[freedox]

How would you explain the police allowing people to continue to roam about when there were reports of an armed gunman?

[Devil_Anse]

I'm sure the police would have tried to rein them in, but I don't know how many police were there at any given moment. It's said they were too late to keep the people off the crime scene; if they couldn't even do that, maybe they didn't have enough manpower to curtail the activities of "40-50 people."

[Neenah]

How would you explain the police allowing people to continue to roam about when there were reports of an armed gunman?

This makes no sense ! The only answer has to be that the police knew there was no gunman, so the neighbors were not at risk of being shot, and Elizabeth was not at risk.

If it was known by the police that there was a gun involved and a threat of killing if MK told...there is NO WAY the PD would allow people to free roam.

But then...I guess they were roaming about when the PD got there. Strange.

[GovernmentShrinker]

I suspect that trying to stop people from searching for their neighbor's missing child may be a lot more difficult in Utah than in a lot of other places. And how much danger was there, really, with 40-50 people searching in the immediate area? A single armed gunman would be pretty unlikely to try to take someone on in that situation, and if he did actually fire and hit someone, the victim would get immediate help AND the gunman would almost certainly be caught, leading to finding Elizabeth. The alternative is to seriously delay a thorough search of the area. Not such a tough call in my book. Remember what happened to little Charlotte Hansen in the course of just a few minutes -- and doctors said that just a few more minutes delay in getting her to the hospital, and they probably wouldn't have been able to save her.

Has anyone heard any updates on Charlotte?

[Jolly Green]

How would you explain the police allowing people to continue to roam about when there were reports of an armed gunman?

You are assuming that 40 police officers converged on the sceen 12 minutes after the call and were in a position to cordon off the entire area and take full control of the neighborhood. Reality is quite different. A single officer arrived first. A second officer arrived shortly thereafter. They may very well have been the only officers on the scene for an hour or more. Having driven around the neighborhood, I can assure you that it would not have been possible for a small number of officers to control all the people in the neighborhood all the while looking for ES.