Shoot to kill. posted by Richard Seymour

A commenter at Direland draws my attention to some recent essays by Bruce Schneier, here and here .

In addition to the problems with shoot-to-kill (or, to borrow what I hope are tautologies from the Met Police Commissioner, shoot-to-kill-to-protect, or shoot-to-kill-when-necessary) that I mentioned, Schneier notes:

This policy is based on the extremely short-sighted assumption that a terrorist needs to push buttons to make a bomb explode. In fact, ever since World War I, the most common type of bomb carried by a person has been the hand grenade. It is entirely conceivable, especially when a shoot-to-kill policy is known to be in effect, that suicide bombers will use the same kind of dead-man's trigger on their bombs: a detonate that is activated when a button is released, rather than when it is pushed.
This is a difficult one. Whatever policy you choose, the terrorists will adapt to make that policy the wrong one.

He also refers to a couple of reports (PDF files) by the International Association of Chiefs of Police which recommend shoot-to-kill on the basis of the following suspicious behaviour:

[A] person might exhibit "multiple anomalies," including wearing a heavy coat or jacket in warm weather or carrying a briefcase, duffel bag or backpack with protrusions or visible wires. The person might display nervousness, an unwillingness to make eye contact or excessive sweating. There might be chemical burns on the clothing or stains on the hands. The person might mumble prayers or be "pacing back and forth in front of a venue."

I see people acting like in London every day, a good number of them apparently without homes.

Another, perhaps telling point is that if these reports were compiled before Mr Menezes was shot, they provided the Met with their red herring about their 'suspect' wearing an unusually bulky coat.