Two things can obviously be true at the same time: that "police officers"† are improperly keyed up as if they're shock troops preparing for a battle, and that calling in a false report with the hope that it will provoke an armed response is effectively an attempt at homicide.
To me, the (standard) overreaction by the police makes arguments minimizing what the gamer did here even harder. Unless you live under a rock, you're aware of the controversy about armed police response in the US. Surely this gamer knew that, and called a fake report in anyways --- one involving an active shooter and a hostage.
I'm with Ken "Popehat" White: what the gamer did here is homicide. We can argue about the degree.
† really, in almost all cases in the US, "assault officers", and we should separate the two concepts, stop hiring new assault officers, and start hiring a new class of less-armed police officers
Later
It turns out there's already a concept in US law that captures this:
> really, in almost all cases in the US, "assault officers", and we should separate the two concepts, stop hiring new assault officers, and start hiring a new class of less-armed police officers
I don't see police accepting this, and it is hard to not feel kinda hopeless about the situation, since it is linked pretty tightly with the 2nd amendment.
An incredibly difficult - but more possible - response is to raise accountability for police officers and their actions. As it stands now, it is virtually impossible for a police officer to face serious repercussions for shooting someone, no matter how bad it was.
Seven years ago, in Detroit, a SWAT officer threw a flash grenade into the wrong apartment and hit a sleeping seven-year old girl with it, then shot and killed her. He was cleared of any wrongdoing and is still a police officer. In the case of Michael Slager murdering Walter Scott, there was video evidence of him shooting an unarmed man who was running away, then planting evidence on him - jurors refused to convict him, and it wasn't until he pled guilty to other charges that he actually had to serve time.
It feels like these things happen on a weekly basis, and judges and juries are perfectly happy to side with police no matter how egregious the shootings are. We, as a society, have basically said the police can do no wrong when it comes to shooting someone, and the consequence is that a lot of innocent people are getting killed. Until that changes, I don't see how the police will change their practices at all.
That's the point: the police don't have to accept it. We probably can't disarm the existing police force, but we can disarm most of them through attrition, which is something we need to do anyways because of the public pension debacle.
I don’t think the solution is to disarm the police. The reality is that it is facing an armed and rather violent population. The problem is rather that they behave like a bunch of trigger happy cowboys. The solution is rather better training, a change of culture and real accountability in the case of unlawful shootings.
Even in countries where the police doesn’t carry guns, the equivalent of the Swat will always do.
But Swat teams must be aware that Swatting is a thing, and should have no expectation when they break into a house to find fully rational people. It’s not a crime to be drunk at home, or to have taken sleeping pills and to not respond quickly to a bunch of guys shouting orders at you in the middle of the night.
I think that disarming the police would improve things even with no changes to civilian gun laws in the US. The US obviously has a severe civilian gun problem, but things are nowhere near bad enough to justify the trigger-happy attitude of police. The danger police face is drastically overblown, and homicide is a tiny portion of the danger police face on the job (more police deaths are from traffic accidents, health conditions, and suicide).
Policing is also becoming a lot safer, despite the rhetoric that things are getting worse and police are increasingly “under attack.”
For starters, we could reinforce the Batson rule [1] and mandate that any jury selected must mirror the racial and sexual makeup of its community, +/- 10%.
Having to prove racial discrimination in jury selection is an absurdly high bar, and usually impossible.
I understand what you're going for, but I think this idea would just reinforce the imaginary walls we use to group humans. The underlying idea is that X-people understand X-people, where X is some arbitrary group, but non-X-people lack the perspective they need. For example, we consider people with black skin to be a group, but not people with blue eyes, or people who can curl their tongues. Let's just work our way toward thinking people are just people instead.
The problem is that juries without a minority on them absolutely find minorities guilty at a higher rate than when one or more minorities are on the jury.
As the thread below noted, it's not fair to have historical conditions that produced winners (white men, countries with colonies, etc) and then make things more equal by saying "That's all over" and failing to recognize the results of previous injustice that are still embedded in our lives.
I could have offered other suggestions. I specifically said 'juries that roughly reflect their communities in racial and sexual senses'. I don't feel that's an unreasonably burdensome ask in pursuit of Justice.
How is that in any way relevant? How does that at all mean that black people better understand black people, or justify explicitly selecting a jury on the basis of something arbitrary like skin color?
So build a post-racial world by building up racial barriers and continuing the "other"-ness of people with different skin colors? I'm not trying to be a dick or strawman you, that's the only thing I can get from this comment.
Build a post racial world by acknowledging that racial barriers exist independently of your thoughts, seek to weaken them and repair ongoing harm. The most powerful group playing pretend isn’t going to fix a damned thing. Trying to pretend that everything is better now... please explain how you see this working?
Edit: Or just downvote and move on, that says something too.
Note about HN down voting: when replying to a post, the parent poster cannot down vote you. The down vote you were awarded came from another commenter.
At this time, this comment has positive karma. At any rate, complaining about down voting distracts from your very good point.
You might have difficulty empaneling juries if this were a requirement. What makes a good jury goes well beyond racial or sexual makeup. Also, in many places the jury pools don't match the community at large. This approach would therefore have the effect of jeopardizing the right to jury trial without really alleviating injustice.
A more fruitful approach might be to try to make the pools more balanced. Getting more community participation in the justice system seems like a very good thing at multiple levels.
I think we'd do better to, at least at first, start solving some of the reasons why our jury demographics are so skewed. Stronger protections for workers that need time off (there should be no work hardship exemption and employers should be forced to give jurors full pay for the duration of the trial) would be a good start to not discriminate against poorer people who can't take off from work without struggling financially or getting fired. Also, criminal convictions shouldn't disqualify someone after they've served their sentences. The current system disqualifies a disproportionate number of minorities and that leaves predominantly-white juries to convict even more minorities...a self-reinforcing cycle. Also, the SCotUS needs to recommit to the Batson doctrine to prevent prosecutors from dismissing minority jurors based on race.
Fair enough.. It is definitely an idea with a lot of merit. I guess I have three questions:
1) Do you think this is politically feasible? Being seen as "tough on crime" is almost never a bad thing in any kind of election, and what you are proposing feels decidedly the opposite of that. Further, even if you aren't disarming existing officers, they have unions and a fair amount of political clout.
2) Do you think you could find enough people willing to do this job unarmed?
3) I definitely see how this would lead to less escalation in a lot of situations (escalation seems to be the default behavior of police now), and it could prevent some of the high-profile police shootings that have been in the news lately. But it also seems like a high percentage of them (the one in this SWATting situation, Michael Brown, the 6 year old in Bexar County last week, Aiyana Jones) would be handled by armed officers anyway, so that only solves part of the problem, right?
I want to be clear that this idea doesn't have much to do with SWATting. What makes SWATting so evil is that it's deliberately designed to place officers in the scenario most demanding of readily deployed lethal force.
Having said that:
1. Yes, I think it's feasible. Not in DFW or Maricopa County, but test cases in places like Madison and Columbus? Remember: big cities already have people like this --- parking enforcement, traffic direction --- and most cities are facing pension problems due to the assault forces they already have.
2. Clearly we can find the people to do the work. TSA staffs unarmed people at checkpoints designed to catch armed terrorists. Big cities already put unarmed officials in adversarial contact with citizens.
3. It only solves part of the problem. But I'd hope that by gradually relegating assault officers only to those scenarios where escalation was known to be required going in, we'd eliminate the kinds of snap-judgement mistakes police make in routine confrontations that end up with firearms deployed.
I guess the one part I remain a skeptic about is whether or not people are going to be ok with it, much less demand it. It feels like the underlying attitude towards policing is the sticking point - the same attitude that lets police literally get away with murder would also prevent people from demanding unarmed police.
Perhaps I overestimate how pervasive this attitude is, especially in big cities. It is definitely something I'd love to be wrong about.
Commenting on 2, yes, it shouldn't be a problem at all. In the UK, police don't carry lethal weapons routinely. In fact, knowing a few of them who are active and a couple retired, even the use of a baton is usually not required at any point in their careers. They rely more on teamwork and communication than physical weapons. I also know an officer from an armed unit. He says he's bored 99% of the time as he's only of use to a tiny amount of call outs and has never had to fire his weapon while on duty in the public.
As to 3, the UK police do escalate sometimes, and I think some of their behavior is disgusting, but at least it results in non-lethal harm (and hopefully disciplinary action) when there are no armed units involved.
Exactly. Expecting police to go to an active shooter / hostage situation unarmed seems rather flawed. That said, I think many other situations police officers are in don’t warrant being armed.
I think that the majority of the population considers that these types of events are very unlikely to impact their own lives and they therefore don't give it much thought. Maybe if a law was passed that required all adults in the county to serve 16 hours of jury duty for every instance of a police shooting and killing an unarmed person then that would be enough of an inconvenience to force a change in attitude.
judges and juries are perfectly happy to side with police no matter how egregious the shootings are
Like many I watched Die Hard and Die Hard 2 over Christmas, and it struck me how deeply the rogue, trigger-happy cop is embedded as a folk hero in American culture. The real life John McClain is George Zimmerman or Mohamed Noor. You guys have got to stop making these movies if you want to make any progress
The average cop show also is a collection of civil rights violations, with some arguing that this makes people less likely to realize that when it happens in reality. (That's not just US series, but strong there too)
I remember an interview with a Vietnam veteran who said the most traumatic part for him was growing up with The Lone Ranger, where the good guys wouldn't do the things he was being told to do as a soldier.
Then I remember seeing 24 and thinking the entertainment industry wouldn't make that mistake again.
Don't blame it on movies. If movies disagreed with accepted culture, they wouldn't be popular. Qualified immunity and blue wall of silence exist not because of the movies.
Also note that Hans Gruber is not exactly an example of average citizen and was shown committing several murders (not to mention a row of other felonies including hostage taking) before McClane has even a chance to encounter him. This is exactly the case where police officer is justified to use lethal force - unlike, say, woman in her pajamas calling the police because she heard a strange noise in her backyard. Constantly confusing these two is exactly the reason why no sensible discussion happens in US public debate about it - it's either "police can do no wrong" or "always blame the police, even if the other side is Hans Gruber".
