Would You Be Willing to Break Rules and Endure Severe Punishment in Order to Save Lives?

Yesterday morning a shocking French parliamentary report revealed that dozens of lives could have been saved in the Bataclan concert hall terrorist attack if part of the French security forces had not blindly adhered to standard procedure.

 A Quick Summary of the Facts

When the Paris police department arrived at the Paris concert hall on the night of the attacks they were armed with only handguns, while the aggressors were firing powerful automatic weapons. As a result of being completely overpowered, the police was not initially able to stop the ongoing massacre.  As luck would have it, however, there was a unit of well-armed military personnel stationed nearby--and a few Paris police officers rushed there in order to ask for help with the situation. However, when police got there, the military told them that everyone would have wait for permission from military headquarters in order to assist with the attack. Permission was asked but received no response.

 Then, the police officers decided to try another tack. They begged the military to loan them their weapons so that police could go in and stop the killings themselves.  Again, the military denied their request because military code explicitly forbids soldiers officers to part with their weapons without prior permission from headquarters.  Again, because headquarters was slow in responding and the military officers did not feel comfortable breaking the rules, the killings continued for at least another good half hour before the police were able to take control of the situation.

 What the military officers did by denying the Paris police help with the attack on the Bataclan concert hall makes little sense from a practical, moral and commonsense perspective.  However, from an administrative and bureaucratic perspective, their behavior was absolutely exemplary. The military officers followed the rules and regulations to the letter. As result of that mindless, yet entirely predictable behavior, many died unnecessarily.

 But can you really blame the military officers for their unbelievably bad decision to wait for headquarters to give permission to help the police in this urgent situation?  What would you have done in their place?  Are you sure you would have the guts to break military law and risk being court-marshaled in order to help out the Paris Police Department?  Have you ever been in a situation where you followed the rules rather than your better judgment, only to regret deeply it afterwards?  The bigger question: How do we live our lives with a health respect for rules without collapsing toward idiotic and dangerous blind obedience to them when under intense pressure?

In the meantime, I am sure that government authorities will do their best to prevent such disastrous decision-making from occurring in the future. Predictably, they will put together a set of new and improved of rules and guideline for military cooperation with police in emergency situations. Because of that sensible tweaking of rules, they likely will convince themselves that they have done all they can to protect the public--because when rule-based decision-making fails catastrophically, what do you do?  Come up with new and better rules, of course.  The obvious and sensible idea of giving permission to intelligent adults to break rules and make smart decisions under duress won’t likely be part of any future solutions, unfortunately.