Saturday, July 10, 2010

The Moat chase is over

He killed himself when, I guess, he finally got tired of it.

Something commenter Keith got that's not in the article:
He'd broken into a house yesterday, in a village hosting about 10% or more of Britain's armed cops, while the lady was getting the kids from school.

she'd returned, found her kitchen turned upside down and called the cops.

FIFTEEN minutes later, two UNARMED cops arrived. refused to enter, called for armed officers and went away.

The bouncer then came back and took some clean clothes from the house and left again in the FIFTEEN minutes more that it took for armed cops to get there.

This is going to take some whitewashing over
.
Here's another article, at the Sun. Which includes After Moat shot himself, witnesses said cops swarmed around and jumped on him. And seems Keith isn't the only one thinking the police have some explaining to do:
COPS were last night accused of a string of blunders after Raoul Moat remained free under their noses for almost a week.
...
Moat was finally cornered a few hundred yards from where his getaway car was found four days earlier. During the hunt Northumbria Police apologised after an inspector called Moat a "nutter".

His ex Samantha Stobbart, who he attacked, was apparently given NO police protection. Another former girlfriend who warned he would hide in Rothbury said her statement was not taken seriously.

Cops also held back details of his getaway car
.
Personally, I don't think calling him a nutter was exactly a large problem, but I guess they decided he was being insensitive.

The Brit cops showed the same problem we've got over here: they had the guy pinned and yet kept around enough people to fight a company-size infantry action, which makes as much sense as O.J. Simpson driving along with a third of LAPD following him. EVERYBODY wants in on it. Something like that, do the brass just want everyone around they can get, or don't they bother to cut the numbers down?

Down near the bottom of the Sun article there's a picture of five cops: two have subguns aimed at the guy and a third is behind a ballistic shield pointing a Taser.

I think he was being a bit optimistic about that...

So this mess is over. And the circus of explanations and defenses and excuses begins.

1 comment:

Keith said...

The cops are now admitting tazing him.

I wonder if that happened when he had his gun pointed at his own head, with his finger on the bang button?

"He shot himself Guv. Honest..."

Which is probably a lot easier to get away with than standing in front of a court and twelve of Moat's peers, while being grilled by a bright barrister with a strong dislike of cops.


Thanks for the posting, and putting up with my Off Topic comments the last few days.

I may be suffering from confirmation bias here, but it looks like britain's armed cops are good at slaying some unsuspecting bloke walking down a street with a table leg in a carrier bag, fatally assaulting a middle aged protestor in London, or ordering a fella who is shooting rabbits on his own farmland to "throw down the gun"

When there's a big, flat footed bouncer running around with a shotgun loaded with bird shot (we'll not touch on improvising buckshot here - it's easy enough to do)

They are way out of their depth


The spin has been pretty transparent to

I'm busy writing some fiction at present, and I'd better write down the spin for ideas later - trouble is most of it is too lame for use.

Oh, yeah, those wonderfully effective British gun controls - Five shot last night in Brixton.