75 Pittsburgh officers on leave after hourslong shootout and standoff during eviction attempt
www.nbcnews.com
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.

  • Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    231·
    10 months ago

    It was nonstop gunfire, not just a few rounds here and there.

    Source: I work a block away and heard it as I was on lockdown.

    I think that a better way to have handled this was for a social worker to be there with police and say, off the bat, that he hasn’t paid on the property since his brother died and he needs to leave but they’re there to help him get into a better situation. Maybe he would have been more open minded to that than heavily armed men trying to break down his door to get him out. At that point you’re just cornering a dangerous animal (as all humans can be) into a corner and made him do whatever it took to retain his quality of life. It’s a tragedy and failure of the system all around.

    • SwedishFool@lemmy.world
      11·
      10 months ago

      I’m glad to stand corrected, merely trying to make the point that until we know for certain people shouldn’t assume it was like an active warzone.

      That said, we don’t know how it started. They were there to evict somebody that at that point don’t have the legal rights to be in that property. They might’ve knocked the door and explained the situation and ended up getting shot at out of nowhere. Bottom line is he hit his lowest and the reaction was to engage the messengers with lethal force.

      Like I said previously, this is a symptom of a socioeconomic disease that needs to get cured, even as such you still sometimes have to treat the symptoms. He didn’t do this because he wanted to, but it’s not the landlord’s problem to handle either and a social worker wouldn’t have stopped him from getting evicted. Worst case scenario that social worker would’ve gotten shot and killed for telling him he needs to find a new home.