Who can you count on?

After an incident where two sisters were gunned down at a BBQ and the emergency services waited what seemed like an extraordinary amount of time before entering the premises to offer help I asked if this is what we can expect from the emergency services during such dangerous situations.

Well, evidence would suggest that this is indeed the case:

Earlier, the coroner was told Mrs Pemberton pleaded with a police operator that she had "about one minute before I die" as she hid in a downstairs cupboard while her husband rampaged through their home in Hermitage, Berkshire.

However, despite receiving the call at 7.11pm, police did not enter the property until 1.53am the following day.

A 16 year old was also killed in the incident.

The situation in the house was unknown to the police, which is why they did not enter the building earlier. They wanted to ensure their safety. That’s all fair enough, I suppose. If you are not willing to take the risk on behalf of a helpless victim then who am I to suggest otherwise?

However, what this does highlight again is the fact that in certain violent situations you really are on your own. In the first incident above a woman lay dying but the police refused to allow medical help to enter the building for an hour on safety grounds.

In the second incident no one knew the state of the victim. It was a black box situation. But, dead or alive, she was on her own for hours. For safety reasons.

Later the coroner remarked that the police could not have prevented their deaths, adding that:

…in his opinion, the deaths were inevitable.

"Nothing could have prevented him (Mr Pemberton) doing what he did," the coroner said.

That’s just the thing isn’t it? In situations like that you can only rely on yourself because the state is incapable of helping. The police are too slow and too safety minded to cope with such circumstances. But how can you protect yourself when the need for personal protection (and I mean from violent and determined attack) is not considered important enough in this country to warrant the legal ownership of equipment capable of saving your life and for the purposes of self protection?

Where does this leave the rest of us? Is it right that we ignore these extremes by not providing now for people that may find themselves in such situations in the future? Are these situations really that extreme? What level of damage to victims is acceptable and at what level should we say, enough is enough, someone needs to protect these people and they themselves are the best people for the job?

These may be difficult questions to answer but what we do need to avoid is the situation where we measure performance by the amount of riga mortis that has set in.

Posted by John at September 30, 2004 10:13 AM | TrackBack