Commonalities: Binghamton and Natasha Richardson

[ Mark Steyn, Corner ] A few days ago in The Corner, I mentioned the South Yorkshire Police, who sat outside watching as a young couple and their children burned to death, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who sat outside a Greyhound bus for four hours watching a cannibal slice body parts off his victim and eat them. Now from Binghamton:

One receptionist was killed, while the other, shot in the abdomen, pretended to be dead and then crawled under a desk and called 911, he said.

Police said they arrived within two minutes...

Police heard no gunfire after they arrived but waited for about an hour before entering the building to make sure it was safe for officers.

What's the point of calling 911 if they arrive within two minutes and then sit outside for the rest of the day to "make sure it's safe"?

Why did the police wait? I think it's probably because it is no longer the job of the ordinary cop to do these sorts of things.

Major shootings, hostage situations, the big stuff are now taken care of by specialized police. These days would an ordinary cop be praised or fired by his superiors for trying to talk a hostage-taker down? I think they would probably be put under investigation for trying to interfere in something they weren't trained for and for which the cop is supposed to wait for a specialist. Even if the cop did talk the hostage taker down, he'd probably still get in trouble for not following proper procedures.

Last month Natasha Richardson died for similar reasons. The doctors had a CT in their hands within 2 hours of the accident. That CT would have shown the bleed. The procedure to fix it is fairly straightforward; you basically drill a bung hole in the skull and let the pressure relieve itself.

A few decades ago, this kind of thing could have and would have been done by a common general practitioner. But today, you need a highly trained specialist with a whole neurosurgical team just to tap a hole in the skull--something people have been doing successfully for millenia, I might add.

Natasha Richardson died because overspecialization in the medical field has tied the hands of general doctors. Any doctor at her hospital should have been able to save her, instead they all held back and waited too long to get her to a specialist.