This is going to be incredibly corny, but for some reason I thought of this quote from 'I, Robot'.
"Sarah only had an 11% chance. That was somebody's baby. 11% is more than enough. A human being would've known that."
I'm honestly not sure how I feel, I have no clue how I would have responded in either the father's or the officer's shoes, and I think I agree with the cop's actions, in the end. Still, it was his father. It sounds as though the fire was so bad the boy's death was almost a certainty either way, and it also sounds like going back in was indeed a suicide mission, but there was at least a chance. A father trying to save his child would, I'm willing to bet, probably accept 11% or 5% or even 0.1% odds if he doesn't know for a fact his son is already dead - if for no other reason than to save himself a lifetime of wondering what he might have done differently. Which, I suppose, brings us back to the fact that the cop did the right thing by both saving the fathers life (probably) and also relieving him of the guilt of deciding not to go in by instead incapacitating him. My rambling point being, I think I agree with the cop, but on the same token, part of me sees the merit in attempting an incredibly unlikely, dangerous and probably fatal rescue if there was even a tiny possibility the son was still alive and savable.