There is no such plan. There are only varying degrees of risk for her.
Had they politely knocked on the door and the perp took the little girl hostage and she gets killed, the cops would be criticized for not doing a dynamic entry.It's real easy to criticize after the fact. The cops at Columbine were criticized for not charging in guns blazing, which in hindsight is exactly what they should have done.
But if they had, they would have been criticized for escalating the situation and causing more deaths by doing so.
We also shouldn't just assume the cops knew there was a little girl present. The people in this neighborhood are probably not all that helpful to the cops. From their perspective, for good reason, based on incidents such as this.
Apples and oranges.
Columbine were arrived at the scene patrol officers.
This was a practiced, day in day out, planned( a bit ) SWAT team.
Big difference in timing, time, training and officer selection.
they could have waited until the perp left the site and set up an ambush. If they didn’t know who was in the house, that was their short coming and is not a valid excuse. That’s like saying let’s charge in without knowing what we are entering into. This was a screw up. No other way around it. To down play it or try and rationalize around it will only allow it to re occur rather than learn something useful for future operations
I have never seen the public make such a criticism.
I suspect in that instance the public might rightly critisize the cops for not waiting until the suspect wasnt surrounded by so many other people though.
Your either/or strawman leaves out all the common sense options.
Sad, really.
Your post ignores too much.
First, if you are harboring a murderer and he takes you hostage, it is only your own fault. Not the police.
Second, if a killing spree is underway (Columbine), police should not wait outside for the killing to end, they should intervene.
The problem most FReepers have is that the police use aggressive, over-the-top force when surrounding and knocking would be sufficient and then those same police will standby outside and do nothing while a gunman (gunmen) kill innocents inside a building.