Those movies came out around 30 years ago. The first one came out while Reagan was president. We don’t really make mainstream movies like that anymore.
This got me thinking why police officers in the US tend to use gun as a weapon of their high priority choice.
Consider many people in the US owns gun, maybe it's because of those officers are fear of death (It's very normal) so they tend to act first to save themselves?
As an outsider, I don't think it's a good thing to allow people to own a gun. Because people are different in general, some easy to anger, some more likely to hurt other. It doesn't mean they are naturally bad, they may just need longer time to cold themselves down. And gun is too quick and lethal, ripped than chance from them.
If people need to protect themselves, maybe allowing them to own a taser instead?
You don't understand how culturally deep the 2nd Amendment is for many Americans. The right to bear arms is a foundational freedom, enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The country was founded in violent revolution and then expanded across a wilderness frontier. Firearms are a key part of that history. The view is also that people aren't truly free unless they have the ability to resist government tyranny. The 2nd Amendment has actually expanded pretty dramatically in the last two decades-- many states have expanded concealed carry and the feds have rolled back so-called assault weapons bans, and the courts have strengthened the 2nd Amendment as an individual right. You'll literally have a civil war if you tried to disarm the population.
Apparently you've never been to Iraq or Afghanistan. It's also interesting your empirical research methods have a terrible fear of analysing history..
Besides the above, how did that recent uprising in Catalonia work out...
Tweet, hold signs, vigils, hashtag whatever.. Without the blood of sacrifice and guns to make it painful, those people were really just pissing into the wind.
It's also important to remember that police go into what they understand to be life or death situations.
When we look back on these incidents they seem horrible, but if you give someone a gun and give them a reason to believe their life is in danger you're probably going to get deadly consequences. It's obvious to us that the cops life wasn't in danger in the instances you mentioned, but people are fallible and they may have brought past trauma or prejudice to the incident. It's probably extremely rare that a cop actually wants to murder someone and is looking for the right opportunity.
That said, if cops had better non-lethal alternatives to guns, we could save lives. Something that is more effective than tasers and works immediately at a distance. The cops objective in a potentially deadly situation should be to immediately incapacitate rather than kill.
I think there's an analogy here with banking, around the idea of securing transactions rather than securing identity. The police need to be a lot more sure that the information they're working with is solid before they take drastic actions, just like a bank should take a lot more care that what they're doing is correct when a transaction appears suspicious.
"Standard overreaction" by the police is to my mind a bigger problem than the homicidal intent of the fraudulent calls. That kind of overreaction is a force multiplier for anyone with ill intent towards the US, never mind immature, violent and mentally ill people within the US.
I don't disagree with the idea that there is culpable homicidal intent for the prank caller, of course.
All sorts of things are force multipliers for violently disturbed people: guns, cars, explosives, and yes fraud and deception. We should treat people who employ fraud to harm others the same way we treat people who use pipe bombs.
Police violence does seem like the "bigger" problem --- not that the difference tells us anything about how we should handle the ostensibly "smaller" problem. But I'll suggest that there's a "big" problem behind SWAT-ing, too: the way technology intermediates between agents and consequences, abstracts away externalities, reinforces the rationalizing techniques our brains use to salve themselves when violating fundamental inhibitions. In some circumstances, we even celebrate these effects, which seem to me far more menacing than a lot of mind-altering drugs.
> But I'll suggest that there's a "big" problem behind SWAT-ing, too: the way technology intermediates between agents and consequences, abstracts away externalities, reinforces the rationalizing techniques our brains use to salve themselves when violating fundamental inhibitions
At this point, I am not sure the people who go all the way to make the phone call to SWAT someone are somewhat detached from the consequences. I would put it on the same scale as loosening the bolts of someone’s ladder.
The intentions and consequences are clear, even if the “accident” might or might not happen and there is some indirection. The very fact they have to choose specific channels to make the call, or spoof caller id makes them explicitely cross the boundary of the “joke”.
Also I believe a sizeable fraction of Us is not beyond wishing someone’s actual death during a long enough period to act at least partially on it. I see it as human nature. But up until now we didn’t have a button in our hand to press it to kill any random person within some probability.
I believe his point to be that there is zero oversight on when SWAT is deployed, remember the police made the choice to go in guns blazing ready to shoot people. The fact that a choice like that can be made without strong justification is pretty horrifying.
I can't understand why this is down-voted. Maybe this is just an emotive issue; somebadguy's aggressive comment makes me think so.
Guns, cars explosives etc are things, and it is possible to regulate their possession wrt individuals that may misuse them.
A call to the police is a service, and is not the same kind of thing since anyone might witness a crime and need to call the police, even unreliable individuals; whereas few people need explosives (esp without a demonstrable need or credentials), and depriving an unreliable individual of e.g guns or a car, is unlikely to be as harmful to third-parties as limiting access to the services of the police.
In the very real sense that laws are regulations. Calls to SWAT are regulated through the law and backed by the force of the state. The mechanism is regulated by punitive measures after the fact, rather than some sort of regulatory filter, due to the nature of emergency telephone services.
> In some circumstances, we even celebrate these effects
The gang mentality that gets trained into police is problematic. They are told they are "warriors", they're told to use lethal force quickly, they're told that the sex they'll have after killing a human being will be the "best sex of their lives". It's sick:
> All sorts of things are force multipliers for violently disturbed people: guns, cars, explosives, and yes fraud and deception. We should treat people who employ fraud to harm others the same way we treat people who use pipe bombs.
You've conflated employing fraud with direct use of force.
Fortunately, the law draws a fine line between the two. You must prove that swatting somebody presents the same probability of death as detonating a pipe bomb. The truth is there is far more successful SWAT operations that doesn't result in death of innocent lives. Out of the SWAT pranks, only a few results in death. Therefore, it does not pose the same direct harm and high probability of death that a pipe bomb would.
> You've conflated employing fraud with direct use of force.
He's conflating employing fraud to harm others with direct use of force. Put another way, should it matter whether you caused harm (and I'm assuming that means physical harm for this argument) using fraud or whether you paid someone to inflict it?
I think perhaps you interpreted the harm from fraud he was referring to as financial harm, but this specific issue is all about fraud that caused bodily harm.
> should it matter whether you caused harm (and I'm assuming that means physical harm for this argument) using fraud or whether you paid someone to inflict it?
I think it does matter, for the simple reason that people who are willing to commit violence, up close, with their own hands, have a very different psychology than people who are willing to do harm but still (presumably) have the normal human instincts that make them not want to do it personally.
It's one thing to kill; it's quite another thing to be willing to (or take pleasure in) literally get your hands bloody. The latter is the mark of an dangerous psychopath.
The manner in which a crime is committed affects all stages of the legal process, including sentencing, jury deliberation, and those considerations will certainly also affect how a prosecutor decides to charge someone.
If you're saying that someone hiring a hitman has the exact same probability distribution of getting charged (let's say, given airtight evidence in both cases) compared to someone who pulls the trigger, that seems like a very strong and surprising claim.
If you're saying that 'in theory' both crimes would rate a certain type of murder charge, that sounds reasonable. Even then though, the prosecutor would certainly be able to tack on other charges (e.g. assault with a deadly weapon) that tangibly affect the outcome, from plea bargaining onwards.
And that seems correct? One of the goals of the criminal justice system is to prevent future crime, so to the extent that the manner a crime is committed reveals information about the future threat level of a criminal, society (and by extension, the legal system) should take that into account.
No, calling SWAT for the 100th time doesn't mean somebody is trying to get you killed. The victim was shot because he failed to obey orders:
> The cops didn't shoot soon as he opened the door. They commanded Andrew Finch to put his hands in the air, he did then put his hands down. They tell him to put his hands up again. Then he drops his hands by his side again. The cop that shot him thought he was going for a gun. Andrew Finch wasn't following directions of the police and the officer made a mistake and Andrew died, but he would be alive today if wasn't for those two morons on the internet that started the whole thing. The Cops legit thought a dangerous situation was happening and I believe they had good intentions. The amount of time to react to someone pulling a gun and killing you is milliseconds. It's bad that they shot him but the weight of all this falls on the people the winded up the machine and sent it to an innocent family.
If it was indeed homocide, the prosecutor needs to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the guy who called SWAT would be able to predict the course of events. The fact that he swatted others before and walked away will point to the fact that this was indeed a prank gone horribly wrong.
I'm just looking at the facts and the more they come out, I get that you are emotional but I'm not defending the guy, but that it's a stretch to say the person swatting was trying to get him killed, rather than say using pipe bombs or hiring hitman which show intent to kill.
It's clear there was no malice aforethought here which you repeatedly claimed without any examples or arguments to back it up.
I'm sorry but this is just how the law works in America or any developed country anyways. We can't have populism and mob mentality run the courts because they are not based on logic, evidence and impossible to separate bias from the truth. Am I happy that these guys will probably walk away? Absolutely not, but I am speaking from a place of clarity and reasoning, not turning to angry blood lust.
I'm not sold on that analogy. After all, fireworks are recreational explosives and we could count up a lot of destructive but non-malicious explosions as well as malicious but ineffective explosions (pipe bombs defused by robots or blown up in controlled fashion by bomb squads).
In the case of SWATting, the fraud is obviously meant to jeopardize the liberty of the targeted subject, and the jeopardy of their life at the same time is highly predictable, even that doesn't let the police officers off the hook.
I appreciate what you're trying to say but banking is not a great analogy for an emergency response situation. Banks do not face the same element of time pressure or lives being at stake.
How would "being a lot more sure" help here? If you mean the police should verify information more thoroughly before responding, then that comes at a direct tradeoff in response times. If instead you mean police should respond swiftly but not bring out the SWAT teams without more verification, then that could pose a (different kind of) safety issue for responders and potential hostages.
The issue here is more one of militarized police tactics. When you're trained to respond to any threat, any sudden move, with overwhelming deadly force, then deadly outcomes will happen.
When SWAT is deployed, the chances of someone getting injured are increased. Some gamers are calling in more SWAT false positives, leading to an increased likelihood of injury to the public.
