Police Drop Bomb on Radicals' Home in Philadelphia (1985)

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/14/us/police-drop-bomb-on-radicals-home-in-philadelphia.html

by sarchertech • 12 years ago

50 60 12 years ago

trhway• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege - another fascinating read (beside everything else, the fire decomposing tear gas into chemical weapon grade gases)

MarioSpeedwagon• 12 years ago

If it happened today: "OMG WE HAVE GOTTEN SO VIOLENT." Nope. We just have the Internet.

Interesting story.

sk5t• 12 years ago

Here's another story you seldom hear about; it's from 1927 and had a worse outcome than recent school shootings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

Killobyte• 12 years ago

For those interested I highly recommend the documentary "Let the Fire Burn".

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2119463/

glenda5• 12 years ago

I would love to read something about how the police didn't kill someone. It seems like most of the people that help other people are "strangers" - are there any kinds of statistics on how often the police actually help? I'd imagine that situations like domestic abuse are cases when they're really successful but other than that it often seems like the police cause real problems that tear people apart.

mhurron• 12 years ago

That couldn't possibly be because bad news makes headlines a lot more than good news does, could it? Mundane things don't make the news so why would a cop not killing someone make the news?

glenda5• 12 years ago

Well, for instance we heard about Charles Ramsey finding those three missing women. Also, today on the local news I saw a report about truckers saving a woman and child from a burning car on the freeway.

The things that police are used for are things like 'the war on drugs' etc... not necessarily positive, helpful, community level things.

Zigurd4• 12 years ago

Local news in the US is highly dependent on police sources, and therefore VERY reluctant to be critical of police. There is far more pro-police bias in reporting than the reverse.

baddox8• 12 years ago

Things that are routine are by definition not usually published as news. "Cop drives patrol car all day without incident" is not a useful headline, and not only because it won't generate clicks (unless it's The Onion perhaps).

ganeumann• 12 years ago

Police don't kill people almost all the time. Police generally are a net good.

I read this book once called Crisis Management. The main idea was to minimize the consequences of rare actions. So, even though train cars carrying lethal chemicals rarely derail, you build the train tracks so if one were to derail, say on a sharp curve, it derails far from populated areas. Or, even though nuclear reactors rarely release deadly radiocative gases, you don't allow people to build shanties nearby, where they would get lethal doses of radiation if there were an accident.

You can't get rid of adverse cases completely in most real-world situations. But you can work to minimize the consequences when the adverse case shows up. There are times when improving the worst case is pretty cheap, if you think ahead.

Policing is like this. The police very rarely need to use force ('rarely' in the sense of force used/interaction with civilian.) But when they do it makes sense to reduce the worst case: that the force will cause mortal injury. In the MOVE case, just wait them out. There is definitely increased cost, but it improves the expected value of the worst case by much more than the cost. Or, as I saw someone ask, speculatively I have to assume, on Twitter 'what would you do if some 6'4" guy was running at you threateningly?' The rational answer might be 'close your car window and call for backup.' It's never 'get out of the car and shoot him in the head.'

glenda5• 12 years ago

Right, at a certain point it comes down to the officer's life versus the life of the civilian. This is a tough situation because you essentially saying "I am going to kill you before you kill me" - which is definitely not how police should operate.

Unless the civilian is armed I see no reason why the police should even arrive at the scene with a gun, unless the situation is violent to begin with, or after being called in as backup.

Russell913• 12 years ago

Police are not supposed to be a net good. They are a classic solution to a game theoretic prisoner's dilemma. If there were no enforcement of laws by police, it would be in everyone's best interest to e.g. steal. Regardless of whether other people steal, you'd be better off doing it. So as a classic solution to the prisoners dilemma, you introduce a force that strictly decreases everyone's utility function. How can this be a good thing? Well, because it changes everyone's optimal strategy from stealing to not stealing, reaching a global optimum. Now you'll notice that this strategy only improves things if it actually changes people's behavior. If people continue stealing anyway at the same rates, then things have only gotten worse (unless you subscribe to punitive, rather than deterrent punishment). So the primary purpose of police is deterrence through the threat of negative reinforcement, not "helping people". Further, whenever police actually have to enforce laws, its a sign that something has gone wildly wrong. The deterrent didn't work, and things are worse off than if there were no police at all. Of course, in reality criminal behavior has a lot of motivators and it's not possible to change everyone's optimal strategy just by raising punishments, so you're going to have police enforcing laws. But there is no police department that is more successful than one where the police just sit around and do nothing.

asdfaoeu• 12 years ago

There is a difference between the two situations though. A train isn't going to adapt based on the your policies though a person might. If your only thinking about short term suffering you might in effect increase the overall suffering by decreasing the deterrent effect of policing.

baddox8• 12 years ago

Police don't kill people almost all the time. Police generally are a net good.

The first sentence is certainly true, but the second is debatable.

baddox8• 12 years ago

I think you make the concept of crisis management sound more complicated than it really is. I suspect there is almost always a calculation of risk versus cost. A certain amount of resources will be spent to prevent disasters of certain magnitudes and certain likelihoods.

pmorici2• 12 years ago

"Police generally are a net good."

I'm not so sure. The few encounters I've had with the police have made me wonder. I live in a medium crime city and every time I have to call the police for something they never really do anything except write a report and then I never hear from them again.

