25 minutes for an ambulance?
Although there is no record of the statement on the NZ Police website, there is a report in the NZ Herald:
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Assistant Police Commissioner Allan Boreham said the man's vehicle was stopped when road spikes deflated the front tyres. There was then an exchange of gunshots between him and police, resulting in his death.
[...]
"What I do know is he was still alive (after the shooting) and police have spent some 25 minutes attempting to resuscitate him at the scene," Mr Boreham said.
Police did a "very good job in a very trying set of circumstances'' to keep the public safe during the incident.
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The police didn't do a good job and the trying circumstances were of their own making - a result of their total failure in being able to stop him. Permitting the offender to go through the 40 odd kilometres of Auckland's urban area is actually a very poor job indeed and potentially put the public at risk. The same utter incompetence and panic that led the police to let the driver of the vehicle involved in the police's killing of an innocent courier driver on the NW motorway flee right past the block where the Auckland central police headquarters is located - is the same sort of incompetence we see in this police shooting. They have learnt nothing from that, clearly.
The police are the quickest to cover up their own short-comings - pity they never seem to be challenged on any of their claims. The first question I would ask is how can it take 25 minutes before the ambulance came when the station is at North Shore Hospital - only three interchanges down the motorway - about 5 - 10 minutes away. And the second question will be: would it have taken 25 minutes if the person shot had been a cop?
The police - via NorthComms - have direct contact with the St John's service and can despatch immediately. So the police are in real trouble here as far the facts they have admitted to stand.
Now, either St John is so hopelessly slow that they took almost half an hour to send an ambulance five kilometres down the motorway at two in the morning (so slow that they should lose their subsidy - that's an average speed of 15 km/h after all), or they were so overwhelmed by the mega-violence of Gotham on a Sunday night that they couldn't allocate a single ambulance to a police shooting for almost half an hour. Those are the two options the police have left us with and obviously each scenario appears on the face of it to be untenable.
If we take the police at their word then there must be an inquiry into the ambulance system because this is just not good enough and below any reasonable expectation. What we need is the ambulance service's word on the matter. Were they held back by police? If so, for what reason, and for how long were they kept back? These are simple questions that deserve immediate answers, not buried in some whitewash report dragged out for years as a tactic to diffuse the justified outrage.
--
Assistant Police Commissioner Allan Boreham said the man's vehicle was stopped when road spikes deflated the front tyres. There was then an exchange of gunshots between him and police, resulting in his death.
[...]
"What I do know is he was still alive (after the shooting) and police have spent some 25 minutes attempting to resuscitate him at the scene," Mr Boreham said.
Police did a "very good job in a very trying set of circumstances'' to keep the public safe during the incident.
--
The police didn't do a good job and the trying circumstances were of their own making - a result of their total failure in being able to stop him. Permitting the offender to go through the 40 odd kilometres of Auckland's urban area is actually a very poor job indeed and potentially put the public at risk. The same utter incompetence and panic that led the police to let the driver of the vehicle involved in the police's killing of an innocent courier driver on the NW motorway flee right past the block where the Auckland central police headquarters is located - is the same sort of incompetence we see in this police shooting. They have learnt nothing from that, clearly.
The police are the quickest to cover up their own short-comings - pity they never seem to be challenged on any of their claims. The first question I would ask is how can it take 25 minutes before the ambulance came when the station is at North Shore Hospital - only three interchanges down the motorway - about 5 - 10 minutes away. And the second question will be: would it have taken 25 minutes if the person shot had been a cop?
Now, either St John is so hopelessly slow that they took almost half an hour to send an ambulance five kilometres down the motorway at two in the morning (so slow that they should lose their subsidy - that's an average speed of 15 km/h after all), or they were so overwhelmed by the mega-violence of Gotham on a Sunday night that they couldn't allocate a single ambulance to a police shooting for almost half an hour. Those are the two options the police have left us with and obviously each scenario appears on the face of it to be untenable.
If we take the police at their word then there must be an inquiry into the ambulance system because this is just not good enough and below any reasonable expectation. What we need is the ambulance service's word on the matter. Were they held back by police? If so, for what reason, and for how long were they kept back? These are simple questions that deserve immediate answers, not buried in some whitewash report dragged out for years as a tactic to diffuse the justified outrage.
posted by Tim Selwyn @ 3:26 pm
1 comments
1 Comments:
Um... if there was a need in NEW ZEALAND for police to open fire on someone, he doesn't deserve saving. He should've been left to die.
Though I do think rather than leaving him to suffer for 25 minutes, they should've put another bullet through his head to quickly put him out of his pain. That's what I'd want in such a case.
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