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Robbery Suspect Tracked By GPS and Killed
New submitter Lew Lorton notes a NY Times story about a thief in New York City who was tracked and located using a GPS device inside a decoy pill bottle he had stolen (along with other pill bottles) from a pharmacy. When police confronted the thief, he raised a gun to shoot at an officer, and was killed
"The decoy bottles were introduced last year by the police commissioner at the time, Raymond W. Kelly, who announced that the department would begin to stock pharmacy shelves with decoy bottles of painkillers containing GPS devices. The initiative was in response to a sharp increase of armed and often deadly pharmacy robberies across the state, frequently by people addicted to painkillers. ... The bottles are designed to be weighted and to rattle when shaken, so a thief does not initially realize they do not contain pills. Each of the decoy bottles sits atop a special base, and when the bottle is lifted from the base, it begins to emit a tracking signal."
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"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
One could do that. Another common method of avoiding decoys is to avoid committing robbery and burglary. Felony crime as a career path doesn't tend to attract the brightest and most careful practitioners.
It's an escalation thing. Due to the relative scarcity of guns in the UK, if criminals started to carry them as standard kit they'd be up against a lot of unfriendly cops who are generally better trained with better hardware. It would end badly in a country where the average unarmed robbery will get you a few years at worst and a kiss on the cheek and community service at least, if not acquittal on a technicality. Using a gun can up your sentence to something unpleasant, so most sane robbers don't carry them. Where nutjobs are concerned, anything goes and most of the rest of the criminal fraternity tend to avoid them. Killing a cop is just as bad here as in the US so you have to be *way* past desperate to go that route. And really stupid.
Seriously, the patrolmen don't have guns? What if someone shoots at them?
Due to strict gun control in the UK, very few criminals have guns, so police officers almost never have the risk of confronting an armed perpetrator. The criminals in the UK who *do* have guns are not petty thieves who are robbing pharmacies for narcotics.
The strange concept is that you would bring up gun control when the statistics don't back you up. Over the last decade, the percentage of officers killed on duty, by guns vs other causes, in Britain is slightly HIGHER than it was in the United States. The US is far more violent than Britain, but guns do not contribute to that nearly as much as you would have others believe.
Do you have a source for that? According to the site linked below (which includes citations), "In the US – population 311.5 million – there were an estimated 13,756 murders in 2009, a rate of about 5.0 per 100,000. Of these 9,203 were carried out with a firearm. In the UK – population 56.1 million – there were an estimated 550 murders in 2011-12, a rate of about 1.4 per 100,000. Of these 39 were carried out with a firearm." I couldn't find similar statistics for police officers, but you're obviously pretty sure of your facts so I thought I'd ask. http://fleshisgrass.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/us-and-uk-murder-rate-and-weapon-updated/
E pluribus unum