Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Seems dogs are used for armed offenders - 3 days ago in Melbourne
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23894019-5005961,00.html
I put it to you Kyle that even if someones position is known sending a dog in would be very effective in subduing them.
A dog with a muzzle I suspect might still be effective as a gentle reminder in crowd control situations.
The article is pretty clear in that the dog was sent to try and find the offender, by tracking them across the paddock. That's different from a person holed up in a house with a gun or something.
Some places will use dogs to get a stationary armed offender, but it really depends on the environment, and what the offender is armed with. They're more likely to be used against an offender armed with a melee weapon like a bat or a knife, as their speed means they have a fair chance. A guy waiting with a gun against a dog isn't a fair fight. Any offender making a run for it, they're likely to use a dog to bring them down, as it won't harm them much as compared to shooting them, and its more effective than using police officers, and less risk.
I doubt the NZ would police would often send muzzled dog units in to a crowd control situation. They're not trained for it, and it would be a completely inappropriate reaction. Dogs are likely to lose control in large crowds with lots of noise, to not be able to hear their handler, and to scare the crap out of innocent people. Police dogs are trained to be aggressive but under control of their handler for obvious reasons. In crowds the handler would have their hands full trying to keep them under control, making both the dog and handler useless.
From a PR perspective, the media story about a set of lunging, barking police dogs at a party out of control or a protest or a riot of some sort would be a disaster. Not a good photo to have on the front page. It may be that there are some places in the world where dogs are used in this role, the obvious historical example that comes to mind is in the American South in the 1960s, where dogs were set on civil rights marchers.
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I added in the “ex” boyfriend in jest. He was the current boyfriend as of the night in question.
And I’m picking he wasn’t too happy at finding out his girlfriend preferred the romantic company of big men with no necks and cauliflower ears.
Well hopefully the police will find out what actually happened.
But the fact that his girlfriend was cheating on him, doesn't change whatever did or didn't happened at the hotel.
If I was in the situation that the boyfriend was in, I'd probably be single in pretty short order. But I'd still take her to the hospital and the police if she said that her cheating turned into being raped. That's not necessarily revenge, that's humanity.
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No, Anjum, from experience I'm suggesting that getting loaded with complete strangers (you know, alcohol that solvent of inhibitions and judgement) and going back to the hotel room of a near-total stranger might not be the smartest call you ever make.
This discussion reminds me of some female friends who have a real problems with that ALAC advert of the woman who gets drunk and then dragged down an alleyway by a guy who takes advantage of her being alone and inebriated. Their problem is that it's targeting the woman doing something that she should be able to do as much as anyone else - drink alcohol, rather than the behaviour of the male, which presumably is rape.
I haven't been able to fall on either side of the debate until now, but now I think I agree with my friends. There isn't anything wrong with an sports person, or indeed anyone else here in NZ, shacking up with some local woman for the night in his hotel room. It sounds like from what Sophie Lewis spilled to the papers, she had a great night with whoever she got together with, and presumably he did too.
Is the answer that women need to stop having valid life experiences, that a male such as myself could have with very little risk, because if you go to bed with a male there's a 10% chance that you happened to pick a complete scumbag who is going to take advantage of you?
Yes women (and men) should put themselves in safe situations and make sensible choices. But when they don't, we should keep our eye on the problem, which is that other people take advantages of them making non-sensible choices in crappy ways.
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so when I heard of the lacrosse team my gut feeling was "guilty".
What's interesting about the lacrosse, is that I saw several news items on the lacrosse team when it first blew up. I think both on our own news, and also The Daily Show covered it too. I hadn't heard anything about it since, and would have assumed that it was still going on or had been dealt with.
If you'd asked me before today about that lacrosse team, I would have said "aren't those the guys that raped that girl?"
Getting cleared of a crime is clearly nowhere near as 'newsworthy' in many instances as the original accusation.
From what I can work out, the person really doing the complaining is the (possibly ex) boyfriend of the 18 year-old. He was the one that made her go to the hospital on the Sunday night etc. But he’s hardly impartial, is he?
That might be. But it might be the case that he was just trying to look out for her. I'm still close to some of my exes, and if one of them was sexually assaulted the hospital and the police station would be the first places I'd be trying to get them to, same as if it was one of my friends or a family member or anything.
We should suspend judgement on their motives at this stage. 'Innocent until proven guilty' should apply both to the complainant and the accused.
