[pc86]

What corroborating phone calls would you expect from an armed hostage-taking inside a private residence? Can you imagine the public backlash had this been legitimate, the police did nothing, and the hostages were injured or executed?

[gaff33]

The problem is that we can't help the extreme case. We need to be realistic. If we really wanted to prevent every hostage situation we could have a police car parked on every intersection in the country 24/7 so that they are never more than 15 seconds away from a call. Clearly this is ridiculous. We accept that sometimes police take a few minutes to reach an emergency.

Equally we as a society need to be grown up and accept that sending a specialist armed team to respond to an event that has been shown to happen less often that people win the lottery is clearly unrealistic. Claims like this can be handled by regular policing forces who can call upon backup if necessary.

[awakeasleep]

Life is filled with situations like this. The proper thing to do is called a cost benefit analysis.

Are kansas city police regularly defusing hostage execution situations in private homes? Have they EVER done that?

Why are they optimizing for that situation? Arent prank phone calls the more frequent situation?

[bunderbunder]

I wouldn't at all be surprised if it's far more common for police getting jumpy to result in physical harm to hostages than police being cautious and prudent does.

The whole point of taking hostages is to try and slow the cops down, and get yourself some leverage in negotiation. If the police are acting in a way that makes it seem like that's not going to work, then the hostage-taker will stop seeing those people as being useful as hostages, and start making decisions accordingly.