Yesterday was a particularly bad day around the Brindle manse, which added to my outrage over what I still consider to be the avoidable, meaningless and tragic death of Emily Keyes in Colorado when a SWAT team went in to get her and her friend out of harm's way.
Today my good friend Jim Dillman writes about SWAT teams and how they're used over on his blog, Doublenought Spy, and perhaps justifiably, takes me more than a little to task. I'll agree that the storm-trooper slur was over the top, and I apologize for it. I'll also agree that perhaps the problem lay more in this particular SWAT team's training than in any mindless need to barge in like the infantry taking an enemy position.
I would also suggest upon further review that perhaps the negotiators had a failure of nerve due to worrying more about the girls' state of mind than that of the man holding them hostage. I've already suggested below that just about anything he did to the girls short of pulling the trigger was manageable. Conversely, it seems that sending in SWAT at that juncture was an open invitation for him to start shooting. In fact, from what I'm reading today, he was apparently provoked not once but twice by SWAT before he started shooting. The big question that will probably never be answered is exactly what he meant by "something [will] happen at 4 o'clock". He might have meant that he was going to kill the two girls, then kill himself -- or he might have just meant that he was going to kill himself while the girls watched. Or he might have meant something completely different.
Bottom line, I sincerely hope that there is a serious and sober inquiry into what went wrong so that it doesn't get repeated in the future. Perhaps this incident really points up the need for a more stringent protocol for the use of SWAT teams in situations like this, or at least the need to use negotiators who don't give up negotiating and go to their big guns just because the perp is being unresponsive and might -- big might -- start shooting.
