Resisting the Temptation to Blame the Police

Of course the Norwegian police did some things wrong on Friday, and of course there are crucial lessons that could be taken from Friday's atrocity. Making sure police commando boats actually work would be one such lesson. But the desire to blame the police seems to be to miss the point of what actually happened last Friday and who is actually to blame.

Breivik may be insane (surely the most accurate description of his motivations to date, and from his own lawyer to boot) but that doesn't make him stupid. And he knew exactly what he was doing. The general feeling seems to be that this attack was planned over several years, and during those years what Breivik set up was a massive distraction designed to get the attention away from his real target - the youth camp on Utoeya. He knew - just as almost every now knows, in retrospect - that if you plant a massive bomb in the heart of a country's government district then what will tend to happen when that bomb goes off is that the police, and the other rescue services, will rush to both investigate and carry out search and rescue operations in the area affected by that bomb.

Which is precisely what this evil man wanted. The rescue services were distracted, giving him more time. That distraction allowed him to turn up in his police uniform on the island, apparently a figure representing what was at the time a very welcome form of security. Which then allowed him to start his murderous operation on Utoeya. And the very fact that the youth camp was on an island made him even more effective in his rampage - his victims had the option to hide and potentially die, swim away from the island and potentially die, or just plain die. The island location also made it immediately more difficult for the police to reach him and to save his potential victims. Yeah, a boat didn't work and a helicopter crew were on holiday. But take any relatively remote island in this country and ask yourself if something similar happened on that island how quickly the armed response units could reach that island.

I dare say the next time a bomb goes off in the Western world, the word will go out to all vulnerable areas and meetings (such as a youth camp of the party leading the government) that they should only let those with identification or who are already known gain access to those areas/meetings. And if this lesson is understood and actioned, then there can be no doubt that it was a lesson learned in possibly the most horrific circumstances possible. But the truth - the dark, malign truth that many people would do anything to avoid - is that this sort of thing cannot be stopped. Especially when the perpetrator is willing to use and abuse the uniform of a police officer to complete his murderous agenda.

Yeah, the police could have done things differently last Friday - I have no doubt that this will be the general conclusion. But the very fact that their attention was deliberately distracted by a madman from Utoeya by a bloody great bomb in Oslo should be acknowledged. After all, only one man truly knew that the carnage in Oslo was only the start, and that the eight people murdered there was only a distraction from a much wider atrocity about to start on an idyllic looking island elsewhere in Norway.