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I am firmly against extending police powers and surveillance but totally in favour of spending large sums on more cops on the beat.
I think we can have CCTV footage without heading down a bad 'surveillance state'. CCTV footage is not the magic bullet to dealing with crime in urban areas, and often it's only useful after the event, but if someone assaulted/robbed/raped etc etc, and was caught on footage, I'd hope that the police would use it to the fullest to catch them. 'More police' can't be everywhere, even if we doubled the number out at any one time.
Therefore as scary as they may be I'ld like more dogs on the beat than a more heavily armed force.
Dogs and other tools/weapons are not at all equivalent. The role for which a police officer can/will use a taser/firearm is almost entirely different to the role for which a dog will be used.
Dogs are commonly used to track and bring down an offender. Very occasionally they will engage an armed offender, but normally by accident (ie, they didn't know the offender was armed). If an offender is holed up and armed with firearms, it's an AOS job, not a dog's role to deal with them. Sending a dog in will just result it being shot, and put a dog team on stand-down for over a year a new one can be trained.
A taser should be used at short notice to subdue an offender who is resisting arrest violently, or is a danger to the officer or someone else. Most likely in that situation the dog is going to be in the car anyway. Police can't bring dogs into umpteen situations just on the off-chance that it develops into one with violence involved.
The crossover where a dog could be a replacement for a taser or firearm is very small.
'More dogs' is a very limited answer. Think of all the limitations of more officers having a dog.
1. The dogs cannot work is areas with lots of people. They get confused about what they are doing. Lots of people are also scared of dogs, you couldn't run one down Cuba Mall on a Friday evening, you'd cause chaos.
2. The dogs cannot work with other dogs very well. If two pairs of police officers tried to work together, and both pairs had a dog, they'd conflict and might get distracted by each other.
3. Police dogs have problems with non-police dogs. If a police officer brings his dog to my front door, my dogs are going to go crazy just because there's a dog visiting them. Some other dogs will attack a police dog however.
4. The vehicles dog units use are specially set up for the dog, and that limits their use for more general roles.
5. Dogs require constant attention and focus from their handler. The handler couldn't do other things - talk to witnesses/victims, collect evidence - if they have a dog on lead. It restricts the many things that the officers need to do, which is why it's a specialised job.
6. Dogs can't enter buildings.
7. Running a dog is very specialised and takes specific training and commitment from the officer. Apart from anything else, you have to put your partner into very dangerous situations sometimes. It's a volunteer job, not something that should be forced on an officer, as it requires commitment at home as well as at work. Police dogs often retire to live with their handler until their death, and some handlers leave the dog unit when their dog retires.
8. Training a dog every 10 years, and keeping it healthy, fed, and happy until it dies is tremendously expensive.
Basically there are very limited times where dogs have a role in the police force, but it's a role for which they're very useful for.
A dog team can only be called in for specific tasks, the rest of the time the dog sits in the boot of the car and the officer is on general duties. If there were incidents where a dog was required and none was available, then there would be an argument for having more, but they're not at all a replacement for firearms or other weapons.
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Unlike Kyle, I do not feel compelled to educate you,
I couldn't help myself, and even while I was doing it I knew it was a silly thing to do.
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it's all cars round here, mate.
And parking at Wellington airport since they rebuilt the parking area a few years ago is criminal. Costs me about as much to park for a long weekend at Dunedin airport as it does to park for a couple of hours at Wellington.
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we caught a shuttle bus a couple of weekends ago and that cost us $50 for two people... so much for economy.
Shuttles here in Dunedin were, at least until a couple of years ago when I last caught one, $10/person to your door. They were $10 when I first caught one, 16 years ago, which, if is still the case, is pretty good given general inflation, wages for drivers, and petrol costs.
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For instance, the heavier the vehicle the more weight and therefore friction onto the road surface, this along with the fitting of a tyre with the correct "footprint" this ensures that the vehicle could stop in a proscribed distance.
I'm no physicist, but surely it's not the amount of contact with the road that stops a vehicle, but the contact with the brake pads/feet? A loaded truck certainly takes longer to stop than an unloaded truck.
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The problem is not remoteness (good for airports) but access. Direct rail and bus links plus motorways that end at the terminals would help.
Actually I think in Dunedin the problem was available flat land. Why it's not next to Mosgiel though, I don't know.
Direct rail and bus links to Dunedin airport? You haven't seen our airport have you...