UK Police - Is 8 minutes an acceptable response time?

I'm not talking about unholstering a weapon, I'm talking about creating more distance when someone closes it by simply running in the opposite direction.

Did you see what I saw? I saw the police car creating distance and drawing him away. The guy didn't successfully kill the cops on the car, so what do you mean?

So there were no police presence at all then? You're making it sound as if they're present right up until there is a murder at which point they run away. WTF?

 

With or without arms the police are the minions of governments rather than to 'serve and protect' those who pay their salaries, viz. the rest of us. I know the 'serve and protect' thing is their right-on corporate message but it's totally meaningless propaganda designed to fool the masses, the better to control them.

 

Didn't you notice that my scenario didn't just include someone saying "Allahu Akbar", but also included the minor point of him quote, "killing everyone he see's?"

 

So the police never do any good for the people?

 

Some do, but the vast majority fail the people; then when they get caught out they make all kinds of ridiculous rebuttals such as 'We've fallen short of our usual standards.' (What ****ing 'standards'?), or 'Improvements were already in place to ensure this kind of thing (their failure?) doesn't happen again.' Note the 'already in place' - no they weren't already in place, that's the bureaucrats' deceptive way of suggesting they're on the ball when they're as useless as ever. In other words they're liars! I don't know where you live but it sure isn't here in this country otherwise you'd know how bloody useless they are.

 

You don't think that response time takes into account the "time between" things? Of course it does, that's all related to response. You think its just about the travel time of units?

I'm actually wondering how it took so long for the unit to be activated. Especially considering the current terrorism climate in London specifically and the UK in general, in fact, wasn't this the reason why the unit was in this particular place, ready for action? Leaving aside the possible inadequate calls from the public, surely some officers knew what was going on and were able to determine the seriousness of the situation and call in some sort of code over the radio. Should they have taken as long as they did? What a shame, they were just around the corner and could've arrived so much sooner if only they knew. It would seem to me that the way it is at the moment, they should be responding to party poppers going off. And they wouldn't be blamed if they did.

It wouldn't. An introduction of firearms would not be an overnight transition, but with it would have to come proper, extensive and thorough training, to the point where they are vastly superior to their US counterparts so that they don't go around shooting people who don't pose an immediate threat. Training along Australian lines would certainly suffice.

Come on. Which is the more effective way to kill a terrorist? With a gun or without a gun? The answer to this is my fact and it it the only fact that I need.

 

Australia is my country. Actually, I thought that England had by and large really good policing. They're largely unarmed, so I assume you're not talking about a culture of unnecessary shootings. Is there some other stand out issue where they are failing the people?

 

I wouldn't trust our police with firearms, not because they couldn't be trained to shoot straight but because they're too stupid to know when to stop shooting. I'm thinking here of the poor kid Jean Charles de Menezes, who was sitting on a train quietly reading his newspaper and got seven bullets shot into his young head for no other reason than some fool was hyped up on adrenline. RIP Jean Charles.

 

So many that I wouldn't know where to start. You can Google 'special needs teacher Linda Walker' for one, and the mother and daughter Pilkington who committed suicide because the local police ignored their pleas to be protected from being tormented in their home. I'll give you the link for that one . . .

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/sep/28/fiona-pilkington-suicide-mother-police

These kinds of abject failure are commonplace events. Hardly a day goes by when there isn't a public police apology for something or other.

 

There's nothing wrong with putting 7 bullets into the head of a terrorist who you believe is going to kill many people at any second, in fact it is the correct response, kill the subject as quickly and as effectively as possible. The problem here is that he wasn't a terrorist. It had nothing to do with firearms practice, just wrong intelligence.

 

They may have it as their motto but in real life if you are an unarmed woman in your nightclothes who calls 911 you end up dead by cop.

 

Unfortunately there are people in the UK who hate our country, they rant and rave at everything, never give facts and are a disgrace to the UK.

 

Do you really believe that a terrorist bent on an atrocity would be sitting on a train quietly reading a newspaper, and with nothing on his person nor around him to indicate that he is a terrorist do you? The poor kid probably wonder WTF was going on when 5 police surrounded him, but as we know, he never got the chance to find out.

