Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"In my experience, serious commercial plane crashes are generally the result of a chain of very minor factors that align sufficiently to result in an accident.

"The apologies an compensation for the victims is certainly the decent thing to do, but the more telling difference here is that there is an enormous effort made by the airline, manufacturers and government to determine what caused the crash, and (often very expensive) remedial steps to prevent that problem from ever happening again.

"If police departments took this approach whenever they screw up and cause injury or death to innocent people, I would find it a lot easier to cut them some slack.

"I'm thinking that a good analogy here is the difference between private and commercial aviation. The accident rates for commercial carriers are so low that they are almost statistically insignificant, and are still trending down. The accident rates for general aviation (that is, amateur pilots like me) have been pretty static for many years. The sad thing is that the private pilots still regularly kill themselves because of rookie mistakes like failing to properly preflight an aircraft, or stalling and spinning from a low altitude. These would be analogous to the kinds of mistakes we're seeing the police make on these raids.

"In my opinion, law enforcement agencies in North America are still acting like amateurs despite the years of experience they should have amassed by now. If they took an approach that was more like commercial aviation, we would all be a lot safer, and probably more likely to trust police officers we interact with day to day."

-- GXT, 2009-06-29, regarding police raids at the wrong addresses. (Thanks to realinterrobang for pointing it out.)