The kids initiated the whole thing and used the cops as proxy. The actions of the police can’t be ignored. To place all blame on the kids is to pretend that hyper mobilization of a quasi military is okay.
To take this further if someone malicious caused me to do something catastrophic at work should I be absolved of all accountability? Sure, I am not the person who did the malicious thing because I had no intent, but I did still do it. Maybe I shouldn’t be fired but the security policies and procedures should be changed for the entire company to prevent this from happening again.
No i'm responding to someone who things "there is no other way to respond" when clearly given many other countries don't have this problem, there must be?
"Perhaps the most notable aspect of the deadly force findings is that SWAT officers rarely
discharge their firearms at human targets. We estimated that across the hundreds of team years
for which we had data that SWAT officers took suspects under fire in just 342 of the tens of
thousands of operations they undertook"
I don't think that most SWAT responses are actually saving lives with bullets. Also included in that paper is a table showing that most frequently, SWAT is used to serve warrants.
I’m glad that most SWAT incidents end without the team firing any rounds. To me, that’s a success case and a better outcome than if the metric showed “50% of the time, officers discharged their weapons”. It’s not a waste when their body armor goes untested on a call either.
If a warrant serving situation seems dangerous enough to use SWAT, I hope they use them and no rounds are fired. That’s a good warrant service, not a failure, in my book.
"After receiving a phone call concerning an active shooter situation, the force sent round a single officer, just to double-check. The officer was among the 7 killed by the gunman."
Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? The sheep were slaughtered because the town stopped trusting him. I'd rather the police scare a few unlucky people and waste some resources than learn to distrust our cries for help. Of course it's a tragedy that someone lost their life, but how many lives would be lost through not mobilising enough police?
To take this further if someone malicious caused me to do something catastrophic at work should I be absolved of all accountability? Sure, I am not the person who did the malicious thing because I had no intent, but I did still do it. Maybe I shouldn’t be fired but the security policies and procedures should be changed for the entire company to prevent this from happening again.