Am I the only one .............

[don1]

Am I the only one who thinks that sending two inexperienced, unarmed women to the scene of an armed robbery in progress is the actions of an idiot?

I haven't heard a word said on this point up to now.

[libertie]

Did they know for sure that it was an armed robbery? I only heard that the alarm button was pressed in the travel shop and they were nearest to the scene! However if they were sent to what was known for sure was an armed robbery, then yes it was a huge error of judgement!

[Loosehead]

Also the control room would not know they where women. The PC brigade demanded a few years ago that the W from WPC be removed and also their numbers where changed so that they could not be identified as women from their number as was once the case.

[don1]

Even if they didn't know there were guns present, what were two rookie police officers doing together, surely common sense would dictate that each rookie should be partnered with an experienced officer.

If two 16 stone guys had been sent to a robbery where the baddies had knives the bad guys would probably have lost the argument

Even if the criminals were armed with knives instead of guns what exactly were two females going to do?

[surfer mike]

Answering alarm calls is a routine job for police officers, i'm sure nobody expected to be met in broad daylight by scum with shooters... its all well and good saying they should have been accompanied by a more experienced officer, but that would not have helped them, police officers with 30 years experience have been killed in similar fashion in the past...

[january_bug]

Again - as I have said below - I don't think they were "sent" - I understood that they were passing the scene.

I also think it only fair to point out that even fully kitted up on protection gear, it doesn't matter if you're built like the proverbial brick outhouse or not, your neck is exposed, and one shot there and you're dead.

So again, I don't think they were "sent" to the scene, and if they voluntarily attended, I don't suppose they knew guns were involved when they walked into the shop. After all, I presume no-one is going to called the dead woman or her injured colleague an idiot!?

[don1]

Jb you misunderstand what I meant, I'm not saying that either of the two police women were idiots, I'm saying that whoever is in charge are idiots for allowing two inexperienced women to walk into a deadly situation without any form of protection.

If my opinion is wrong about this all you have to explain to me is why one of them is dead and the other in a wheelchair.

[january_bug]

I believe all that needs explaining, don1, is the circumstances in which they arrived at the scene. If they weren't sent to the scene, then no controller is guilty of sending them there. I thought I'd made that point perfectly clear.

The lady in the wheelchair was in the wheelchair because she is weak (physically, and this is meant as a statement of fact, not an insult). Current media reports are that the injury was to her shoulder. I have not heard anything to suggest that she will have difficulty walking in the future as a result of the injuries she sustained in the course of attending that crime scene.

The other lady is sadly dead, because a criminal shot her. We do not yet know in which part of her body she was shot, and it cannot even be ascertained by us(without further press releases/press conferences by the police) whether any sort of "flak jacket" would have saved her life. At this stage, as I have said repeatedly before, we do not know that they were sent to the scene, therefore we should not assume that any controller, "idiot" or otherwise, sent this woman to her death.

I did not say that you were calling the police officers idiots, and I wanted to be clear that that wasn't what I was implying.

[Chessman]

Having read the above posts, I agree with parts, and disagree with parts, however, my view, is, (and I do expect to be slated for this, but please do it in a nice way, i'm a gentle soul), I don't believe that we should have women patrolling in the first place, eg, if these thugs were unarmed, there's not much they could have done anyway, but its all done in the pursuit of equality, and I don't believe men and women can ever be equal.

If anyone wants an explanation of that last bit, please re-post.

[Grunty]

The real problem is that the number of officers has not kept pace with the increase in their work. About 12 years ago I had occasion to read the personal record of an officer who, in 1939, was described as industrious and zealous. The amount of work that he did in the whole of that year is done by a modern officer in four days.

All the controller can hope for in many cases is that there will be somebody available to go. I know nothing about the situation in that particular town.

[Dom Tuk]

From a news item i thought that the police were responding to a female employees personal alarm, the type that sends a signal to a local police station/or a company that then calls the police. I am not sure how they located where the alarm came from unless they knew that the employee worked at the travel agents so put a call out to see who was closest to the scene. So i am not sure that they knew an armed robbery was in progress.

