Posts by Matthew Poole
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If they were shooting a the offender on teh back of the truck, how the hell does the guy in the van get a bullet in the chest?
By being directly behind the spot where the offender on the back of the truck was meant to have been? That's the logical explanation, and looking at the photos of the scene it's entirely possible. The vehicles are quite sufficiently close together for a missed shot to have hit the driver of the van.
As for the chest, look at the heights. A person sitting in a van is a pretty close height match to trying to hit the body of someone crouched on the back of a fairly low truck.
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And I think I/S is probably right about this - anyone else would be put through the process of going to court - the police would say "let's just let the courts decide" so to do anything different in this situation is hypocritical.
The police have never "let the courts decide" a police shooting. Ever. The only prosecution of a cop who shot someone was the private prosecution of Abbott, by the enraged and vindictive Wallace clan.
Also, and this is a key distinction, nobody else has a job of shooting at people (I'll ignore soldiers). Anybody else is, at the very least, defending why they were shooting at another person.
I'll point out that Greg Carvell was not prosecuted for shooting the man who invaded his gun shop with a machete. He was prosecuted for a breach of the law relating to storage of firearms. So saying that the police always leave it to the courts in the case of a civilian shooting is somewhat inaccurate. There have been precious few cases of civilians shooting other civilians in defence of themselves or another, and the most recent case did not result in a prosecution for attempted murder, some form of aggravated assault, or even careless use of a firearm.
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How much would it change things if the police shooter had received the order to take down the fugitive immediately? Is it plausible that's what happened?
I/S is demanding a prosecution of the officer who fired, but if he was acting on an express order, who's culpable?
"Just following orders" doesn't cut it. The only person who knows what the shooter is seeing is, well, the shooter. If they can't fire safely, but they do anyway, it wasn't the IC who pull the trigger. The IC might get told off, especially if the shooter reported that there was no clear shot, but when it's all said and done only one person is responsible for taking the shot. The IC knows only what they're told by the people at the sharp end, and they rely on the operational judgement of the people who're doing the doing to implement the tactical decisions that're handed down.
It sounds like this was just a cumulation of little odds to produce that one awful outcome. The odds of a miss, the odds of the truck stopping just as shots were fired, the odds of there being an innocent person directly in the line of fire, the odds of the round hitting that person in one of the few parts of the body where near-instant death is a certainty, etc etc.
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I don't regard it as a defence, and I do not think the courts should either.
Ask Antonie "Samurai Sword" Dixon how sympathetic the courts are to a "The upside-down b made me do it, y'ronner" defence. According to Granny he's now appealing for a third trial for the murders. I mean, seriously, how many times must a jury be confronted by the same nutjob?
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Ok - I thought this guy had fired randomly when the police had cornered him and asked him to drop his gun several times (before the motorway ordeal).
Possibly. However, it may not have been the AOS chasing him at that point. The AOS don't just miraculously appear when needed, they're officers with other duties who have to go to their central staging point (I believe Auckland AOS is based entirely out of Auckland Central), kit up, and then respond. That this happened during a working day just meant that a greater number of officers were going to be at work, probably quite a few of them in Central itself, and thus in a good position to respond. Officers with lesser training may have been far less keen to take on someone with a rifle, especially since they quite probably had only a Glock.
Also, was he actually firing at the police prior to the motorway incident? Firearm presented, certainly, but the impression I've taken from the media coverage is that most of the shots were fired during events on the motorway.
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The question really seems to be about a "clear line of fire" type decision. The aerial photos look like the AOS members shot at the truck with the van directly on the other side - questions about movement of the different vehicles etc make it all much more difficult than that static post-event photo though.
This is where it all gets very tricky. Any semi-competent hunter, or indeed anyone who's had any introduction to basic firearms safety, knows that you should always know what's beyond the target before you fire. It's accepted that the Police will breach that most basic of rules - "Never point a loaded firearm at another person" - but that's their job. The other cardinal rules are fully applicable, if not more so because of the frequently crowded areas in which they operate. In this case, it looks like at least one of the officers involved wasn't totally conversant with the "beyond his target" part of the equation. Especially when shooting at someone on a moving vehicle, this shouldn't be an afterthought.
The way it's shaping up, the odds just all came together wrong. The moving vehicle suddenly stopped moving just as the cops were firing, and just clear of the innocent bystander. Lo, we have a shot that completely missed, hit the innocent bystander in the chest, and as is the expected result when the police shoot someone in a vital part of the body, he promptly expired. It sucks, but it's hardly a conspiracy by the cops to whack themselves a PI boy to up their locker room cred.
Personally, I will be disappointed if any action results beyond internal disciplinary action. Contingent, of course, on the officer having not been so stupid as to not even consider what lay beyond the target. In that case, prosecution for careless use of a firearm would be entirely appropriate. Failing that, being dropped from the AOS and possibly subject to a letter of censure would be sufficient. His conscience is going to be a far worse punishment than anything society can offer.
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I read some place that police here use the hollow nose bullets (banned from warfare by Geneva convention, but approved for police use everywhere) that don't tend to ricochet (that's exactly why they use them, so as to avoid "collateral" damage).
The big advantage of a hollow-point round is that it mushrooms on impact. This means its shock value is much higher, and the damage it does is greater. That they don't ricochet so much, and are less likely to cause collateral injury through an over-penetration, is a fringe benefit. See Wikipedia for more details.
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Well, we do have a National government.
On a related (to that line, but totally unrelated to the thread other than the date coincident mentioned below) note, I heard a great "But we have a National government" one yesterday. A close friend's father is about to lose his in-home care, with ACC and WINZ playing pass-the-buck over who should be paying for the care of someone who's on ACC for a medical misadventure. She was telling one of her friends and his parents about it (the parents are stereotypical millionaire, Takapuna-dwelling righties), and his father said "But National are the government now. They'd never allow that to happen." Total disbelief that Saint John could ever allow such a thing to occur on his watch, and honest conviction that it was just bureaucratic fuckup. "Someone must've ticked the wrong box. National will get it sorted out."
Will be interesting to see what happens with that case, because the letter from ACC announcing a 3 Feb funding termination came through on Friday (while my friend was BDO'ing). Not exactly a lot of notice. So there was much spamming of pollies over the weekend, and the media are champing at the bit to get a nice, juicy, highly sympathetic aren't-ACC-evil-bastards story.
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Wow. As recently as 2001 there were large numbers of arrests. 89 that year. Then a huge drop, to 28 in 2002.
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Three arrests in an entire day is pretty amazing.
It's certainly far fewer than past BDOs, especially historically. '"When it first started there were about 120 to 130 arrests but now the serious crime has all but disappeared," Mr Davison said.' That's, what, a 97% decrease? Incredible.