 

Why are you going all out to defend police incompetence (no mention of Linda Walker of the Pilkingtons I see?) - are you an Aussie policeman by any chance?

 

The specific concept of “response time” is the time between attendance being requested and arrival. Obviously the arrival on scene (of police in general or an armed team specifically) isn’t the be-all and end-all, which is why only talking about response time is flawed. The “8 minutes” quoted in relation to this incident is relevant but it isn’t anyone’s actual response time.

You don’t even know how long it took them to be activated. All the timelines I’ve seen don’t going in to enough detail for that. The fact an ambulance was requested fist suggests that the initial emergency calls from the public might not have identified it as a terrorist attack (not unreasonably – they just saw a van hitting some pedestrians on the bridge). It isn’t about the time of the first emergency call but the first call that actually identified the incident as possible terrorism that’s relevant here and we don’t know when that was. Then it’s a question of the chain of communications and decision making in place to activate the specialist teams.

I suspect all of that is reviewed internally following any incident (including all the false alarms they’ll inevitably respond to) but there’s probably an element of secrecy there since we don’t want potential terrorists knowing technical details relating to when and how the police would respond to potential attacks.

The point is that you’ve still not identified police officers who could have definitively identified all of the suspects and, had they been armed, been able to safety stop them significantly quicker than actually happened with the speciality team. Again, I’m not saying this definitely wasn’t possible, only that you’ve not (and I’d argue can’t with the level of information in the public domain) shown how it is “highly likely”. You’d need to do that before you can use this as an example to support the idea of routinely arming British police officers.

 

That's probably accurate, but if so, then the police would have a different term for what I'm referring to, which is the time between authorities becoming aware of an incident and the incident being resolved. To be honest maybe 'response time' isn't the best term to use.

I'm tempted to use the example of the black transport officer who got his face cut while fighting off one of the attackers, but whether transport police should be armed too would certainly be a step up in the argument of armed police. If he was armed, he wouldn've blown the c*nt away. I don't know why you fail to see how it wouldn't "safely stop them significantly quicker than actually happened with the speciality team."What could be unsafe about killing a terrorist? By your argument, officers who were armed and between them had all of the attackers identified and within shooting range and had a clear shot, all inside the first minute, it would not have ended the incident quicker than 7 minutes later by a special unit. My whole question basically stems from thinking about the same incident taking place in the middle of New York City - I just can't see it lasting for 8 minutes and I don't think many rational people could.

 

Are you referring to my countrywoman, the Australian? Yeah, tragic case, unbelievable. That's why I'm specifically suggesting that if the UK police became armed, that they have proper and superior training to their American counterparts.

 

I think its okay to rant and rave about the police failing people and I wouldn't have thought that it means that someone hates their country, quite the opposite in fact. I'm sure you think that too, but it sounds like you're talking strictly about the people who never give facts that are the disgrace and hate the UK.

 

Cymru, part (for the moment) of the UK.

 

If you think about how a suicide terrorist might go about carrying out an attack, it wouldn't be by wildly screaming "Allahu akbar" non stop until finally detonating would it? Wouldn't they want to blend in to look like a passenger by sitting quietly and maybe reading a newspaper? And regarding there being nothing on his person, for all the police knew, he had a bomb in a bag on the ground.
At the very least, it is a total failure of intelligence which falsely identified him as a target, at the very most it was the officers on the ground in how they went about engaging the suspect, but I was just saying that it had nothing to do with weapons training.

I'm definitely not defending police incompetence. I had a look at those stories and they look like nothing other than utter police malpractice and incompetence and they are an unforgivable disgrace. However, would it be fair to say that they are rather extreme cases? I also know about the disgraceful 'Rottherham muslim rape gang' police incompetence case, and this one probably sits at number one in the list.

 

I had to Google that! You couldn't have just said Wales?

 

That's a foreign word for 'Country of Foreigners'. Stick that up your posterior. We were here from the Ice Age on.

 

In UK? Yea, 8 minutes is acceptable. Normal for police in DC is 5-7 minutes. Every cop is armed.

 

The point I was making is someone can close 20 feet and stab you before your brain can process the attack, and you're not going to see the attack coming in most cases.

Yeah, I saw a car that gave up trying to shake the attacker and then the police ran away. In a car.

 

Try to cut down their response time, then, and save on population!