If they had to wait for an armed response unit to be sent out, do you realise how long it takes for the team to get the permission to open the cupboard for the guns, assemble the team if they are there at all, get kitted out, get briefed, get a vehicle to take them all etc. By this time the robbery would have finished and nobody would have been killed.

[january_bug]

Dom Tuk - I agreed with your post, but then, for me, you spoiled it all with your last sentence. How can you possibly know that no-one would have been killed!?! There is no knowing what these people would have done. If the rumour about the rape alarm thingy is true, then they might have discovered what the woman had done and shot her dead. Any number of circumstances could have arisen in which the robbers decided to shoot to injure/kill. We cannot possibly make assumptions that police non-attendance would have resulted in no fatalities. At risk of being attacked, I'm a little surprised by your apparent lack of thought in that last sentence, given the high quality and well thought out manner of a vast majority of your other postings.

[Dom Tuk]

Fair point JB. I cant say for sure that no one would have been killed. But if you take into account the number of robberies that take place on a daily basis in this country and work out that not many fatalities take place the chances are very high that this would have been another robbery by a gang of low lifes and it would not even made the back pages of the local free newspaper. Furthermore the gang shot the WPC outside the shop indicating that they were fleeing as the PCs were coming in. So perhaps they saw the patrol car and decided to make a run for it (without harming anyone inside) or they had fininshed their job and that the WPC tried to stop them physically and got shot. Whatever happens now i hope that they get the people who did this and boy are they in for a rough ride in the prisons.

[january_bug]

Dom Tuk - you're gonna get annoyed by me soon, but I'm not meaning to be annoying, I promise!!! Again - I agree totally with your post (and I'm glad you took my point as fair! :-)) RIGHT up to the last sentence! Now, I'm being picky here, but I think there's a chance that some inmates may actually be impressed by a guy who murdered a police officer!! I know that not all prisoners hate the police, and certainly not all condone murder, but I am guessing a fair few hate the police, and, sick as it is, it occurs to me that the murderer, if convicted, may actually become a sort of "celebrity hero" amongst some inmates.

What a sickening thought. Sorry, but it was just a thought.

[Dom Tuk]

JB i always thought that cop killers were not liked even by other inmates. The prison officers and police would of course be very professionally robust in their dealings with these types. In the grand scheme of prison hierarchies i think the lowest of the low are the paedophiles and rapists (they get the worst treatment from other inmates), then come the cop killers as the others do not consider the killing of a police person as any great achievement (they are afterall unarmed). It was just my belief i may be wrong in this.

[january_bug]

Dom Tuk - well I want to believe you, so I shall!! And very glad to hear it too! (And now't wrong with your last sentence! :p)

[loobie]

From what I have heard and read, the two officers didn't even make it into the shop - they were shot outside in the street as the scum did a runner.

[don1]

Jan bug, your posts are intellectually fallible most would say nonsensical I would have to agree with somewhere between the two.

[january_bug]

My posts are "capable of making an error"?!

Are you SURE that's the word you meant to use?!

Or did you mean questionable?!

Dom Tuk - did you feel my posts were intellectually fallible or nonsensical!? I respect your opinion and would be interested to know. :-)

don1 - have you managed to grasp the point I was making in my first point yet, or would you like me to explain it again. I can use shorter words if necessary.

[Grunty]

Dom Tuk - I have just seen your post of 11.04.

A personal attack alarm is not one of those ineffective aerosol things that people carry. It is part of the shop's alarm system, but is set off deliberately rather than by an intruder. The problem is that most calls are false alarms. The officers would not be expecting to walk into an armed robbery. They would be saying 'lets get this alarm call done and then we'll have a break'.

It is a long time since firearms had to be deployed in the way that you suggest. The armed response vehicle just has to stop, the officers get the guns out of the locked gun box and they are away. I have checked this on Google to make sure I am not speaking out of turn. The fact remains though, that the armed response vehicle could not be deployed every time somebody accidentally kicks the alarm pedal.

[bernardo]

If two inexperienced unarmed women had been sent to the scene of an armed robberyin progress, then the person who made that decision would indeed be an idiot. But they weren't, so he/she isn't.