UK Police - Is 8 minutes an acceptable response time?

Actually, I asked you "what is a more effective way to kill a terrorist? With a gun, or without a gun?" "TANK" was actually not an option.

A tank is the best way to kill an individual terrorist? Its the best way to destroy a terrorist house, yes, but a tank is not the best way to kill a human who is in the open. How are you suggesting the tank makes the kill? i actually thought you were joking with that video you posted, but it turns out you were trying to use to prove that a tank is the best way to kill a terrorist!

 

I think that in a decent country the question is, 'is this person a potential murderer?' rather than your speed at assassinating anyone you please.

 

To be clear, I'm talking about how long it took for the incident to be resolved. I'm sure it wouldn't have taken 5-7 minutes to kill terrorists carrying out an attack in the middle of DC. Would it?

 

Oh I misread. I thought you meant response time.

Truly depends on where the beat cops are when the call is made. There was a shooting at a mall here in DC and there were cops right there and took the suspect down in under a minute

 

Not the literal word "wales" though, its "walha" isn't it?

 

Where did that come from? Yeah of course, but this thread is regarding the London attack where the attackers were more than potential murderers!

 

Who cares? I live in Cymru myself.

 

Well, they're dead, whatever!

 

Well I was trying to draw comparisons to other city's night life on a Saturday, as this was the case in the London attack. Do police in DC have a strong presence at night on the weekends, in the night life hot spots?

 

They definitely do

 

Go play top trumps.

 

A tank is the best way to kill a terrorist? Cite that for us.

I've read crazy **** before but this tops everything

 

Never mind the quality of training,the public don't want routinely armed police,neither do the police or politicians.

 

So it probably wouldn't take 8 minutes to kill three terrorists you wouldn't think?

 

Probably not. Depends on the situation. Are there civilians caught in a cross fire? Hostages? Are the known locations secure enough for clean shots without endangering the public? Realistically, it probably wouldn't take 8 minutes. But you never know

 

Yeah of course all of that stuff makes a difference. However, I was talking about an attack identical to the one that happened in London where there were no hostages and it was in the open on the street with people running away from the attackers.

 

Not in this context. It’s worth noting that the whole “8 minutes” meme came from the tabloid media because it made “good” headlines rather than from the police because it means anything. Resolution of the incident isn’t necessarily straight forwards, involves a number of factors outside the control of the authorities and covering a whole range of elements.

To take an obvious example, while we now know there were only three terrorists the police obviously didn’t know at the time so even after those three had been shot dead, they won’t have considered the incident “resolved”. There would have been a much longer period of confirming the situation, checking for explosives, an initial investigation of the van and the like. And even after any immediate danger is over, the incident would continue as victims were treated and taken to hospital, any evidence collected, roads cleared and the like and then follow-up investigations to check for any wider conspirators or further related threats.

Quite possibly, though that could have changed the behaviour of the other two attackers, maybe leading to them splitting up or taking hostages in one of the buildings. Maybe the terrorists could have even got the jump on the officer and ended up with the gun themselves. Who knows. My whole point is that there are so many factors and so many we know nothing about that nobody can simply declare that any single change (such as all police officers having firearms) would be “highly likely” to have any specific outcome.

What could be safe about firing a gun in a built up area surrounded by panicking civilians? Part of the firearm training for any officer is going to involve assessing the surroundings before deciding if it’s safe to fire. The point is that simply having an officer with a gun in range of a suspect doesn’t automatically mean the situation is going to be resolved.

Don’t put words in my mouth, I’ve said nothing of the sort. If armed officers had been able to identify and deal with all the suspects within the first minute it would obviously have been resolved quicker. Your statement remains that if regular officers were armed, it would be “highly likely” that would have happened. That remains a totally unsupported presumption.

That’s still all your speculation. You apparently not even tried to find comparable examples of incidents in New York (or anywhere else with routinely armed officers) to back you your pre-determined conclusion and I’m not willing to take you word on the specifics of the performance of New York City police.

 

I suspect we are dealing with an OP who wants to play top trumps, so I used my Tank card, if I had had an A10 card I might of played that!

 

The police in the UK (perhaps omitting PSNI) and in Australia are facing a bit of a crisis when it comes to dealing with small (number of individuals) terror attacks like the one at Borough Market. There is no third force like the CRS in France or the Marechausee in the Netherlands. The Brit response is to set up mobile specialist units that can get to a scene quickly. In Australia police are routinely armed with handguns but nothing larger and would have a difficult time dealing with a terrorist attack such as this. There would need to be a callout of a tactical unit. Granted I think most Australian forces (organised here by state and territory and the feds) would have tactical personnel out on the road at all times, but they'd need to stop, kit up and get there which would cost time. Apart from what we can see there is also the question of doctrine. That failed during the Lindt siege in Sydney, the operational police on the ground did fine, the commanders were all over the place with their handling of it. The approach they used was totally wrong. But that's how they were trained to handle it. That has to be reworked now.

So we have the federal government grandstanding and banging on about bringing the military in when there's an incident. Not the best thinking for a few reasons. I hope our state and territory governments are able to hold out against that idea.

This is not a simple issue and there's no point in trying to make it so.

 

The correspondents here all seem to think the great thing is to kill people quickly so nothing comes to court, a bit like Al Capone in Chicago.

 

Now we're talking!

 

In Dallas a while back a lone police officer took out two terrorists wearing body armor and toting ARs with two shots from his service side arm. Is that 'trained' enough?

But yeah, if they were taken out by a tank it would have been far more entertaining, no question about it, so I'll go with 'tank', too.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_tank#/media/File:Marineflametank1968.jpg



Also useful for use at 'Black Lives Matter' marches and Al Sharpton tax audits.

 

When seconds count, the police are just minutes away. That's why I advocate gun rights.

 

What a great quote.

 

What incident was that? I tried to research it but all I got was the 2016 police shootings in Dallas.