To begin, talk of swatting someone ought not be sanctioned on these communication channels. Mod down the comments or suspend their privileges/account.
We agree, use of force is far to casual in the US, especially with the reduced rate of violent crimes.
In the time being, we could also start dealing with the false positives directly. For example, while SWAT is gearing up, the operator could ask who is calling and how they learned of the issue. Without that information, the odds of a false report go up and the trigger bias should be going down.
> For example, while SWAT is gearing up, the operator could ask who is calling and how they learned of the issue.
How exactly would that help? Swatting is by definition fraudulent callers claiming to have firsthand knowledge of an issue -- in this case, he pretended to be a hostage taker.[1]
Better hoax detection training is a fine idea but swatters are determined adversaries. It's going to take more than just asking a couple basic questions. And since real emergencies are often signaled by imperfect and limited inbound information, there is only so much that can be done to filter out false positives. I agree with Krebs that this is primarily a matter of police use-of-force training and stronger action against swatters.[2]
Shouldn't it be possible for the police to trace calls to 911? Sure, a serial swatter would use burner phones to hide their identity, but you can at least find out their position. If the phone is not in the same cell as the caller claims to be, that should be a huge red flag against deploying a SWAT team.
>>If instead you mean police should respond swiftly but not bring out the SWAT teams without more verification, then that could pose a (different kind of) safety issue for responders and potential hostages.
I think you're getting close to someone people don't like to talk about; we (as a society) seem to value the lives of police officers far higher than we value the lives of innocent "civilians". This seems entirely backwards to me - I'd strongly prefer that police officers effectively never fire first. Let the SWAT teams be very highly armoured and lightly (or non-lethally) armed.
You have it backwards. SWAT police move aggressively, at great personal risk, in order to save civilian lives. The idea is that there is a hostage situation and hostages are being actively killed.
How often is that idea close to reality, and how often is it a fake call, a no-knock warrant, or some other bs?
And are they actually taking great personal risk? Police killed a bit under 1000 people in the US in 2016 and had around 150 officers die (with lots of this vehicle related). Seems like it's riskier for people interacting with cops than the cops themselves.
Wikipedia sugggests that the bulk of SWAT deployments are to serve search warrants. This suggests to me that they're not acting at "great personal risk, in order to save civilian lives," and instead that they're acting as a deadly threat for compliance.
What the prank caller did the equivalent of unleashing a dangerous dog on an innocent citizen. That the police in the US is a dangerous dog is a problem in itself, but unleashing a dangerous dog to harm someone is a crime.
Bank will freeze funds indefinitely until they can make a decision.
It's not applicable to what the swat has to deal with: hostage situations, armed fights, bombings, etc... they can't hold on the phone forever and do nothing.
Is this even controversial for anyone beyond the most die-hard blue liners? Of course this is homocide, both for the caller and the shooter. If it’s not, then it’s hard to imagine anything is.
I am terrified to live in the US. The acceptance of illegitimate aggression is absurd.
The sanctity of saving innocent lives from state abuses is a hard fought lesson of history that we should not take lightly. Any time the state abuses this there should be serious consequences. Not a civil lawsuit paid out by taxpayer money.
> I am terrified to live in the US. The acceptance of illegitimate aggression is absurd.
That's a bit extreme.
First, because illegitimate aggression isn't just accepted by quite a lot of people, there is vocal debate and public outcry over it. Which is good.
Second, confirmation bias may be amplifying your fears here. According to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...), there were about 1100 people killed by police in 2016, and almost 1200 in 2015. And some portion of those were likely justifiable (and maybe even saved lives).
To get killed by police is not quite as unlucky as getting struck by lightning, but the odds are about 1/295,000 for the former.
You're both right. While it's extremely unlikely that OP would have any kind of injury at the hands of police in the U.S. (just like in any other country), it is not a secret that the U.S. suffers from an exceedingly disproportionate likelihood of dying at the hands of both fellow citizens and police.
It's hard to overstate how completely alone the United States stands when the stats are compacted: [0]
Australia had 94 fatal police shootings between 1992 and 2011. The U.S. had 97 in March of 2015.
England and Wales had 55 fatal police shootings in the last 24 years. The U.S. had 59 in the first 24 days of 2015.
>While it's extremely unlikely that OP would have any kind of injury at the hands of police in the U.S.
Illegitimate violence from the state (the police) is actually common enough that I have seen it many times in my life; and I am a White, law-abiding person who makes a point to stay out of trouble.
I feel extremely safe and have always had friendly encounters with police in both Europe and East Asia.
Note the official stats don't include scenarios such as the ones around Gary Webb or Ian Murdock. We won't ever know what really happened, but they're extremely suspicious.
This doesn't take into account beatings, getting shot and not killed, the police stealing from you (civil forfeiture), etc. Plus, police almost always get away with it. Terrorism is a smaller threat, yet we spend billions on preventing it and it's a major political issue.
In Germany, a country with more than 80M people and over a dozen cities with a population of more than half a million, that number has been around 7-10 per year in the last few years. The US number seems insane in comparison. Extrapolating by the population of the US (of course thats a simplification), the US number is still a factor of over 200 higher.
I fully support questioning the wisdom of that move, but the fact remains that the government that dropped the bomb(s) was not the aggressor in that conflict... in a world war where the stakes were ridiculously high. I think thats an extremely important bit to contextualize that event, when compared with say... Nazis, Hitler, and Auschwitz.
> in a world war where the stakes were ridiculously high
The context of a World War - even more so than that of any other war - makes it much easier for any government to do what it likes. Which most often means to kill lots and lots of people.
What I argue is that such context is very different from a time of peace. It's not really fair to include WW2 atrocities when talking about the number of deaths caused by guns in a peace-time.
The GP tried to do exactly that, which I disagree with in itself, and moreover forgot to include any other "government [that] murdered millions of unarmed civilians" in their argument. I don't have a strong opinion on whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a good or bad idea, I just pointed out that, in that single operation, the US government effectively "murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians". Again, that's nothing surprising, nuclear weapons are designed to do just that.
So, again, it was war. People die in wars. That's what the wars are for, basically. Now, since then, we're at peace (here in Europe, at least). The number (and rate) of deaths caused by guns during this peaceful time is overwhelmingly higher in the US than in Germany. That's it, I don't mean anything else, just that this is a fact and that mentioning Auschwitz is not a valid counter-argument for this.
You might want to reconsider these assumptions. There's a lot of history and economics to cover, but I don't believe it is fair to say it was so clear-cut who the aggressor was. When the US had economically ravaged China and then sent Perry to open trade; the Japanese had refused, so Perry went and fired a shell in Tokyo (Edo, then) Harbor. The Japanese then went through trials of trying to play along: one Japanese diplomat put it, 'When the West won the game of poker at the world's table, they then as the victors declared the game immoral,' which describes Japans geopolitical situation. There was economic warfare against Japan, first.
Germany also had economic warfare waged against them and this should not even be controversial--even mainstream "modern-day priests" like the hugely influential economist Keynes had said this.
That said the Japanese empire was an evil one, like most empires, but when the bombs were dropped on civilians the war was already over--that is why Eisenhower said "there was no reason to use those things."
Having had US police (unjustifiably IMO) aim guns at me[1] and having lived in a third world country, I'll take the US hands down any day.
Police violence is an issue but way overblown for most people -- violence from other citizens far outweighs the police risk.
Compare to third world countries where you can easily be murdered in broad daylight surrounded by people, over a few hundred bucks, and the murderers face very little chance of being caught, let alone convicted.
Of course the best solution is to move to a country with great demographics equalling no crime or police violence, but those are becoming hard to find.
1: Turns out if you report (online with no followup) one of your licence plates as having fallen off your $300 car, cops might do a "felony takedown" on you, your 100 lbs wife, and 1 year old daughter. This apparently includes aiming handguns at your head while giving instructions like "lift your shirt up from the top".
Of course the best solution is to move to a country with great demographics equalling no crime or police violence, but those are becoming hard to find.
Canada, The UK, Australia, New Zealand - those are the english speaking ones that meet your criteria. After that, most countries in the EU, Nordic countries, most countries in Asia would also be considered to have less crime and police violence than the US, while having comparable or superior social services and demographics (most but not all, countries in Asia - Duterte isn't making any friends recently).
Careful. As mentioned before in previous discussions (or really whenever someone implies nordic countries are monoculture) Sweden is not a monoculture. New Zealand, as an example (and my country), has a lot less crime (or at least, less violent crime) and it is approximately as diverse as the states. For my part, superior demographics means a similar melting pot society.
I have no idea what happened to the OP, but I have had my plate stolen and I did report this to the police. When I reported it stolen, they warned me that anyone caught driving around with it was going to get pulled over at gunpoint, so I'd better report it if I somehow found that it had fallen off or whatever.
I got new plates soon after that, I never found out what happened to mine.
Ah. Perhaps it was standard practice to replace plates on a stolen car with stolen plates from a non-stolen car prior to major crimes such as bank robbery at some point.
But if so you would think the criminals would learn to swap plates instead, as who looks at their plates that closely?
In my case, I reported it via an online form. I figured I'd get some sort of confirmation or response to take to the DMV. Found out what the standard operating procedure was the hard way.
This might be the wrong place and time to comment, but last year there were more than 37,000 motor vehicle deaths in the US. That's more than a hundred every day on average. It's reasonable to fear the road a lot more than police killers (or killers of any kind) in the US, even in light of this horrific event.
Unfortunately, calling this homicide requires acknowledging the fact that calling the police on someone is likely to result in them getting killed. And however obvious that fact may be, it's probably not something that the justice system (of which the police are a part) will be willing to acknowledge.
>Unfortunately, calling this homicide requires acknowledging the fact that calling the police on someone is likely to result in them getting killed.
Telling the police someone has murdered several people and is armed and has taken hostages is likely to result in SWAT responding with potentially deadly force, because that's what they're supposed to do.
That's not at all equivalent to a proof that "calling the police on someone is likely to result in them getting killed."
I understand the anti-police contingent in these threads tends to be strong, and the feeling is often justifiable, but let's not pretend what happened here is a typical police response, even in the US.
