The suspect, William Hardison Sr., shot at deputies trying to serve an eviction notice, resulting in a standoff that lasted about 6½ hours.
Details are still scant, but...
“I mean, he had a lot of ammunition in that house, and certainly ... all of us were strapped, you know, with ammunition, and we were calling for additional ammunition,” Kraus said. “Like I said, we tried to give him every opportunity to come out.”
...I'll go way out on a limb and suggest that this could've been handled better.
I get that he fired first ( the eviction situation is a whole other bag of nuts) but couldn't 5 police officers with some tear gas have fixed this in 30 minutes with a lot less gunfire?
The guy was losing his home and he was scared. We don't know what his mental state was and we don't know how he came in to possession of so much fire power so I'm not going to assume he bought guns instead of paying his rent- I'm just going to assume that 75 officers and 6.5 hours of gunfire was obviously not the best way out of this situation.
Why didn't the cops just leave and then surprise arrest him two days later when he leaves for some groceries or something?
Obviously he wasn't a flight risk since he was literally in trouble for not wanting to leave. Did he have a hostage or something? Why was it time sensitive to arrest him that very day?
"We were aware of the actor's disdain for government when we went to serve the eviction notice which is why we had extra deputies on the detailcame prepared to escalate this neighborhood into a warzone for shits and giggles," Manko said in an emailed statement Friday.
I don't know what you all are moaning about, sure, 75 cops is quite a lot, but if you as a cop is there to simply deliver the message and get shot at, do you think the appropriate response is to go: "Oh hell, I'll just go tell the -ACTUAL- owner of the house that it's this guy's house now." And just leave after somebody tried to murder you?
Sure the economy and the socio-economic environment is what's caused this to happen, that's the real disease, but even then you sometimes need to treat the symptoms. This is one of the symptoms. Also a 6.5 hour shootout doesn't nessicarily mean a high rate if fire, he might aswell just be looking out the window and throw a pistol round out once every 10 minutes. That's 39 bullets or just around 2.5 pistol magazines.
Normally I would say wait until he is out for groceries - his local grocer doesn't have a lot of ammunition. Though this guy seems to be the kind of guy to have a horde of food, and I don't think anyone would want him laying suppressive fire on the neighborhood until he runs out.