Posts by Matthew Poole
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But I don't think the principle of Nuremberg applies, since it was restricted to "war crimes", as I recall.
You may be right, but that doesn't mean it can't be used as a shorthand for "just following orders won't protect you from the consequences of what you've done." Certainly it's a very frequent comment in all kinds of discussions that you can't say "I was just doing what I was told" when you get called on doing something that's legally or morally dubious.
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What happened to road spikes?
They're not long enough to deploy across the motorway (at that point it's four lanes wide, plus shoulder), as I understand it. Plus, in a "hot pursuit" situation, it then requires the following cops to break off until the spikes can be pulled.
Oh, and it's not even a year ago that an officer was killed while deploying spikes. I can't imagine an incident controller being too keen on risking that the offender might decide to see what a cop looks like as a bonnet ornament.
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Simon, kill implies an intent to do so. A cop shouldn't be shooting with the intent to kill, they should be shooting with the intent to stop a threat. If the threat survives, all the better. You can't prosecute a corpse. No euphemism, just a recognition that the intent shouldn't be death. Death is, if anything, unfortunate. Not only does it result in prolonged periods of media scrutiny, and shitloads of paperwork, it denies society its chance to put the offender on trial and impose its own punishments.
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Whatever the charge is, the important part to me is that justice is seen to be done, by being done in open court - not in a backroom.
We really do need to get this country beyond the belief that the Police police themselves. They don't, any longer. The Independent Police Conduct Authority is, in name and in law, independent of the Police. It's in s4AB of the Independent Police Conduct Authority Act 1988 (yeah, 1988, what the hell happened to the intervening 20 years?!), even.
If the IPCA decides that, as best as possible, the shooter fulfilled their legal and professional duties, then that should be acceptable to the public at large. It won't be, of course, but then again anything less than a full lynching party won't satisfy some members of the public when it comes to the fuzz fucking up. And, no, that's not aimed at anyone here.
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Ben, I didn't read it as a comparison, though I do appear to be alone in that. I immediately thought (and even said), as he did, that there's long-standing legal precedent that "just following orders" doesn't protect the grunts who actually carry out the orders.
It should be possible, in reasonable discourse, to make mention of the outcome of the Nuremburg Trials without it immediately being taken as comparing whatever is under discussion with the actions of the Nazis. Or am I alone in that belief?
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McDonald was finally arrested, not shot dead. How were police able to do that? If lethal force was not used to "take him down" (euphemisms be damned - we mean kill him), then to what extent was it the best - or only - option?
There is no lesser option available when a person has a firearm, at least as far as I'm concerned. Lethal force meets lethal force, and nothing less should be even considered. If it can be resolved without firing a shot, as happens most of the time, then excellent. If not, a Taser (being the next-best-thing to a gun in the police arsenal) isn't much use against someone who can kill you while they're still outside your range.
The Police firearms regulations, specifically Standing Order F61 (of which I have a copy, but I'm not going to post it in full) state that use of lethal force is not acceptable once an offender ceases to pose a threat. In this case, the offender suffered shrapnel wounds of a nature severe enough to warrant surgery. That, quite likely, was what it took to get him to drop the rifle, or at least have him distracted long enough for a cop to tackle him. No longer a threat, lethal force no longer required.
As far as your "kill him" bit goes, the police don't shoot to kill. They don't shoot to wound, either, but they don't shoot with the express intent of killing the subject. Death is an unfortunate, but likely, consequence of a hollow-point round being fired into the torso, but it's not inevitable. If the policy was actually shoot-to-kill, it would be head shots all round and none of this nancying about with shooting for the largest part of the body.
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I have been wondering what kind of media clamour we'd be hearing now if the AOS officer hadn't taken that shot and Richard Neville had been shot in the back of the head.
The reaction of people like Jim Hopkins to the police caution in the Navtej Singh case (he deemed them "cowards") suggests it wouldn't be pretty.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't. I put it to a friend the other day, that unless the cops get it 100% right 100% of the time they're considered to be incompetent/cowardly/<insert pejorative adjective>. The standard demanded of the police is far higher than the standard demanded of any other public service, it seems. Reading the report about the Tamihere explosion, for example, potentially raises questions about the actions of the fire fighters (to be perfectly clear, I am not suggesting anything!). But they were going on what was known to them at the time, and it just turned out to be all kinds of bloody horrible. The media hasn't actually jumped on them for that, but in the same situation I suspect that the police would be getting reamed six ways from Sunday.
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And it is a Godwin
No, it's not. Godwin's law says that the longer an internet argument runs for, the closer to 1 grow the chances of one party comparing the other party to Hitler or the Nazis. The corollary is that the party doing the comparison has lost the argument, and is what leads to people being declared to have "done a Godwin" or similar.
Have a read. So Russell was wrong to call it a Godwin, and you were wrong to affirm it as a Godwin. It was a perfectly valid reference, not a comparison, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the actions of the Nazis. -
it's the courts job to decide if it was a mistake, or if it was manslaighter.
It's almost certain that it won't be manslaughter. They don't usually charge hunters who kill another person with manslaughter, and that's a far less defensible act than this. It'll be careless use of a firearm, unless there's some incredible act of egregious stupidity on the part of the officer involved, of which we're yet to hear. And just looking at the photos and doing the math it's hard to see how that could possibly be presented in court in such a manner that a second-year law student couldn't impart enough reasonable doubt that conviction would be impossible.
Careless use is the ordinary charge for people who kill someone else with a firearm by being, well, careless.The other consideration, and one of which the prosecutors will be very aware, is that if they put this officer up for manslaughter they will do nothing good whatsoever for the general safety of the NZ public. It was bad enough with the private prosecution of Abbott, but to be prosecuted by the Crown would really make every officer faced with a lethal force situation think, potentially for far too long, very hard about the possibility that they'll end up in jail. Our cops don't need that kind of fear hanging over them, because they're just not prone to being trigger-happy. Doubts and excessive consideration for their own well-being could cost an innocent person their life.
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If an armed intruder breaks into your P-lab and tries to steal your crack, can you shoot them and claim defense of property?
No. To quote s53 of the Crimes Act 1961:
Every one in peaceable possession of any movable thing under a claim of right, and every one acting under his authority, is protected from criminal responsibility for defending his possession by the use of reasonable force, even against a person entitled by law to possession, if he does not strike or do bodily harm to the other person.Shooting somebody doesn't qualify as "not... do[ing] bodily harm".