You basically just agreed with almost everything I said...lol. So what you are asserting is, that while he was holed up in a cabin and at that point not firing his gun it seems, and everyone was behind cover of some kind, he was still a substantial threat so they caved in the cabin and burned it down? Again, please show me other standoffs where this has happened because there are standoffs every day.
Of course the police are going to take cover if someone is shooting at them. There comes a point where they have to realise that nothing they are trying is working, and resort to sending a team in. If the suspect is still shooting at them, or at least pointing a gun around, then that team is withing its rights to use deadly force if it is authorised.
The suspect might not have been firing a gun constantly, but he was known to have one and had been exchanging gunfire with the police. The police, for all their intelligence, had no way of knowing whether or not the suspect was hip-deep in ammunition and settling in for a week-long siege, or if he just had a six-shooter and a dusty old box of ammunition keeping him going. For some reason, you seem to think the police should have magically known when he was out of bullets.
The use of a truck to tear down the cabin, and the use of fire were probably extreme tactics intended to overwhelm the suspect and force him out. He was, after all, a trained police officer, and would probably be familiar with the standard tactics of hostage negotiation. Something different was needed, something that would surprise him.
The police don't have a checklist of "things to try"?. I beg to differ. I'm not a cop but I bet they have huge manuals and massive amounts of training for situations just like this.
Stop putting words in my mouth. I never said that they didn't have a checklist, I said that they didn't have a checklist that entitled them to kill the suspect if nothing on that list worked.
And I could be wrong, but isn't lethal force only used when the danger is "imminent" as in right now? You are confronted by a punk in an alley with a gun so he gets shot. Someone has a gun pointed at his wife's head so he gets taken out. No problem. Does a guy holed up in a cabin, not positively identified yet as the person they are looking for, with everyone behind cover and not in danger, qualify as an "imminent threat"? At this point, since they weren't 100% certain it was him by their own admission, what Dorner said on his manifesto is irrelevant, they weren't sure it was him.
Let's see: an armed suspect is in a cabin. He has threatened to kill police officers, and has already shot at least four and killed two. He has opened fire on the police surrounding the cabin.
And that uncertainty over whether it was him comes from the way they have not been able to identify the body.
You can't justify this in hindsight. They didn't know it was Dorner for certain, so anything Dorner did or said or promised or threatened shouldn't be taken into consideration. You can't say, "well he said he wouldn't be taken alive so they had to use lethal force because he might have boobytrapped the doors" because they weren't certain it was him in the cabin were they?
You're just trying to prove that the police did something wrong based on technicalities and loopholes.