I'm British and the words you just wrote sound insane to me.
The key point here is that the threshold for the use of lethal force by the state should be much, much higher than merely an anonymous call. If that makes me "anti-police" then I'm very happy not to live in your great nation.
What do you think happens in a real scenario where someone has shot someone and is holding a group of other people hostage? You think they get some agents on a jet from Quantico to start collecting evidence?
That's what makes this crime so evil: the people doing it are deliberately trying to put the police in the worst possible scenario. Police need more training and better procedures and they are certainly abusive, but it's this exact situation --- when it's really occurring, and isn't just some troll --- that drives most of those abuses.
While SWAT should respond, shouldn't they cordon off the area and try to make contact? Actually going inside seems like it should be the last resort, after there is no response or there is observable probable cause or imminent threat.
Especially if the call is anonymous with few concrete details -- the police should consider why does this caller know the info they know? Why is the call anonymous or otherwise untraceable?
How many times have lives been saved by SWAT entering after a call like this vs an innocent person getting injured or killed? How many anonymous, untraceable calls to 911 have even turned out to be legitimate?
Not in the active shooter scenario. The standard approach now is to not even wait for SWAT, but to go in as soon as at least two officers are on the scene. The rationale is that active shooters usually stop killing people as soon as they get any kind of resistance, so timing is very important.
Of course "going in" does not mean shooting indiscriminately.
It definitely seems like some simple heuristics could help a lot in giving police a sense of the probability that it's a false alarm. They will of course still need to assess the situation, but systemic police accountability issues aside, harming completely innocent people is still no picnic for the officers involved, so knowing when the fraud likelihood is particularly high should help them calm down and take a more measured approach.
Apart from call tracing, I'd expect simple things like whether the caller stays on the line and cooperates with the dispatcher (vs hanging up immediately) to be quite predictive.
> when it's really occurring, and isn't just some troll
I don't know how often hostage scenarios as extreme as you describe actually occur in the USA, but I read about instances of 'swatting' constantly. Given the false-positive rate of such reports, it's no surprise that sending military-style squads to 'shoot on sight' ends in tragedy again and again.
> I don't know how often hostage scenarios as extreme as you describe actually occur in the USA
Often. Mostly domestic violence barricading scenarios, which are usually handled by front-line officers with sidearms and negotiation. SWAT deployment is usually discretionary at such a scene, predicated on an active shooter, and anticipates forced entry. In an active shooter scenario, front-line officers will typically defer to SWAT to force entry, given the risk.
But yes, it does happen. A lot of domestic violence ends badly.
A lot of domestic violence ends badly because police actions ensured that it would. E.g. instead of leaving the bastard the woman develops a sort of codependent relation with local cops so that every busted lip she suffers means the bastard gets a tag-team beatdown from everyone on duty. Nightly entertainment for the whole neighborhood!
I'm no fan of wife-beaters, but somehow every other nation on earth has figured out less violent ways of dealing with them. Yes, in many cases "the way" is to simply accept that wives will get beaten. Admitting this is no more an acceptance of police violence than admitting that not all nations are governed with perfect justice would be an acceptance of all of our damned wars. This is a "won't somebody please think of the children?!" level of argument.
I think a big compounding problem is the overall prevalence of guns. In most places domestic abusers aren't untrained gun nuts living in a macho wave-your-gun-whenever-you-want culture.
People can obviously do plenty of damage beating each-other with objects, slashing with kitchen knives, or whatever, but guns seem to lead especially often to escalation from shoving to instant death.
When police show up, if someone has a gun everything is a lot more difficult/dangerous.
I think part of the problem is a indirect result of the US gun policy. In pretty much any other civilized country is very, very rare that the police will encounter someone who is armed. In the US guns are everywhere. So the police constantly feels threatened for good reason. So to me lots of these issues are even more cost from the US not being able to move its gun policy into the same century as every other civilized country.
I get the point about guns being important to protect against a fascist government, but then I literally see a p protest march by Nazis armed with assault rifles...
I want to have the right to feel safe knowing that random people around me won't be carrying weapons made for the sole purpose of killing people.
"The government" - that's supposed to be the way we organize ourselves and stand up together to above things we believe in as a nation. While that's not always working well talking about it as if its given that it's a malevolent, suppressive regime is only going to make things worse. The US finally needs to do its wild West mentality and arrive on the 21st century with the rest of the civilized world.
Respecting any right comes at a cost in human lives. We should think very carefully about which things we consider so important as to be worth elevating them to that kind of absolute.
The cost:benefit of the second amendment is way out of proportion, IMO.
It's ok, nationalism makes some people emotional, take a deep breath and calm down.
I don't actually disagree with you. The use of lethal force was the mistake here, but the presence of force was justifiable. The problem is how easily one seems to lead to the other. What should have happened is the police realizing their force was unnecessary and then standing down.
Also, if someone were to call in, say, a terrorist threat or a bomb threat in Britain, someone would show up with guns there as well. You know, because Britain also has their equivalent to SWAT teams. With guns. That they shoot people with.
The British 'firearms units' aren't trained to bring aggression to a situation. They're trained to properly identify targets before shooting, knowing that they will be required to justify their actions in court. Completely different to SWAT team training in the US. Here in the UK, an officer shooting someone dead as soon as they answer the door won't fly in court. The number of police killings in the UK vs US is relatively less controversial by a significant margin.
UK armed police shot and killed and unarmed, innocent man in 2005. Nobody was charged or had to justify their actions in court. It happens far less often but when the situation does arise, it's not obvious British police are better trained and react better. What does work is the policy of restricting both firearms ownership and the number of armed police.
The fact that you didn't even need to know his name and most in Britain know who you're talking about says all you need to know about the scrutiny of it. Every time a British police officer discharges their weapon it is automatically investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
No, that doesn't, in itself, say anything about the degree or quality of scrutiny. It just says the events are so rare, they're memorable. Officers discharging their weapons are reviewed in the US as well.
If you're referring to the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting, then there were weeks of hearings where the police and officers involved had to justify their actions.
There was a very long coroners inquiry on this shooting. In this coroners court the shooters had to explain in details. Yes, they got the identifications wrong, but this was not after some random telephone call, but after four suicide bomber had filled dozens of people.
I think the balance is about right and nothing like the USA. More importantly the jury of peers, in the coroners court, thought the Met Police failed on Health and Safety grounds but not the individual shooters.
There are long inquiries and court cases in the US as well. Jury of peers, the whole lot. I'm not sure how the 'balance is about right and nothing like the USA'. When called upon in a moment of crisis, these people got onto a train and shot an innocent person in the the head half a dozen times, from close range.
The big difference is, there are fewer opportunities for armed police to screw this up. There are far fewer of them (heavily armed police are the exception, rather than the default) and they are not nearly needed as often (the citizenry is not as heavily armed). The policy that largely prevents the mistakes is what really helps, rather than having better armed police or better post-cockup inquiries (both of which, to me, seem fairly debatable).
American SWAT teams are also trained to "properly identify targets before shooting", and officers are held accountable through a variety of systems (even though we may not always agree with the conclusion).
We're not going to get anywhere with such silly caricatures, and they are dangerous in themselves -- just ask Dallas. May be something to keep in mind while we're on the subject of indirect culpability.
I'm not sure where you thought I was being nationalistic. I stated my nationality to make the context clearer. My country is an odious cesspool in many ways. We're just lucky not to have a fully militarised police force.
That isn't the problem (at least primarily). Claiming that there is a serious hostage situation with the possibility of serious violence (perhaps even a potential murder) seriously escalates the risk and hostility of the situation. I didn't say potential hostility; the claim itself directly increases the perceived threat level of the situation, even if it isn't credible. A team of people responding en masse with weapons[1] at the ready further escalates the tension of the situation and the hostility of the room, even if their weapons are never used.
The end result is a very tense situation with everyone - on all sides - ready to jump at anything that might be a threat. Fortunately there is at least some evidence[2] that in "most" swattings, cooler heads eventually prevail and nobody gets shot. However, evaluating potential threats is always going to use the faster but less accurate "System 1"[3][4]. The higher the tension level, the greater chance that someone's mind will make a serious mistake, which can easily result in a cascade of everyone recursively responding in ways that probably compound the mistake, which is when people tend to get shot/stabbed/beaten/whatever.
The solution is that there needs to respond to situations that are less likely to escalate the situation to greater levels of hostility. Once it turns into a "charlie foxtrot"[5], it's too late. However, if a streamer's prior notification to the police that, should any threat be called in regarding their address, if the police pound on the door, they can expect the stream to walk outside peacefully to talk, maybe the dangerous escalation where they breaking down the door and pointing guns at everyone can be avoided. They can always fall back to that strategy if nobody comes out to talk.
edit: added [2]'s missing footnote and URL
[1] of any type - a bunch of people storming a room armed only with batons is still an escalation of violence.
> someone has murdered several people and is armed and has taken hostages
Should this not be responded to with lethal force available? You're going to get a lot more people killed that way. Obviously the error rate should be reduced as much as possible, but a naive approach of ignoring calls without a lot of validation would be a disaster.
I imagine it would be really easy to fake some verification anyways, and coordinate a SWAT with two callers.
It would be negligent to respond with anything less than armed force to a threat like this. The police can and should be better trained, but that's different than failing to send an armed response. I would be surprised if a similar threat would be brushed off in the U.K.
That fatal police shootings, regardless of justification, are homicide is uncontroversial. It's somewhat more controversial to characterized a false report leading to a fatal shooting as a homicide by the reporting party, because of the necessary intervening acts in the chain of causality.
OTOH, some codes specifically address false reports of emergencies producing death, avoiding any need to address indirect homicide.
Assuming that the SWAT call itself was a felony, there could be justification for charging the guy who made the SWAT call with felony murder. I'll leave it to actual lawyers to determine the actual facts of this case, I'm just trying to point out that committing a felony due to which people get killed can, in some cases, lead to felony murder charges.
The judge and the jury care for the circumstances and the intent.
This case, a repeated offender (he did many calls like that) who made highly specific buggy claims (armed hostage taking with already dead hostages) with the intend to arm or kill the target (see his message) and a trace of everything (see twitter messages and recordings).
