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It's been an exciting day in the Bay Area. We were walking up Post at around 5 p.m. and encountered chaos at Larkin Street, in which the whole block was taped off with police tape. We heard the words "bomb squad" before making a detour.
Upon returning up Hyde, we ran into more police tape and the heavily armed/armored dudes pictured above. We also saw a guy being wheeled into an ambulance. After our second detour in which we came back up Leavenworth, we heard from others that it was a hostage situation and a guy had barricaded himself into one of the buildings, which KGO has confirmed. [Update] The man was taken to a mental hospital for an evaluation.
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made my walk home from work an interesting one...!
It was one guy. alone in his room in a flop house. with no weapons. Was the SWAT team really necessary? i suppose it's better safe than sorry and who knows what this guy's mental history is, but still this probably cost all us taxpayers quite a bit.
Depends. Was the goal to keep civilians safe and contain the situation, or to show other potential suicides that they'd better be quiet about it?
Life safety is job 1, and if someone is barricaded in a building or room, standard patrolmen aren't trained in close quarters combat like SWAT guys are. So, between a possible perp shooting some patrolmen, then being killed, in my opinion and likely the PD, the subject dying is much more acceptable. And activating SWAT doesn't make a huge dent in funding PD...they exist, they are already on stand by, and they get to do what they are paid for.
You know, it used to be that the cop on the beat would come and try to talk the crazy guy down. ONE COP. He'd maybe kindly ask the neighbor to go down to the police box (we have those in SF!) and call for a few more of the lads to show up.
Back then, LOTS of people had guns. Revolvers and shotguns and rifles and such, and even fully auto weapons. Sometimes they had to bring in the heavies to deal with someone who had a bit too many guns to just put them in the paddy wagon.
...but for some reason having a full-on military force on our streets is now considered good policing.
The world isn't any more dangerous than it used to be -- people just freak out more now. =(
How about we station 80% of the SFPD around Mission/TL/Haight/Western Addition and parts of Geary and chase the goddamn trash out of town?
Why do seemingly complicated problems have such simple answers?
When I was growing up back east - we lived across the street from some drug dealing hoods. My dad took a baseball bat and tapped it on their door one night. He told the monkeys inside that if they ever decided to look at our house, let alone talk to any of us kids, he would see that things were settled properly.
They are locked up in prison and when they occasionally get out still do not cross the street near our house.
The new Chief better have some fast answers or I will be paying him many visits. I'll tell him that story ad nauseum.
I'm confident that new chief will be fascinated by your story, anonymous internet poster.
I saw that movie! how did you get Clint Eastwood to play your dad?