phddan wrote:And I in turn, will respectfully disagree with this assessment.
LEO's are paid to respond to situations like this. LEO's are given hand to hand, firearms, tazer, strike weapons, and use of force training. They have armored vest. They have radio's. And they have back up.
Now, lets see what the "sheep" had to work with.
A cell phone, maybe.
How many times do we hear a LEO spokesperson decry people getting involved in situations such as this, and instead tell them to call 911.
And how many times do we hear of a person getting involved with defense of a third person getting sued. Or better yet, defend themselves and have their weapon confiscated, go to jail, and have to hire a lawyer.
"It's easy to be a critic from one's armchair when one hasn't walked in the other guy's shoes - sorta like shouting in your living room at those stupid professional quarterbacks on TV."
Goes both ways.
Dan, I think you missed my point. Let's look again at what I said:
I suspect that the investigators were disgusted at the inaction of the other passengers because they are sheepdogs and I am certain that, to a man, they would have acted to stop the attack if they had been there, armed or not. I think they had excellent grounds to feel as they did about the sheep on the train.
What I was trying to communicate is that most officers are protective of others by nature. If they had witnessed the subway attack while off duty, most of the ones I've known would have actively intervened even if unarmed. Sure, there are exceptions, but I've worked with a lot of officers from a lot of agencies for a lot of years, and I hold this view with deep confidence born from long and consistent experience.
I didn't arrive at these views from my armchair. In my own department, I commanded well over a hundred officers and led them through every kind of incident you can think of (and probably some you couldn't make up if you tried). I chose to do it as much as possible out in the same streets they worked in, and when it was in the best interests of command I took point going in. I was in the perfect position to see what really goes on in the daily actions of police officers.
I saw more selfless action and heroism in 30 days, month after month, than most folks outside the other emergency services and the military get to see in a lifetime. That's hard to understand if your only contact with LEO's is when you get pulled over, and you haven't had the privilege of working alongside folks like this in situation after situation where lives (yours, theirs, and others') are actually on the line and everyone is keenly aware that there are no "do overs".
Yes, on duty officers are provided with lots of life safety equipment and weapons - it'd be pretty tough to talk folks into doing that kind of job without them. The equipment helps, but the officers injured and killed statistics stand as clear evidence that the gear doesn't make the work safe by any means.
Most officers are very conscious of the fact that they are often just one small mistake away from being killed any time they confront violence, and if they forget they get reminded by close calls frequently enough. This situation is not common in the work lives of most of the folks they serve, and it is not surprising that officers' character and beliefs are often seen as different and are poorly understood. Many folks only see them as good guys when they are physically standing between a citizen and an immediate threat of violence. The rest of the time they're often disparaged as uncaring, excessively violent, or having poor judgment and they are looked down upon by large segments of the population because they get their hands dirty in the worst possible circumstances that others get to pontificate about later.
To return to the subway attack which is the subject of this post, the bystanders had a lot more than cellphones to work with. They had superior numbers, they had collectively superior strength, and they had the ability to engage from multiple directions at once. Those are overwhelming advantages if used against a single individual, even one armed with a contact weapon like a hammer that cannot project lethal force at a distance.
We can speculate but never know for sure why they failed to come to the aid of the innocent victim in this instance. Perhaps what they were told over the years played a role, and I can't defend anyone in law enforcement or outside it who preaches that "let the police handle it" is
always the right answer, although it's certainly frequently good advice. I would certainly question the sanity of someone who would fail to defend himself against a deadly threat because he might face legal issues later.
With all that being said, and knowing that some will disagree, I remain confident that the true sheepdogs among us share the investigating officers' view that the other passengers' failure to act when needed was not one of mankind's more noble moments.