Shoot to Kill

It was a horrible tragedy that British police shot to death a man who turned out to be an innocent Brazilian they thought was trying to pull off another suicide bombing. However, the police did the right thing. As a man who appeared to be Middle Eastern emerging from an apartment complex under surveillance as a terrorist base, wearing a long coat in the middle of summer, heading to the Tube and taking off running, hopping over a turnstile, and lunging into a train car when the police tried challenging him, in the context of the bombing and attempted bombing in the previous two weeks, the police had no other choice but to kill him. Every single indication the police had suggested the man was going to blow up himself along with a train full of passengers.

The real travesty here is not the shooting alone; the travesty is the next time a situation like that occurs it may really be a 'martyr' wearing an explosives belt and facing political pressure, the police may hesitate just a second longer than they should, and that hesitation may cost the lives of countless innocent civilians.

Hiam Watzman has an excellent piece in the NY Times on this and parallels to the Israeli struggles with suicide bombers.