The dramatic standoff in Kansas City between a SWAT team and some naked guy wandering around with a bow and arrow, which riveted the nation for approximately zero minutes this week, ended peacefully late Monday night. The Kansas City Star reported that officers were able to use a Taser to subdue the man, which I think usually counts as a "peaceful ending." It's peaceful compared to bullets, at least.
According to the report, police were called about 9:30 p.m. "after someone reported that a naked neighbor was knocking on their door." As usual, the naked neighbor knocking is never the naked neighbor you wish was knocking, and this one was especially not welcome because he was carrying something sharp. When police arrived, they said the man was "throwing pieces of food to imaginary animals" before going inside his own house. How police knew the animals were imaginary, as opposed to hiding or out roaming the neighborhood, was not explained, although I'm not saying they were wrong. Maybe it was imaginary food?
The SWAT team (or "tactical officers," which I think is the same thing) was called after the man "shot an arrow out of a window towards the area where officers were hiding," police said. This seems like yet another example of the ever-increasing and disturbing tendency to militarize our police forces and call in SWAT teams where they may not really be necessary—for example, where the suspect is armed with Stone Age weapons. On the other hand, if the officers on the scene don't have the training to successfully hide from somebody who throws food to imaginary animals, then maybe you do need the tactical guys. I don't want to second-guess the experts on this one.
The report says that police "called an Operation 100" after the bow shot, which I was sort of hoping was police code for "hide further away" but turns out to be what KC police call a standoff with an armed suspect. To their credit, they didn't shoot up the place as sometimes happens, but rather were able to end the operation with a Taser in about an hour.
Previous standoffs reported here have included the three-hour standoff sparked by an unexpected price increase for Taco Bell Beefy Crunch Burritos, the one in Topeka during which the hostages managed to put the perpetrator to sleep by showing him Patch Adams (did he later sue them for this? yes he did), and this one where a New Jersey SWAT team was held at bay for 90 minutes by a cardboard cutout inside a bank.
I considered including this seven-hour incident in Kingman, Arizona, but I still don't think you can count it as a "standoff" if the guy inside slept through the whole thing and never knew the cops were there.