It's a perfect school case. It makes perfect sense to charge him for murder. Everything is the worst it could possibly be with the worst possibly aggravating circumstances.
Can't wait to see the proceedings. Won't be surprised if they make an example out of him.
"Homicide is the killing of a human being due to the act or failure to act of another. Criminal homicides include murder and manslaughter. Non-criminal homicides include killing in self-defense, a misadventure like a hunting accident or automobile wreck without a violation of law like reckless driving, or legal (government) execution. Suicide is a homicide, but is rarely prosecuted."
How can you call a swat call homicide unless the entire swat team is charged with accessory to murder, being wielded like a weapon?
If you're just charging the officer and not the entire swat squad, then you're admitting that that officer stepped out of line of what the swat call should have done. In that case, there's no homicide case against the caller.
In this case, ONLY the officer should be charged with homicide.
What is the evidence that the shooter (the officer) committed homicide? The article didn't give any--it only said the reason the officer discharged his weapon was unknown.
Like a mobster who orders someone killed. A hitman does the killing but the mobster is equally responsible.
But what about the Muhammad cartoonists in Europe? Drawing a caricature of Muhammad is not a crime in Europe, however it will result in angry reactions in the Muslim world, and people (often Christians) getting killed there. The cartoonists know that but proceed nevertheless. Are they in some way responsible for those killings? I’d argue not but many disagreed then. But drawing the line of where responsibility stops being shared is non trivial.
I'd have thought that drawing a cartoon depicting Muhammad and signing it "drawn by Christians in <insert target Muslim country>" would be a better analogy. Then yes, I'd say that the real authors were responsible for the resulting violence (along with the people inflicting the violence of course).
Not only that but the perpetrator is crowing about it on YouTube and other social media. He was more concerned about having to change his Twitter name. Absolutely no remorse. I'd call it 1st degree murder nothing less.
I'll double down on that one by saying most gamers know SWAT are trained killers that are more likely to use force than regular police. This is features in shooter games a lot. Especially in Call of Duty, the players have to regularly do "breaches" that hit a room SWAT-style with bad guys shot as quickly as possible. Many breaches also simulate chaos that happens where player initially has trouble identifying friend or foe.
A CoD player who isn't mentally impaired or something specifically sending in a SWAT team on a target who is shot by the team should be charged first degree at the start. Similarly for anyone else that clearly knew what a SWAT team does from games, movies, or other media. Prosecution might act mercifully from there depending on the circumstances. They better know they can do first-degree, though, with enough locked up to hopefully be a deterrent.
I like your idea of hiring fewer 'assault' officers but we've got to stop giving the police the benefit of the doubt for being so keyed up in the first place, not least since the avalanche of video footage in recent years suggests that large numbers of them are also straight-up lying.
I do fully agree about the person who made the call also being culpable, but it's dangerous to buy into the idea that cops don't have any moral agency when they're on a call.
I don't give them the benefit of the doubt and do have a problem with how ineffectively they're prosecuted for their conduct. But it's worth bearing in mind that in these SWAT-ing scenarios, they're deliberately put into the one uncommon circumstance that drives practically all of the rest of their abuse. It's a singularly evil thing to do.
We’re going to hold strangers on Xbox live to a higher degree of accountability than highly trained officers. Sadly this makes perfect sense. These officers are the equivalent of trained killer dogs and this is what we should expect.
We're going to hold strangers who use their Xboxes as an excuse to attempt to kill people accountable, independent of anything else we do. Respectfully: this is pretty simple grown-up logic.
Trying to kill someone because they beat you in a game is significantly more evil than trying to kill someone because you mistakenly believed they posed a threat to human life.
There’s a ballot initiative here in Washington called I-940 that will do exactly what you describe if passed. It’d be great to see it replicated across the country: http://www.deescalatewa.org/
There was a story a few years ago around my area where a kid who was in trouble with his parents took his father's work truck without asking to get cigarettes. His father called it in as stolen to teach his son a lesson. Well, he ran from the cops and they shot him.
If you're going to send a group of people armed with guns into a harmless but tense situation there's at least a chance that something really bad is going to happen.
And for sure it shouldn't be like that, where cops can and will shoot you given any justification. But "swatting" isn't a funny prank at all and it's sickening that it's even a thing.
Why did they shoot him though? Isnt a human life worth more then some car? This behavior from the police is unheard of in Western Europe, and there would be a public outcry if something like that would happen here. I dont understand americans...
The police cannot shoot someone to save a car, even in America. They would however be allowed to shoot if they had a "reasonable fear" that their lives were in danger.
The question is why are American cops so much more likely to find themselves in these situations?
I think first and foremost Americans are just a more wild and criminal people. Our murder rate is much higher in general. So there are going to be many more situations that really do justify the use of force. You can't change this easily.
But the police take the real threat and hype it up. American cops do have to fear someone shooting them. But the police take that fear and train as if they are going to be under fire at any moment.
I've seen a police training simulator made by a major weapons company. The simulator had a scenario where the office spoke to a homeless man with his hand in a bag. You were supposed to make him show his hands. At the end the man points the bag at the office and shoots a gun hidden in the bag. It's a ridiculous scenario and it is designed to teach the office to fire his weapon because someone MIGHT have a weapon.
The cops are basically taught to shoot first and ask questions later.
The public isn't outraged because most of the people who get killed where already playing with fire. It is taking the publicizing of these instances were innocent people die to get people to notice.
Of course the scenario features a homeless man, rather then some well dressed white male in a suit. Gotta teach the police to enforce based on stereotypes, right?
America is very large, and within it there are disparate groups with very different opinions on the level of force required by police. Sometimes I think that America would be better off if it weren't so large. Then there might be more of a consensus on this kind of thing. As it is, there are just too many different levels of government (local, state, federal) and people with all kinds of backgrounds and viewpoints setting up these enforcement bodies (for example, FBI is federal, there are likely to be many people from out-of-state in that enforcement branch, also, those SWAT police officers were probably trained out-of-state, just a guess on that though).
> really, in almost all cases in the US, "assault officers", and we should separate the two concepts, stop hiring new assault officers, and start hiring a new class of less-armed police officers
The reason that cops are so nasty in the us is because there are so many guns. It's a different environment than other Western countries, and calls for different police tactics.
Unless guns are removed from the equation somebody is going to die. Either use a heavy handed police force, and civilians will die, or use a police force with a lighter touch and police will die.
1. use expendable police materiel to scout out the situation of a dispatch in advance of sending in any actual police bodies (e.g. police drones with fancy optics.)
2. send people in heavily armored rather than heavily armed. If you can make your SWAT team immune to bullets (such as by, say, encasing them in an Armoured Personnel Carrier), then they're not going to be feeling threatened and shooting anyone.
#1 is pretty universally useful. You can figure out who has guns and who doesn't.
#2 is more situational, because our best solution for heavy armor right now—APCs—have no good way of entering your tenth-floor apartment. This is why I'm constantly checking up on the progress of military robots and powered armor: the more invincible you can make something, the less it needs to actually kill anybody to do its job. The ideal here is a combination of robot-police and human-in-exosuit police that don't even need guns, because nothing they are sent to deal with is ever really that dangerous to them.
>>2. send people in heavily armored rather than heavily armed. If you can make your SWAT team immune to bullets (such as by, say, encasing them in an Armoured Personnel Carrier), then they're not going to be feeling threatened and shooting anyone.
It's way easier to figure out ways to pierce armor than it is to develop it. Green-tipped ammunition is more than good enough to pierce all common and easily-worn body armor today.
Besides, if you send people in heavily armored, they are going to feel threatened by nature and will be more trigger happy.
The motorcyclist has a gun in his pocket, and shoots the cop without warning.
How will your proposed solutions are going to do anything in that situation?
Sorry to rant, but this attitude of an amateur thinking they know better than all the professionals who have been doing their job for many years, and can propose quick fixes that will solve everything, is ridiculous.
I have a real hard time caring about cops' fears in such a scenario. Innocent until proven guilty is a time-honored maxim of the U.S. justice system, and a cop deciding to kill you completely invalidates that.
Is being a cop scary? Hell yeah and I feel bad for those folks, but if you don't want to constantly be in fear of your life, get another job.
Put cops who murder innocent civilians in jail. End of story. This shouldn't even be a debate in the U.S.
EDIT: Since I had the goal posts moved on me, I want to make it explicitly clear that a cop should be allowed to kill in self-defense, just like any other lawful citizen.
The thing about guns is that there's basically no moment that exists between "in fear for your life" and "dead." Either you shoot the other person while you think they're pulling out a gun (i.e. kill in purported self-defense), or you {get shot and die, nothing happens}. There's no moment, with guns involved, where you can know that someone is trying to kill you, without already being dead.
You've just created a pure strawman. Cops should never lose their rights! I am not making such an argument, and I don't see how you got there from my points. I would never argue such a claim.
The cases I'm talking about are not self-defense. They are like the story above. If A murders B, and A is a cop, then A should go to jail regardless of the fear A had in that situation. But this is not what happens in the United States. Cops don't go to jail for shooting perfectly innocent people because the cop can claim they were afraid for their life and thought that B had a gun.
If I'm a civilian, that defense doesn't fly. But if you're a cop, then it does work. That is a flaw in our justice system that needs to be corrected because a perfectly innocent man can be killed by the state and no repercussions are felt.
The state should never be able to kill an innocent man. If they are shooting at you, they aren't innocent. But if you think they have a gun (especially in an open-carry state like Kansas or Texas) then they are innocent and should not be killed.
EDIT: I am saddened by the downvotes. Does the state have the right to kill innocent people if those people own a gun? Doesn't the second amendment protect against this? I simply do not see the legitimate argument for allowing such behavior. This just seems like rabid tribalism for police.
I don't think I understand what scenario you're talking about. If you're talking about the scenario I posted a video of, I think you are completely off base.
If you're talking a cop straight-up murdering someone, and it getting covered up, then, of course, that's wrong.
I think there is a lot of gray area between these two scenarios, however. I also think if there was a ban on guns that would solve most of it.
