I think this is just the tiniest bit of spin here.
In New Zealand, like the UK, police don't regularly guns. Most officers aren't trained with firearms. You have a number of elite armed response units who are. In addition to the various piracy offences, Kim is also charged with possessing an unregistered firearm. Apparently he also had some legal, registered firearms. There seems to be some confusion there, but the bottom line is the guy had guns.
Now, I don't know about you, but if you're going to arrest someone who you know has a gun maybe - just maybe - you'll want to send some officers with guns as well. Because even if it's the smallest, tiniest chance things are going to kick off you don't really want to be at a disadvantage.
And since your regular officers don't carry guns you send along your specially trained officers.
So you can make a very good argument that the guy shouldn't have been arrested. But I'm not totally convinced you can have a go at the police for sending some armed officers along to arrest somebody who was known to have guns and was also known to be a flight risk.
I believe they carry guns to all arrests where the person is known to be a violent offender. I've witnessed this many times. Never seen them draw their weapon though.
However, the way this arrest was carried out is completely over the top. Like his bodyguard said, he probably would've given them breakfast if they'd knocked on his door.
i joined eff yesterday. i don't have a clue about megaupload [this is just something that reminds me of a much more general problem], but something is clearly wrong when commerical interests start to be "enforced" by counter-terrorism forces [and governments get strong-armed into passing laws and people have to launch campaigns to stop other laws and ...]. i don't know what else to do; eff seemed like one obvious player on the side of sanity.
https://www.eff.org/ [jeez; paranoid life - perspectives is flagging the cert as a bad one - anyone else?]
While police acting as goon squads for private interests is problematic, there is another larger problem here. Police departments everywhere are becoming more and more paramilitary.
In the United States, the Federal Government actually gives surplus military gear to local law enforcement. SWAT teams are prestigious to have and every municipality's police force wants one. Many universities even have SWAT teams now, using the Virginia Tech shootings as a rationale for why they are necessary.
The problem is that SWAT teams are so rarely needed. Spending all that money on training for something that is rarely used is hard to justify. All that cool gear can't go unused. Plus, police officers on these teams tend to want to play special forces soldier. We get mission creep. It starts with drug warrants. Officers, "based on training, knowledge and experience," state that "drug dealers tend to be armed." And anyone involved with drugs is a dealer for the purposes of drug warrants. So, using the surprising and overwhelming force of a SWAT team is necessary for "officer safety." Eventually, SWAT teams graduate to serving nearly all warrants. Some SWAT trainers recommend this for practice.
If you follow the news on this issue, wrong-door SWAT raids are a daily occurrence. Innocent people are terrorized. Innocent people die because of poor trigger discipline or mistakes in the heat of the moment. Sometimes, police are confused for home invaders and they are killed in self-defence. And the shooter is then facing capital murder charges.
SWAT raids create volatile situations. Unfortunately, the alternatives aren't as glamorous.
It took a lot of "think of the children" politics to get to the place where we send armies after white collar criminals... and then nobody thought of the children, bashing into the nursery and pointing assault rifles at them. I'm just glad they decided not to use the dogs.
My point is that the police have become so militarized that it has become unreasonable (and there's little difference between SWAT and military). I have kitchen knives in my house. Am I an armed suspect that would require 20 men in full armor with assault rifles, vehicles that are essentially APC's and friggin' air support to take down?
Not to mention the possibility of taking 5 minutes to think about a safer way to apprehend him (perhaps wait until he leaves his house, or at the airport clearing customs?) instead of "storming the castle" (where they knew there were young children) as it were? The fact that they thought there might be a shootout and they knew the kids were there makes their actions doubly unreasonable.
It happening more in every arrest, in just about every country. The police have been given new toys. They want to play cowboys and indians with them.
Did Kim Dotcom ever leave his house? Could it possibly have been cheaper, safer, and easier to, say, pull over his car and arrest him on the side of the road? Wouldn’t that also leave Dotcom less cause and opportunity to activate Megaupload’s alleged self-destruct mechanism?
These accounts are strikingly different. I'm sure the true lies somewhere between "he was locked up in a safe room with a sawed-off shotgun" and "all you had to do was ask".
I don't really know about that dumb waiter though. It certainly does not look like the entrance to a safe room and I'm not even sure Kim could fit through it.
I think another aspect to consider is that even as someone as controversial as Kim you don't expect to get raided by a helicopter flotilla. It even somewhat surprises me that he didn't had a more solid defense built up, e.g. at least a 24h guard staff.
The "terrorism" aspect is quite easy to construct. There are a bunch of pictures around with him holding a gun and some even having an (inflatable) tank in his garden ( http://imgs.sfgate.com/n/p/2012/01/31/c007af25-a097-4eda-839... ). In today's over-terrorism craze situations like these make a good case to finally make use of all the overstocked terrorism gear and demonstrate its usefulness.
There were weapons on the property and Kim made sure everyone knows that and he had (armed?) bodyguards and was obviously prepared for whatever assault that might occur on his property, hence the "plan" where to take and hide him. Let's just say that those two facts are enough to put this case out of the regular patrol officers' yard into the hands of "some-sort-of special ops" unit. What would LAPD do if they have to deal with a suspect locked up in some place, with guns and bodyguards? They would sent SWAT and run a boat anchor through the wall, just like we saw in the movie we downl... saw in cinema.
Why is it so extraordinarily strange then that the New Zealand police sent their own special unit? Quote wikipedia: "...formerly known as the Anti-Terrorist Squad, is the full-time tactical and counter-terrorism group of the New Zealand Police." A police unit was sent, not the military. And they probably just have that one unit, so that unit has to counter actual terrorism AND measly secure private property with armed douche bags on it.
So, they sent a team of specialists to take control of an unknown situation with an armed suspect - sounds very rational and calculated, exactly what any efficient police would do. You do not endanger regular patrol officers in potential close-quarters gun fights.
And to claim now that Kim would have invited them in and talked to them is completely besides the point. An arrest warrant was out on him, the police had to deal with it and it is not for Kim to "negotiate" or comment on how he would have dealt with being arrested. His potential hospitality is irrelevant. He was a suspect, he was knowingly armed with bodyguards and they had to seize him - they obviously decided this arrest was more than an average patrol officer should handle. End of story.
Everything else is nothing but speculations and propaganda and feeds right into the natural suspicion that a lot of US Americans seem to have of the police. As a European, I am glad they are there and do their job. Was it a bit "too much"? Probably... but that unfortunately comes with the terrain.
And I am speaking as a former paramedic who has seen a similar situation and was glad we had the police special ops there to secure the apartment before we could do anything about the patients in there.
In New Zealand, like the UK, police don't regularly guns. Most officers aren't trained with firearms. You have a number of elite armed response units who are. In addition to the various piracy offences, Kim is also charged with possessing an unregistered firearm. Apparently he also had some legal, registered firearms. There seems to be some confusion there, but the bottom line is the guy had guns.
Now, I don't know about you, but if you're going to arrest someone who you know has a gun maybe - just maybe - you'll want to send some officers with guns as well. Because even if it's the smallest, tiniest chance things are going to kick off you don't really want to be at a disadvantage.
And since your regular officers don't carry guns you send along your specially trained officers.
So you can make a very good argument that the guy shouldn't have been arrested. But I'm not totally convinced you can have a go at the police for sending some armed officers along to arrest somebody who was known to have guns and was also known to be a flight risk.