Posted on 01/12/2010 11:20:09 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
This is going to further blur the lines between civvie police and bona fide military branches like the National Guard, Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force (order of mention not intended to mean anything). I’d think that as soon as a situation is seen to be an international terror attack it should be treated as war and the local police should become subsidiary at best.
Sorry, I've been up debugging too long.
Cheers!
Yeah, our SWATS, SRT’s, ERT’s and whatever else they are called are generaly really good. Unfortunately, their effectiveness is retarded by the politically correct bureaucracies they work for.
Ok I would support that but only if and when all Federal funding is cut off from State, County, and local PD. That’s is the only way to ensure that no nasty federal strings get attached to the dollars.
Not according to the current adminsitration.
By the criteria of no Federal dollars going into local PD I just killed the whole idea... Damn it, another poison pill... Too bad the Police departments don’t deserve the trust of the communities they are hired to protect.
I’m sorry, but as a POST Certified LEO in three states, Current Reserve Deputy and former Atlanta PD Police Officer of 7 years all I can say is this.
If I’m a hostage in an incident of the aforementioned description I do not want any PD/SO or State Tactical team coming to “rescue” me.
At a minimum I want the FBI HRT, not the regional guys but the mainline HRT Unit, or one of our Army SF or Navy SEAL CT Units, SAS or the Israeli Commandos.
Other than that, I’ll fend for myself.
SWAT is fine for serving no knocks on the local crack house or taking down a local crazy who has barricaded himself into his house with shotgun and a bottle of bad moonshine.
A much better solution would be to intern muslims in America like we did the Germans, Italians and Japanese during WWII. Then as Ann Coulter flippantly stated we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. Problem solved, there you go.
and while the kids inside are being raped and killed, local law enforcement sits on its hands and waits for a military presence to arrive?
You know that isnt going to happen, Ive trained with our local swat teams here and they are more than capable.
Better solution would be for citizens to not only be permitted but encouraged to go about armed, even heavily armed.
You’ll note that whenever something like this happens in Israel, the citizens usually end up resolving the situation themselves through numbers and superior firepower.
Well there also used to be this quaint idea of a “militia” embracing all good armed people. Specialty police is a relatively modern notion. We must be careful of false dichotomies.
Jihadi defense ping
I agree with you, but we both know that our politicians dont have the spine for that.
Police aren't Special Forces I guess is what it boils down to and treating them like they are does them a disservice by putting unreasonable expectations on them. If the event is a platoon sized group holed up in a building with as much support as the author suggests, you're going to have the govoner make an "Aid to the Civil Power" request to the federal government to get Delta or some other SF team to do the actual assault backed up by ERT and local police. Having a local ERT do the assault is asking for a disaster (not saying they aren't competent or professional, just that they are the wrong tool for that particular job).
Sorry but when they are all you got they should at least think about it and train for it.
SWAT trains for a completely different animal but it’s not “if” this happens but when. The training for patrol officers and detectives is extremely minimal and most often involves static hole punching in paper targets. We learned at Columbine that you can’t wait when you have active shooters. What we have not learned, nor have we trained for, are the simple infantry tactics that win the day in a firefight. Suppressive fire is not in the American law enforcement vocabulary nor do we typically carry the right weapons or enough ammo.
I think it’s going to be a damned mess when it happens and I am surprised it has not happened yet. There are no easy answers but training gives you the best possible edge and they need to train patrol just as much as SWAT. SWAT is not a fast response team in most cities and Beslan/Columbine/Ft.Hood showed us that time = casualties with a determined foe who accepts his death.
The first responders, patrol, will have to act. Waiting 15 minutes to an hour for SWAT is not an acceptable option with active shooters. Waiting many hours or a day for HRT or SpecOps is a losing strategy. The longer terrorists occupy the target the more hardened the target will be and the higher the casualties will be.
I pray it never happens and it will be ugly when it does.
If the people have the will, the politicians will have the way. Or else!
Yeah, because then they wouldn’t have mass fear from the helpless to use as a tool to accomplish their goals.
Still, it’s the only solution that I know of that even remotely works to quell this sort of action. When you are outnumbered four hundred to one in (let’s say) a terroristic infantry assault on a mall, you lose and don’t accomplish much slaughter.
Have you read John Giduck’s book “Terror in Beslan”? The “good armed people” made the situation worse by randomly firing rounds at the school, and at times, even thwarting efforts by Russian police and Special Forces to enter the school undetected. How would local townspeople coordinate their movements? Who is the team leader? What is the extraction plan for the hostages? How do you know when the building is clear, and how do you know the terrorists havent blended into the crowd? The quaint idea you long for is dead, do you know everyone in your town? I certainly dont and my family has been here since the 1700’s. There needs to be order and a centralized command structure, you cant have a bunch of untrained folks willnilly entering the building, or you will end up with dead civilians or more hostages.
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