The scenario at hand in the OP, where a cop murders a completely innocent man through mistake. I agree that a ban on guns would likely solve the problem in the video that you posted.
My point was that your video seemed out of place since the actual issue is that cops in the U.S. are held to a different standard for murder. If cops were held to the same standard, then they could be held accountable for their crimes and some of the public outrage would be alleviated.
If (for the sake of argument) the amount of guns in this country were significantly decreased via a ban and the police still held to a different standard, police would still be able to kill an innocent person out of fear for their life. Racial biases could also cause a cop to be more fearful in a situation and still kill an innocent person without consequence.
I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).
> My point was that your video seemed out of place since the actual issue is that cops in the U.S. are held to a different standard for murder.
That video was part of a specific response refuting the idea that if the cops just used drones and body armor, there wouldn't be a problem anymore. I did in no way intend to imply it was a counterpoint to the main story. I don't know why it's being perceived in that way.
> I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).
Yes, but that runs into the trade-off I was talking about. Either you have a heavy handed, "shoot first, ask questions later" style police force, or one with a lighter touch. In the first scenario, more civilians are killed. In the second, more cops.
Only by banning guns can you reduce casualties on both sides.
How would take the guns out of circulation already? There are millions of them out there and a whole tribe of diehards who will never give them up, and on top of this an entire industry around it -- the amount of people that die from this problem isn't worth the political capital and sustained decision maker attention needed to push this through compared to everything else that could be done using the same limited bandwidth.
That's not true. Guns are expensive. By far most of the guns are owned by people for whom they are a relatively expensive hobby, and the more guns you own the less likely you are to commit a crime. Note that concealed weapons licensees have a lower rate of crime than police officers.
Guns are an expensive hobby. You'll want to have several different nice guns, and lots of ammo, and some targets, and a safe, and time at the range. It's easy to spend thousands a year.
If you just want a gun for self defense or murder, they are cheap. Buy a Hi-Point or a Ruger LCP for $175 and a box of 50 9mm and now you can kill more people than you'd ever have a reason to.
I think it's only fair for law abiding citizens to expect to survive an encounter with the police. If a police officer is going to bring a gun to a situation where one is not needed, then the onus should be on them to accept more risk of death than is expected of a law-abiding citizen. Generally speaking, they're paid to do a job, and that job unfortunately currently involves the risk of death in the line of duty. That risk cannot be reduced at the expense of innocent people dying needlessly 'just because' an office might be shot. There are many jobs a person can do if they're not up to the dangerous environment some police depts have to work in.
In what situations are guns not needed though? I wouldn't even dream of doing anything other than manning a booze bus in a place where people are allowed to legally carry guns if I didn't have my own one.
It doesn't seem like the choice for most American cities is between armed cops and unarmed cops. It's between armed cops and no cops. Why would anyone sign up and expose themselves to that level of risk?
Killings by officers in US: 1140
Killings by officers in England: 3
Deaths of police by shootings in US: 41
Deaths of police by shootings in England: 0 (about 1 every other year)
Population of England: 54 million
Population of USA: 325 million
England has 7% of the deaths per capita compared to the USA. I couldn't find data on Germany, but I suspect it's similar.
In general, I think the idea of having people being able to defend themselves against the government is a good idea, and people having the right to have guns was a way to achieve that. But with the amount of power the government has nowadays, I don't think it's a justification anymore.
> Millions of Europeans were murdered by their governments within living memory, with records of similar atrocities going back hundreds of years.
Once your country has been around for a bit longer, you will also have a long history with plenty of atrocities to point back at.
How many native Americans were killed during the "colonization" of the American continent? Or do these not count because they hadn't been US citizens back then?
> Once your country has been around for a bit longer,
With the sole exception of the U.K., our government has been around longer than every other representative democracy on the face of the earth. Note that France is on its fifth attempt at a republic. We won't even mention Germany here.
> Or do these not count because they hadn't been US citizens back then?
They were mostly killed by European colonists operating under European rules, just like the atrocities that the European governments perpetrated on every other continent of the world.
> With the sole exception of the U.K., our government has been around longer than every other representative democracy.
I was talking about countries, not governments, these two are not the same, even tho the parent comment would like to pretend they are.
In that regard, it's still very dishonest to compare Europe, with its often centuries-old animosities between countries in a very small space, to the short history of the USA being a thing, in which it had mostly only had to deal with Mexico and Cannada in terms of "neighbor conflicts".
> They were mostly killed by European colonists operating under European rules
That's even more dishonest, it's not like all that changed and native Americans were recognized as such, as soon as the US got founded, and everything was perfect after that.
The US has the luxury of being rather isolated, thus the vast majority of conflicts can easily be externalized, usually to a completely different continent, with barely any real consequences for the US population. It's for that very same reason that the US been involved in some kind of "war" [0] pretty much constantly in its 200+ years of existence.
It's for exactly that reason that so many US Americans have been a-okay with these armed conflicts, as the vast majority of them never hit close to home. No US American alive today does know what it's like to have militarized conflict in, or at, their countries borders. Which probably also explains, in part, the massive overreaction to 9/11.
Now you can argue not all of them are "real wars" but rather "interventions" or "anti-terror missions" or whatnot, but let's be real here: That's simply schematics to keep on selling this state of affairs to a US population which is starting to be pretty fed up with sending their kids overseas to die for often very questionable reasons.
Protection from the government was justifiable before, but now that governments have gained so much power, guns in the hands of the citizenry aren't going to stop them.
So what's the point of still letting citizens keep them?
Here's the thing: every time a questionable police shooting happens, it makes national headlines. It's something that happens every few years, not every other day. And just to be clear: that doesn't make it ok or not a problem.
Am I missing something, but do the wordings in this article not indicate that the German government considers it OK for cops to shoot a suspect that is running away?
My German isn’t very good so there’s a good chance I might be missing something.
"Defending from the Government" is a myth. As long as you don't have enough supporters you are going to lose. Remember American Civil War for example. Did the guns help South to defend their "rights"?
Now compare other restrictions on liberties those countries impose and might be causing co-linear effects. Start with immigration policies, drug trade, and bordering countries.
This is the worst argument against anything, because it only logically follows that criminals won't care about ANY laws and therefore everything should be legal.
It doesn't matter whether they care about the law or not, it's about making it harder for them to get a gun regardless, and being able to confiscate them if we catch them. It worked in Australia.
And it didn't work in Mexico, Honduras, or Nicaragua, all of which have more in common with the United States than Australia does, and all of which have a) strict gun control laws and b) breathtakingly high murder rates.
Yes but are those murders by members of crime organisations or by some random that had a mental breakdown and easy access to his or a family member's gun?
You really think that the US has more in common with countries where gangsters murder with impunity, and paramilitary police death squads conduct extrajudicial killings?
They can be deterred by an arms ban, just like how it's almost impossible to buy a kinder egg with toy inside the US. See China, Japan, and countless other gun-free societies.
However gun culture and the prevalence of gun manufacturers in the US may make it practically impossible in the near term, but it definitely is possible.
"Whether you can say we're 20 per cent better off, 80 per cent better off, is subject to debate... But the bottom line is, if [the reforms] had the effect of reducing the number of guns that are available to Australians, it is strongly correlated with the gun homicide and suicide deaths on the wane."
"Data from the Australian Institute of Criminology shows the rate of homicide victims dying from a gunshot wound has dropped since the reforms came into force, but not consistently in every year."
"ABS data indicates the rate of assault by firearm causing death has also declined since the reforms, but not in every year."
The only credible argument against gun reform that article gives is that correlation doesn't imply causation, which is of course true. However, that's not an argument against the common sense position that gun reform decreases gun deaths, but an argument against this specific type of study (which OP didn't mention at all).
Depraved heart, aka depraved indifference is probably too mild here. Depraved indifference applies to situations in which the object is not murder, and may not even be gross bodily harm. It’s a matter of not caring that your actions have the predictable potential to end a life, such as firing into a busy club.
In this case there’s a clear case of premeditation and targeting of an individual, which is genuinely different from the depraved heart statute. At the same time however, it’s going to be hard to prove intent without relying on something like the statute in question. This really does feel more like murder one, albeit with a very unreliable weapon.
Yes - but lets step back and think about what we can do to prevent these things from happening.
TWO things went wrong here. Not one. The criminal who made the fake call was to blame and the police officer who shot an innocent and unarmed occupant is also to blame.
There will be always crazy pranksters. We have laws to prosecute them but they can be out of country, so we really cannot fix that.
But we can fix the second thing that went wrong. We can ensure that police is trained not to kill wrong person in hostage situations (i.e., it could be that there was some hostage situation but person going out was the actual hostage).
I'm with Ken "Popehat" White: what the gamer did here is homicide. We can argue about the degree.
In the history of media, there have always been a small fraction of maladjusted people who cannot distinguish the fantasy of the medium from reality. ( Here's an example from 1774. Search for "suicides" http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Storm_and_Stress ) These instances are rare, in the same way that instances of "swatting" are rare. There are multiple reports of such accounts, the damage each such instance produces is outsized for the planning and effort to pull it off, and the details are quite lurid. However, as a fraction of the general populace, the affected population is tiny.
I say this as someone who counts himself in the gamer camp. I have seen firsthand, adults who are gamers transfer the morality they learned in their online community -- where the consequences are only in the context of games -- to the running of real world organizations. People can be treated as fungible/disposable. Truth and morality doesn't matter -- if the system allows it, then it's all fair game. This is quite different from the false and long debunked notion that the fantasy violence in media can lead to real violence -- precisely because of the demarcation between fantasy game-world objects and real people and the real world. When you shoot a soldier in-game, people know full well it's not something real that just happened, and the object of such treatment is objectively not real. When someone "kills" a prostitute in a Grand Theft Auto game, there is literally no victim. However, when someone sh#t-talks another player, the human mind on the other end is quite real, and the emotional impact is intended to be every bit as real as if the event happened in person. The game is fantasy, but your fellow players are real human beings, and the moral experience gained through the interaction between fellow human beings is also real. So too, the moral experience gained through the running of an online organization of real human beings is also real.
