I re-read my comment and I stand by every word as the logic is impeccable, as has been averred by commenters other than myself and of cooler heads than say Helmut O’Hooligan, who decided to go full retard in a very uncharacteristic moment.

My one retraction is that I will grant that I have no way of knowing what Balko’s motivation in posting this story was, so I retract “I understand the purpose of this post.” Clearly after reading the man for a decade, I haven’t the faintest idea how his mind works, or should work given what appear to be his goals.

Without that presupposition, the statement “It helps one’s credibility in the eyes of the establishment to present a “balanced” viewpoint of police behavior…” still stands.

I agree that it is logically possible that was an unintended consequence of Balko’s post.

However, that leaves open the distinct likelihood that the purpose of the post was to justify the existence of SWAT teams. Which has led down the slippery slope to where we find ourselves today. In a police state.

Am I wrong?

My points are always founded on logic.

OK, OK, I do get emotional sometimes, but it’s in proportion to the nutpunchery that goes on here daily.

Now that I’ve written that, I have resolved to take a sabbatical from this hellhole. And I mean hellhole in the nicest possible way. Toodles, and have fun banging your heads against the brick wall.

I guarantee he would have busted his ass to save a kid from some thug kidnapper.

I don’t mean to harshly criticize your post, but your characterization might come more from Hollywood “vengeance” movies than real life. Please consider a lens of mental illness in which to view shooters and hostage-takers like this. Very, very, very few are just violent thugs. Most have some degree of mental illness (assign your compassion as you wish).

Le was still holding the girl in his arms at the top of the stairs when he began firing at the officers. Jimenez fired back with his assault rifle, without hitting the girl, and killed the man.

Knowing how often official incident reports are blatant lies, it is rather difficult to determine anything. All we know is “something happened and a guy is dead”. No way I’m concluding anything based on a police report.

This hostage situation seems to be a good use of SWAT. And, I have no idea if SWAT acted appropriately.

Thank you for the rejoinder. Your explanation in #29 sounds pretty sensible to me. While I don’t think extreme manifestations of violence are “human nature” I do think that contests for dominance are (as suggested by the behavior of other primates). With or without the State, some people with “act the fool” as some people in my community are fond of saying.

I also want to point out that I have no hard feelings towards you, in spite of the fact that I probably still sounded pretty worked up in #27. This story and CyniCAL’s response sort of hit a nerve with me. It has to do with my own background as well as some of my disagreements with anarchist theory. It just made for a kind of “perfect storm.” Thanks again.

It’s interesting that you direct your frustration with libertarian/anarchist tendency to demonize government employees per se at me, given my occasional criticism of the same tendency. Needless to say, that’s something I try not to do, not so much because it’s unfair (as, granted, it sometimes is) but because it’s superficial: as far as I’m concerned the state is best understood as just another private institution (or network of institutions), an extension of the corporate capitalist power structure, and made of people just like every other human organization. The state is bad because of what it does, not because of what it’s made of. Humans were oppressing, robbing, murdering, and raping each other a long time before they had states. The state is the result of violence, not the (primary) cause of it.

And for future reference, while I am pay attention to claims that I’m being unfair, or inaccurate, or cruel, or whatever (because those are all bad things to be, in and of themselves), I have no interest in pandering to anyone. I couldn’t care less what flies outside the libertarian blogosphere, or within it, for that matter. If conventional wisdom weren’t fucking stupid, we wouldn’t be in the sorry place we’re in.

JOR, while I appreciate your more measured response to this issue, I still find the above statement vexing. You seem to be saying that the SOLE reason that Officer Jiminez shot the hostage taker was to protect “his own.” Are you seriously saying that this officer didn’t care about an eleven year old kidnapping victim? If so, that is just cold and pretty damned offensive.

Look, Jiminez is a human being. Why would he not care about freeing this girl? This, in a nutshell, is the whole issue with anarchists and the police. You guys time and time again deny the police their humanity and that has always bothered me a great deal. Not because the state of policing in this society is excellent (I am on record here saying quite the opposite!) but because I think it is terribly dangerous and counterproductive to assume that someone has sinister motives 100% of the time. Attitudes like that tend to lead to pretty ugly places (such as death camps), historically speaking.

JOR, I grew up around cops. My Dad was a cop. I don’t always agree with his views, but I don’t think he lived to go out and torture people either. I think he was a family man doing a job that he often found annoying or moderately interesting, depending on the day. I do know he saw through a lot of the bullshit in policing that I currently criticize. As a result, I think he did his best to ignore aspects of the job that he found counterproductive. I will tell you one thing though. I guarantee he would have busted his ass to save a kid from some thug kidnapper. I have no question about that! And he would say, that is just what we are supposed to be doing out here. And it is what they are supposed to be doing (feel free to cite the usual court case about police not being required to defend you, but most cops don’t care about that case).

So how far do you want to take this sterotyping? This demonization of all things State-related. My wife is a state employee (public aid office). Do you want to demonize her to? For trying to help out some people who are truly impoverished (and getting lied to by manipulative shit heads on a regular basis as well). Would you ascribe terrible motives to her too. She knows the system fucking blows, but she tries to make the most of it and I love her for it. I guess that makes me an evil statist pig too (Come get me!). Or maybe you would like to go around to city hall and piss on some public works trucks. Or go spit in the face of the nice old lady at the county clerks office. Or throw rocks at fire fighters. Hey, have a ball man. Just understand that blanket attacks on public employees won’t fly outside the libertarian blogosphere. If you don’t believe me, ask Scott Walker.

