Foreign Perspectives

The sleepy village of Rothbury has largely been cut off from the outside world for the last few days and now finds itself knee deep in TV crews this evening thanks to Raoul Moat being finally cornered in the village.

As you might expect the relief is clear within the village and behind the camera crews there seems to be very much a carnival atmosphere with the end game of this chase taking place just a few hundred yards beyond. That might seem unseemly to some but these people have essentially been confined to their houses and in fear of their lives for several days now so it’s very much a relief to be close to returning to the normality of their sleepy village once more.

The police negotiating team are hard at work. Some might ask why bother but it’s just natural for the police to try to avoid further bloodshed whenever they can. Thus the negotiator will be attempting to build up a sense of trust between them and Raoul through agreeing to simple things like providing him with something to eat and drink. What they’re building to is to get him to hand over his weapon of course but that will take time in what seems sure to be a tense situation so don’t expect major developments anytime soon.

What does seem a bit over the top is the sheer number of police officers and vehicles although that should be set against the growing numbers of press and bystanders rather than the lone gunman.

As we move towards the hours of darkness they’ll be keen to move all those bystanders a little further back. You might think that floodlighting the area would be the way to go but that’s likely to increase tension still further and is therefore something to be avoided.

In that it’s a lone gunman, the final stages shouldn’t be too many hours more. After all, he’s going to have to sleep at some stage. However, that very tiredness will make the negotiations that little bit more difficult especially as we’re dealing with someone who seemed set on suicide earlier.