It's widely acknowledged all over the internet, that the reality of the humanity of people on the other end of communication is somehow often forgotten. The real emotional toxicity of such behavior is widely acknowledged in the gaming community and over the general internet as well. These things aren't in question. The things that are in question are 1) what it means and 2) what we should do about it. Without question, the toxicity of online interactions is due to an online disconnect between communications and consequences. It is a failure of the mechanisms which regulate the social animal Homo sapiens. There are entire libraries of novels and nonfiction books about how the breakdown of aspects of the social fabric reduce human interactions to might-makes-right brutality. Perhaps it's progress that all of human nastiness moves onto the digital realm and away from the world of flesh and atoms. Certainly, the immorality and nastiness of even attempts to regulate/counter the general toxicity seem to devolve down to the same level as the general toxicity itself. Perhaps the existence of walled gardens is akin to the building of town walls and the rise of feudal lords. People in the real-world 1st world adhere to the rule of law and generally live by principles. People in the virtual 0th and 1st worlds are still in a feudal world of rule by force and of personal/tribal loyalties taking the place of principle. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the nascent moralism of today's online world often resembles medieval moralism in its acerbic irrationality and absolutism.
There's a lot here I agree with. For more than a decade, after "growing up" in what was essentially the computer underground, I've been grappling with discomfort about the way technology blunts and abstracts consequences.
A couple years back, some vulnerability researcher friends found a series of horrible security flaws in a very popular pacemaker brand. Does anyone here really doubt whether, if fully weaponized exploit scripts for those flaws made it to the wrong IRC channel, some depraved asshole would kill a stranger for "lulz"? I don't. Technology is amplifying something truly bad inside of us. Maybe it's worse than we think; see: the Fermi Paradox.
I think you probably underestimate how common SWAT-ing is. I have relatives with no unusual connections to the grimier communities on the Internet who have been SWAT-ed after disputes in video games.
>I think you probably underestimate how common SWAT-ing is.
It's easy to underestimate unless you've listened to it happen tens of times in a single hour.
The calls take two minutes or less, individuals have literally been competing on how many they could do within a single day.
"I'm at 725 5th Ave, I've shot a bunch of people and will shoot any police that come" Takes only seconds to say and would almost guarantee a heavily armed police response.
There must be thousands, possibly over ten thousand of these incidents every year.
>There must be thousands, possibly over ten thousand of these incidents every year.
It's a shame we can't have any reliable statistics based insight into exactly how often it happens because of the widespread policy amongst US police departments of not collecting and/or publicizing such data. The Obama DOJ was attempting to correct this trend (in a collaborative manner, which was the only available avenue) with many such departments, but cancelling that policy initiative was literally Jeff Sessions's first policy action as AG.
> For more than a decade, after "growing up" in what was essentially the computer underground, I've been grappling with discomfort about the way technology blunts and abstracts consequences.
Me too. I often wonder how much worse the results of a modern-day Milgram experiment might be.
This is one of those things that keeps me up at night. I've instructed my wife and children that if police ever come banging on the door, get on the floor, face away from any entry points, call 911 immediately and negotiate compliance over the phone.
One of the few things left in a modern American home that can stop bullets from modern firearms is a bookshelf full of books. There are a number of experts who advocate creating cover from gunfire coming from particular directions and making sheltering and escape plans.
>call 911 immediately and negotiate compliance over the phone
I'm with you until that part. For one thing, many SWATings result in no-knock entries - even if you're prostate and facing away, holding and manipulating a phone, and/or continuing to talk through a phone instead of responding to the verbal commands of the assault officers are both Bad Ideas imo.
Not all of them do breach and entry as the first course of action. Depending on what's been reported they may knock, they may stand out in the street and yell at you over a bullhorn, or they may try to breach the door. A lot of factors go into considering which course of action they take. The idea is to establish contact and negotiate a course of action before they try storming the house with itchy trigger fingers.
In any case, my advice does not preclude obeying orders if an officer is pointing an MP5 at you and telling you to put your hands on your head-- it's too late then, so just comply and hope for the best.
I think you probably underestimate how common SWAT-ing is. I have relatives with no unusual connections to the grimier communities on the Internet who have been SWAT-ed after disputes in video games.
Perhaps I need to look into that more. However, also note that not all instances of SWAT-ing are equal. How often do they result in fatalities? I'm sure that Sturm und Drang novel readings resulted in quite a few more family arguments and morose journal entries than resulted in suicides. Maybe I should rephrase that to fatal SWAT-ings.
How do you even rank SWATing incidents and on what continuum? That’s the same as suggesting not all incidents of having a loaded gun pointed at someone are created equal. SWATing is the moral equivalent of that loaded gun. Just because no one has died before does not matter.
I think this applies to that theory only if we assume an evolution of strong small group tribal mentality of species in all cases. For all we know, that could be a requirement for intelligent high-technology using life, but there's not a lot of facts about that to my knowledge.
> the toxicity of online interactions is due to an online disconnect between communications and consequences. It is a failure of the mechanisms which regulate the social animal Homo sapiens.
> Perhaps the existence of walled gardens is akin to the building of town walls and the rise of feudal lords.
> People in the virtual 0th and 1st worlds are still in a feudal world of rule by force and of personal/tribal loyalties taking the place of principle.
I think those are the money quotes right there. It's important to remember that there are many people that can remember life before the internet, and had to learn as they went, and those are the people that the younger ones that grew up with the internet saw as elders and the people who set norms. It will probably be a few generations until we get to a normal cyclical situation where the pendulum swings back and forth between online behavior, privacy, etc. We're not even close to knowing where there center/average is on these issues yet.
I think those are the money quotes right there. It's important to remember that there are many people that can remember life before the internet, and had to learn as they went, and those are the people that the younger ones that grew up with the internet saw as elders and the people who set norms.
As someone who has been using the internet since before the existence of the World Wide Web, the younger generations who came along happily ignored many of the preexisting norms and groupthinked/made up their own.
What's more, this sort of thing happened again and again in smaller, less global contexts. Programming is termed "half a field" by Alan Kay because it forgets its own history. There is a tremendous tendency for human society online to re-invent its own body of knowledge whole cloth, ignoring what has come before in a way that further propagates ignorance.
> As someone who has been using the internet since before the existence of the World Wide Web, the younger generations who came along happily ignored many of the preexisting norms and groupthinked/made up their own.
Well, nothing happened in a vacuum. It may have appeared they ignored it, but some behavior may have been specifically in rebellion of existing norms.
It's chaos currently, but I think we'll be able to identify trends in future decades.
> What's more, this sort of thing happened again and again in smaller, less global contexts. Programming is termed "half a field" by Alan Kay because it forgets its own history. There is a tremendous tendency for human society online to re-invent its own body of knowledge whole cloth, ignoring what has come before in a way that further propagates ignorance.
I think there are explanations for this. The main one being that Computer Science is much too large a field for areas people are expected to use it later. It's like not having Engineering as a Major, much less the subcategories such as Mechanical, Civil and Aeronautical engineering, and just expecting people to have a Physics or Mathematics degree.
Of course that results in a lot of people reinventing the wheel, because so much of what you actually were exposed to relevant to what you're doing comes from employees who happened to have interests in that area or your own research of whatever material you can find, of which it's all pretty new (relative to most other fields), and a lot of it may have been kept as trade secrets (or seen limited exposure which is why it's hard to find).
Of course this is all exacerbated by ungodly amounts of money being thrown at these people to develop something quick and get it out and iterate on it before someone else can.
Computer Science isn't half a field, it's the spoiled child of the sciences, where money smooths away all the problems and mistakes are never learned from. That doesn't paint a good picture for the future (and now I'm depressed, but at least feel I have some job security :/)
Yes, it's homicide for both parties. Considering that this is the first swatting death, I have to disagree that it's an _attempt_ at homicide, which would imply premeditation/first degree murder.
From the wiki page you linked:
>defendants commit an act even though they know their act runs an unusually high risk of causing death or serious bodily harm to a person.
That definition could apply to manufacturers and vendors of firearms and weapons.
Police (and soldiers) operate on unreliable information all the time. They should be held equally responsible. I've heard plenty of veterans deployed in actual warzones show more consideration for human life. Whoever makes the call to pull the trigger needs to accept the consequences. Being a police officer is extremely difficult and dangerous, and is compensated accordingly.
If the act of SWATing someone is a felony, then 'felony murder' could apply here. And if the act of SWATing someone isn't a felony, it really should be.
From the video seen online, it appears that the victim made a sudden movement when blinded by the lights after being confronted by SWAT. I think it was too trigger happy, but we have the benefit of hindsight. I feel terrible for the victim.
> Two things can obviously be true at the same time: that "police officers"† are improperly keyed up as if they're shock troops preparing for a battle
Agreed. People with agendas seem to try to twist this into an either-or situation. But both the "swatter" and the cops who shot are in the wrong here.
> and that calling in a false report with the hope that it will provoke an armed response is effectively an attempt at homicide.
Since the guy was killed, I'd say it was homicide rather than attempted homicide. But I think both the swatter and the cops should be tried for homicide and both should be found guilty or neither should.
> I'm with Ken "Popehat" White: what the gamer did here is homicide. We can argue about the degree.
I disagree. I am not a US citizen but where I live there are two things to take into account before qualifying a crime: the consequences and the intent.
>> Depraved-heart murder is the form of murder that establishes that the willful doing of a dangerous and reckless act with wanton indifference to the consequences and perils involved, is just as blameworthy, and just as worthy of punishment, when the harmful result ensues, as is the express intent to kill itself.
So prosecutors will have to find out about the intent.
“””
The rule of felony murder is a legal doctrine in some common law jurisdictions that broadens the crime of murder: when an offender kills (regardless of intent to kill) in the commission of a dangerous or enumerated crime (called a felony in some jurisdictions), he/she is guilty of murder.
The concept of felony murder originates in the rule of transferred intent, which is older than the limit of legal memory. In its original form, the malicious intent inherent in the commission of any crime, however trivial, was considered to apply to any consequences of that crime, however unintended.
”””
Thanks ! Really interesting topic. It says almost all states (including Kansas) of america follow that rule and expand on how some CW nations don't. Law is fascinating.
