and population in terms of numbers. and then there's the old robert gates l.a. p.d. model which just says fuck it, the police are a paramilitary. but there are alot of problems with this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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