In one instance when my car was stolen I was victimized more by the police than the car thief. The cops when they found my stolen car towed it to a lot and then told me they had found it via registered mail at which point I had to go pay several hundred dollars to get my car back that was only worth several hundred dollars to begin with. Also couldn't just write it off and leave it because they would still come after me for the towing and storage fee which was $50 per day. On top of that when I went to get the car the employees at the police station were _literally_ illiterate and made so many errors in transcribing my name and VIN number onto the vehicle release form that the towing company questioned whether it was actually my car!

In another instance when my car was the victim of a hit and run it took the police 4+ months to get the police report to the insurance company so that that they would pay for the repairs.

I mean if you can't take reports and return stolen property efficiently what the heck are you there to do?!

quaffapint2• 12 years ago

I believe it was Mayor Goode that called for the action.

bcoates• 12 years ago

It isn't their job to help people. They're bureaucrats, it's their job to show up after and take notes, give interviews and file paperwork. There is no reason to give these people guns, tanks, helicopters, or bombs -- giving them cars is a stretch (we have mass transit, after all).

The US Postal Service has a better justification for being armed and having bombs and guns than the police do -- they at least have a positive mandate to defend the mail in their custody from robbery.

varkson• 12 years ago

So you won't complain if your family are killed in front of you and the police don't do anything? GG dude this is why everyone thinks anarchists and the like are fucking dumb.

newobj• 12 years ago

"Let the Fire Burn" documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eCA0bIezA

quaffapint2• 12 years ago

I was a kid living in the Philly area when it happened. It got lots of local TV coverage of course and it honestly did feel quite crazy having a military like action against a house in Philly, but it never seemed to go much beyond that after it was all over. IIRC it was Mayor Goode who called the action, and being african-american, maybe that helped keep racial tensions down. I can only surmise if it was today that there would be much longer lasting coverage and repercussions.

pmorici2• 12 years ago

I think when you get down to it isn't quite as much about race as the news would have us believe. It is more about the plight of the poor vs. authority trying to keep them in their place but by highlighting incidences with racial components like this they can polarize the various groups that would otherwise have common interests.

The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more corporate bailouts etc...) but they are often portrayed as polar opposites and played against each other in the news and politics.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more corporate bailouts etc...)

Except not. While the TPP and OWS were, in some senses, responses to the same circumstances, TPP seeks generally right-libertarian approaches to addressing those circumstances, and OWS seeks generally left-wing solutions. There's some overlap, but also deep and fundamental opposition. TPP is anti-tax/anti-regulation, OWS is generally for restoring regulations that were removed that they see as having enabled the situations that both TPP and OWS respond to.

This isn't really surprising -- major, widely-felt economic pain is shared, but different ideologies offer different approaches to addressing that pain.

vidarh• 12 years ago

I've made the point elsewhere that a lot of activists in the US are shooting themselves badly in the foot by playing up the race aspect over and over in these cases.

They are missing that while there certainly is racism in the US, these problems correlate much stronger with poverty than race: The vast majority of differences in violence along racial lines disappear when you start adjusting for social equality.

By tying it to race, these activists are pushing away large groups of people - both poor people of other ethnic backgrounds, and other people who don't find the race issue comfortable for various reasons (including not so savoury reasons).

And by focusing on the police, rather than the underlying social inequalities, they are likewise pushing away groups that see the police as fundamentally protecting them against a lot of the people that are demonstrating.

At the same time, address the poverty issue, and 1) it has a much more significant impact, 2) it leaves the remaining race issues in much starker relief (it is far easier for racist cops to justify their behaviour when the victim is black and live in a poor area where it is easy for people in the community to accept that a black kid in that area can be scary)

It is heart wrenching to see how off the mark these things end up going.

dfxm122• 12 years ago

but it never seemed to go much beyond that after it was all over

That's because MOVE was largely hated by their neighbors (who were also black). They were almost universally considered a nuisance to their area, and their living conditions represented a threat to their neighborhood.

MOVE's confrontational demeanor (to cops & regular citizens) combined with building up a huge arsenal made this a pretty unique and delicate situation.

Importantly, Goode claimed full responsibility & launched an investigation almost immediately after the incident which found the city at fault. Civil lawsuits were filed and money was paid out to the family of the victims.

While not normal by any means, this is different from Ferguson in that there, local government seems to be silent and police are treating everyone like criminals, even the press, and are acting with impunity. We've yet to see the fallout though, but it has been going on long enough.

will_work4tears• 12 years ago

I swear I saw this before, or a similar thing. Also I swear I saw something similar in Independence, MO; but I cannot find a thing about it. Perhaps I was conflating it with this event.

rwhitman• 12 years ago

One of the houses on Osage Avenue that was burned down was my dad's childhood home.

Gracana• 12 years ago

I don't get it. What's the rush with situations like this? They're not going anywhere. Surround the area, stay well protected, and think, negotiate, anything seems better than this.

dfxm122• 12 years ago

There was no rush.

A 90-minute shootout this morning came after a week of growing tension between the city and the group, known as Move. Residents in the western Philadelphia neighborhood had complained about the group for years.

Police Drop Bomb on Radicals' Home in Philadelphia (1985)

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