True, but I’m not sure how that’s relevant to your point. You said situations like the one Radley describes or “something very similar” happen so often that they don’t even make the news. That’s a clearly wrong claim.

If you’re arguing that SWAT operations with no weapons discharged by anyone at all, no hostages, and no deaths are “very similar” to the operations in question, I say no way. Yeah, if the cops deploy a SWAT team and it turns out that everyone involved comes quietly and/or is apprehended without a weapon even being drawn? I can see that not making the police blotter. To argue that those situations are at all comparable to this one is wrong.

Thank you, StrageOne. That is the key point here. Earlier I was so angry that I couldn’t put it that succinctly. The actions of the police resulted in a child being freed from a kidnapper. The kidnapper was the true aggressor in this instance and the police did their job–or at least what their true job should be–to end the threat. This should not be about ideology. This should be about a girl being freed from a violent shit head. So I am just saying when you get to the point that you are an anarchist first and a human being second, then maybe you need to re-think your political views.

If you want to criticize someone for selectively venerating the police, Balko is not that guy. If you want to complain about violent, reckless, and unaccountable behavior by police, this isn’t the news item you should be concerned about. Seriously, just wait a couple days, these opportunities for righteous indignation are far too frequent in my opinion.

Tomorrow I can be pissed about whatever blood curdling items my daily blog walk takes me to. Today I’m thankful a little girl gets to go home.

Don’t worry. It’s not. Though I do sympathize with his arguments to some extent: given what we know about police – even SWAT team – marksmanship standards, the fact that they didn’t shoot the girl in the kidnappers’ arms must be a matter of sheer luck; they were likely just shooting back to protect their own hides, and killing the kidnapper without injuring the kid (or any other bystanders) was a happy coincidence. I say this purely based on what I know about other SWAT raids and general police behavior; it has nothing to do with my anarchist principles per se (which say, for what it’s worth, that anyone has the right to do anything they can that doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, and shooting a kidnapper who is shooting at you to try and ‘defend’ his take doesn’t violate anyone’s rights).

Unfortunately, a majority of his posts are just him screaming at his computer screen:

#44 | CyniCAl | January 20th, 2012 at 6:11 pm

I am going to wear twice as much cologne as I did before. Fuck you all.

His argument here is just plain disgusting. If a private citizen had shot this kidnapper he, and I, would be hailing him as a hero. I don’t know why it should be any different just because the guy is a cop. His distaste for state aggression trumps all. I’d say that your intuition is correct.

Jesus Fucking Christ, CyniCAL. Look, we have had some good conversations about your beliefs and I feel better informed for having had these conversations. But you are not only wrong on this, you are actually becoming a parody of yourself. You are a Monty Python character in the making. Ooh Ooh, violence inherent the system.

The above quote from you basically suggests that the SWAT team should have just gone with it and trusted that A FUCKING HOSTAGE TAKER might just let THE FUCKING CHILD STRANGER HE JUST FUCKING ABDUCTED go free AFTER HE STARTED SHOOTING AT THE FUCKING POLICE ATTEMPTING TO FUCKING FREE THE HOSTAGE (You were so eager to stick it to the man you forgot that the guy was shooting at the police, though I’m sure that was staged by some malevolent agent of the State flying overhead in a black helicopter).

If talking this kind of rancid shit is required of the principled anarchist then I will never, ever in my life consider myself a fucking anarchist no matter how much I sympathize with their “cynicism” about the state. Long before I encountered you on this site, I felt that most “anarchists” were either teens or college kids trying to act scary and piss of their parents or aging burn out college professors who just think they are more intelligent than the rest of us rubes. I have modified my views on anarchists somewhat since then, but your comments about this case kind of brought back those old feelings again. Perhaps I need to have more faith in my intuition.

I say good on San Jose P.D., at least this time. As for the hostage taker, FUCK HIM.

Plus, the only weapon discharged was the police rifle… Untrue.

Knowing how institutions operate, I sense the general motivation for the cop was that inaction in this situation would be more harshly criticized than action that resulted in the death of the hostage. Again, CiniCAL’s omniscient ability to determine one’s motivations for a particular act. I find his analysis to be unbelievable.

In all, this is a wash, and only so because of the positive result, in which luck was a factor. How can it be a ‘wash’, and still have a positive result? The net positive result means that it wasn’t a wash. I may be wrong, but I believe that the negative that CiniCAL sees that balances out the positive in order to result in a ‘wash’ if the fact that this rescue was performed by a SWAT team whose mere existence, to CiniCAL, is a statist aggression.

I think he is spot on. Follow the logic and you can’t come to any other conclusion. I disagree.

‘Murc’, maybe needs to read what I posted. The correct application of a SWAT team does not always end in a shooting of either the alleged suspect or an officer.

Of the thousands of SWAT deployments, “to counter imminent or occurring violence”, most end with all involved safe. Even those SWAT operations to conduct search warrants or make arrests rarely end with death or injury.

That is why when that does happen it is man-bites-dog news.