Oh, I know and agree. One Of Those Types is on this thread, basically saying the oh so patient City had no choice but to kill those commie Africans yet this was not like Waco or Ruby Ridge. “Very reasonable to drop a satchel charge.” Uh huh.
I pulled this quote for our FRiend:
“One of the truths that we will never be able to get to is what was the right thing to do, because we don’t know is whether (they) would have done it two weeks later… without any provocation. And we would have been blamed for not acting.
“All that we can do in law enforcement where we deal with human beings who do different things and march to different drummers is make the best judgment we can based on the information we have available, pursue it, and then do everything we can to get to the truth and to determine what can be done to avoid such tragedies for the future.”
MOVE was awful and militant. Anyone running for Mayor in Philly in 1980 KNEW there was a bigly chance MOVE would rear its ugly head again. How about developing a playbook? Maybe open lines of communication….I mean, Northern Ireland ended hostilities. Indeed, a search for “standoff ends peacefully” pulls up scores of instances.
The quote sounds like the type of weasel wording we’d expect from the Goode Admin to defend the attack and murders, right?
Right….except it’s from Janet Reno, about Waco. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/aug99/reno27.htm.
Ruh roh.
And any federal LEO who DIDN’T plan for the worst is incompetent at best, and playing for the other team at worst.
But Waco bad, MOVE good.
As I wrote on an unrelated thread, one of the benefits of non-censorship is I can flag the low information types and ignore their nonsense - you could say, leave it in the desert. Mission accomplished.
You’re right about that Janet Reno quote. It could apply to both cases - the Branch Davidians and MOVE.
On the one hand, law enforcement had to do something. Both standoffs were like hostage situations because there were children inside. IMO, MOVE and the Branch Davidians were primarily to blame. But, in the end, in both cases, the feds/law enforcement made a bad decision that led to a catastrophe.
With MOVE in Philadelphia and the Branch Davidians in Waco, the people and places were different, but the situations were very similar, and the outcome was the same.
Then, there’s Ruby Ridge. Everyone has biases, and I’m no different. I try to keep my own biases in check. One example is Ruby Ridge. I will never manage to dredge up any sympathy for the Weaver parents with their beliefs, but I felt very sorry for the boy who was killed by the agents. So, when I look at what happened there, I think about the boy. That case is different from the other two because it was about one family. Weaver was caught in an undercover operation, and (IIRC) the agents snuck up to their property which caught the boy by surprise.
But, there are many cases with sting operations and no-knock raids where the police kill someone. The main difference was the people and place. Ruby Ridge was in the Idaho wilderness, and it caught the attention of the Right. Other cases catch attention from the Left. Yet, all those kinds of cases are pretty similar.