Gentlemen, for those that look at my profile, you'll realise that I am a long time lurker on here, and I simply cannot remember if or when I have ever posted on PPrune, but feel compelled to do so to try to offer some idea as to what the crew may have been facing during the incident. To put it into context, I have considerable military RW flying experience in a variety of aircraft, but have no experience of Police Flying or the EC in question. I have been instructing on RW for 14 years.
Any malfunction that occurs in a relatively complex aircraft can result in a tragic loss of life, and it need not necessarily be a catastrophic failure. Some factors to consider here, IMO, are:
Night Operations - forgive me, but I think it needs re-iterating that malfunction handling at night is a complex business. The fundamental aspect of flying, particulalry RW when close to the ground, is the utilisation of visual references in order to judge required control inputs which will make the aircraft go where you want it to. Take away visual references and it become a very difficult thing to achieve (ask anyone who tries to hover over the sea - even daytime, or those that land on ships at night for a living). The point being that DTs task was immense in a) recognising the emergency b) reacting to it and c) attempting to identify a clear area in a busy urban environment. All this against a backdrop of, potentially, losing height (which really doesn't take long from 1000ft (if that's where they started from) when you bear in mind that in stable autorotation a medium weight helo will experience approx 1500-2000ft/min rate of descent. That would, and I'm generalising here because I do not know the height from which this emergency was initiated, give him between 30 and 45 seconds to identify a suitable area whilst dealing with an emergency. Not being on NVG would have further limited his choice of area to best guess - a flat, clear area, probably having to rely on the Radalt to judge height (which is of course giving intermittent readouts as the aircraft flew over buildings)
Also worth bearing in mind is that malfunctions often occur in a gradual manner. They may have been flying along and been alerted to a developing situation. This may have steered them toward a particular course of action (ie positioning the aircraft into wind - vital - and preparing to make an emergency power on approach. This would inevitably have meant initiating a descent, which would of course have then, ironically, have limited their options if the circumstances worsened resulting in an engines off landing.
Truth be known, there isn't a pilot in the world that deals with a malfunction the same way, the reason being that we all deal with high pressure scenarios in a different fashion. I have no answers as to what happened, but I can however appreciate the awful sense of diminishing options that the crew may have faced. A shocking accident that only serves to remind us of how fragile we all are.