If I were to threaten to kill someone if you didn't stop posting on the web, and you didn't, and I followed through, would you consider yourself to be guilty of homicide?
Swatting involves sending anxious humans with military grade weapons to an innocent person's house. Those anxious humans are trained to kill. If you Swat someone, and that person ends up dead, you're the reason they died -- and I fully agree it should be treated as a homicide, manslaughter at a minimum.
In your scenario, you are a hostage taker. You've taken both me and the other person hostage with the threat of murder...
Fair enough, but I read the previous post as saying that simply knowing that your action could lead to someone else committing a crime made you guilty.
The institutions of the state act a lot more like a machine, because the people in it are punished if they don't follow orders. While "just following orders" has been established in the past as no excuse, I think we've also shown through Stanford and Milgram experiments that human psychology does act that way. Thus, I don't think it's trivial to convert it into a moral agent problem. It's more of a systemic issue.
Ensuring there are consequences for people who act immorally may help address the systemic issues, of course.
>Unless you live under a rock, you're aware of the controversy about armed police response in the US. Surely this gamer knew that
That seems difficult to prove. I used to spend a shitload of time on WoW where I wouldn't watch what was going on with the world. Some people lose touch by immersing in games, and Trump has taken over the news anyway within the last year. Not that I'm defending the dude, but wouldn't bringing up something that's difficult to prove hurt your case overall (IANAL obviously)?
There should be more than enough to simply get the guy on calling in a fake hostage situation, or hopefully homicide.
> false report with the hope that it will provoke an armed response is effectively an attempt at homicide.
that requires malice aforethought which must meet the following criteria in some jurisdictions in US:
> Intent to kill
Just because they called SWAT doesn't show intent to kill. Hard to prove even if the accused has threatened to kill the gamer because calling SWAT is not like calling a hit squad.
> Intent to inflict grievous bodily harm short of death,
Reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (sometimes described as an "abandoned and malignant heart"), or
Intent to commit a dangerous felony (the "felony murder" doctrine).
So this is where the problem lies with your argument. The accused did not call or hire assassins which would suggest intent to kill. The accused could not physically hurt or threaten the life of the deceased by calling SWAT because that would mean its common knowledge SWAT are hired guns.
At best involuntary manslaughter makes sense. If there was a law in place before this event, specifically aimed at protecting people from getting SWATTED, then there's a small chance in escalating the charges.
I'm equally frustrated at the lack of laws and punishment to deter SWATing, but this is a side effect of the militrilization of local security apparatuses.
But like other tragedies in America, it will do little to deter the trend, as it is clearly divided on excessive force. Proponents will claim guns will keep the government in check....against a suite of surplus military hardware used to invade a few countries.
This is a systematic problem, charging one man will not fix the situation. Of course, after this case, people stupid enough to swat each other are going to find an increasingly less sympathetic jury. But it will happen and SWAT is not suddenly going to stop and ask if it's legit or not.
It's incredibly cowardly and shortsighted to traumatize using security apparatuses meant for true emergencies, over some ruffled egos, in a virtual, ephemeral electronic world.
No. Kansas recognizes depraved-heart murder, which does not require a specific intent to kill, as 2nd degree murder. Sorry. If the prosecutors find with any certainty who called in this fake emergency, they are going to ruin that person's life, that person will deserve it, and the ruin will serve the public interest.
The level of culpability, not least the causal connection here is hundred fold weaker. Casual reading of the law rarely lines up with established case precedence.
At the precinct, defendant admitted that he stole the minivan, exceeded the speed limit, and swerved into oncoming traffic as he fled the police. In explaining his driving, defendant said he tried to avoid hitting cars and pedestrians, and that he did not know the neighborhood well and drove down the one-way streets by mistake. Defendant said he was lost when he ended up on Manhattan Avenue, and that he was avoiding cars as he evaded the police. According to defendant, he was going against traffic and looking in his rearview mirror for the police immediately before he struck the victim. When he looked forward again, defendant said he saw the victim and that he thought he "hit the girl in the hand or something." When he saw more people and traffic two blocks later, defendant decided to crash into the parked car to avoid hurting anyone else. He also expressed remorse for his actions.
It's easy to make the argument that SWAT-ers do the opposite of what this person did and are in fact more culpable: they deliberately, competitively, and with care create circumstances optimized to put lives at risk. They don't just call the police; they call fake active shooting incidents to the police.
The whole point of depraved heart murder is to put intent aside and refer back to mere actions. I can already read the statement of the swatter claiming his intent was to pull a prank on a loose friend. Follow the reasoning in Maldonado and you are not getting anywhere near depraved heart murder.
No, that's not the point of depraved heart murder. It's a culpable state-of-mind standard that requires the prosecution to prove that the defendant acted with "utter disregard" for human life. The predicates are (1) a set of reckless actions that were likely to put lives at risk and (2) a total indifference, unmitigated by any actions whatsover to prevent harm, to the prospect of causing harm.
Read the case you just cited. It overturns a depraved indifference conviction and so goes deep into the details on this.
Here's an excerpt from a case in Kansas specifically mentioning depraved-heart murder. Important part in italics.
> "Depraved heart second-degree murder requires a conscious disregard of the risk, sufficient under the circumstances, to manifest extreme indifference to the value of human life. Recklessness that can be assimilated to purpose or knowledge is treated as depraved heart second-degree murder, and less extreme recklessness is punished as manslaughter. Conviction of depraved heart second-degree murder requires PROOF that the defendant acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. This language describes a kind of culpability that differs in degree but not in kind from the ordinary recklessness required for manslaughter."
So yes, you still need to show proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this was a prank gone wrong. Unless the accused called assassins, it's going to be hard to argue intent.
So, having begun your argument with the claim that only "involuntary manslaughter" would be available to prosecutors, because (not that I follow this logic) they'd be missing "malice aforethought", you've now become an expert on how Kansas evaluates gross recklessness?
I'm approaching this with no emotion and pre-judgement but based on facts. Let's take a look at what really happened:
> According to the article, allegedly two Call of Duty players were threatening each other over a $2 bet. One call of duty member gives the other a fake address when the other threatens to SWAT him. Police go to the fake address and shoot somebody. Guy who got shot couldn't have possibly prevented the situation and is ironically the least at fault of anybody involved.
There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill, in fact it was a random address that another third party had posted, and somebody decided to pull a prank that went horribly wrong.
Involuntary manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought.
Of course I'm not a lawyer but I refrain from allowing emotions to taint the lens of truth. I've yet to see any constructive counter arguments from you, instead you've sidetracked the debate by attacking my character.
This is logic that says that if I point a gun at a crowd of people and shoot blindly, I haven't "murdered" anybody, because there was no one person I intended to kill, and, in fact, I might just as easily have gotten lucky and killed nobody, so what intent could exist to prove against me?
> This is logic that says that if I point a gun at a crowd of people and shoot blindly, I haven't "murdered" anybody, because there was no one person I intended to kill, and, in fact, I might just as easily have gotten lucky and killed nobody, so what intent could exist to prove against me?
No, in the example you've presented, that is directly demonstration of intent to kill using a device (a gun) that has high probability of death. That is not the point I've made and you are attempting to bend what was said.
Conviction of depraved heart second-degree murder requires PROOF that the defendant acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.
"There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill"
It does not require that they "intended to kill." It just requires that they "acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life." You find it hard to believe that anyone could consider it reckless (and indifferent to the life of the victim) to send a team of gunmen, who you've explicitly instructed to be on high alert?
Prosecutors will get to describe the crime in any frame they choose, and a jury of humans will get to decide whether it's murder.
Assuming this player is in an extraditable country, I predict he's going to rot in jail for the rest of his life. It's not like he was playing CoD through TOR. He won't be hard to find.
People already have the gamer tags of the two people involved in the shooting (the swatter and the person he was intending to swat, but who gave a false address) and even have tweets from the alleged perpetrator (now deleted) who claimed he wasn't responsible.
So yes, it's a very short matter of time before police start knocking.
> There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill
Who are you trying to fool here?
Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting. If it weren't, they would have called family and child services to fraudulently report child sex abuse, animal control to report an escaped rabid panther, or any number of other government bodies that don't show up to the party with fully-automatic assault rifles.
There is no fooling just sequence of facts and events you are denying.
The victim was shot because he refused direct police order and endangered himself by making the SWAT thinking he had a gun.
The guy calling the SWAT is an effete asshole but there's no way he could've predicted the endangerment that the victim put on himself by directly refusing orders to keep his hand up (he didnt and he was shot thinking he was pulling a gun).
So if you wanted to prove intent to kill, you'd have to
1) Show the probability of getting killed by SWAT vs Hitman is the same, which the judge will throw out as intent.
2) Show that the SWAT caller could've predicted that victim would put himself in danger by disobeying a direct armed officer.
3) Retrospectively show intent to kill in previous SWAT calls the perpetrator has been charged for.
This is just the harsh realities of court. It's very hard for prosecutors for cases like this, especially when the public is so skewed to one version of the story. It's ironic that such zealous energy from the mob crowd will only hurt the case, the internet and the mob mentality doesn't prevail against examination of facts and evidence....
Hence this is why I stopped pursuing a legal career...because I realized that true justice will rarely be delivered. To convict someone, you need more than just conjectures and emotional response, you are up against highly intelligent defense lawyers who are expert in raising doubts in those that react with emotion, not logic.
>Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting
Nonsense. The point is to cause incredible inconvenience to the victim, not to kill them. Most of the time the cops will probably waste a few hours of your day, and make you look pretty bad in front of your neighbors.
This is quite possibly the first death after thousands of swattings, it seems unreasonable to assume that the perpetrators wouldn't be aware of how rarely this actually happens.
It seems like you've just completely blocked the possibility that this case will not go your way. You've repeatedly denied facts and evidences present in this tragedy, that a) calling SWAT will never be accepted as calling a hitman therefore no intent lies in itself other than pranking b) the victim was killed because he disobeyed an armed officer c) restrospectively prove intent to kill in all previous swat cases, which will have wide reaching political ramifications that go beyond just the individuals involved. d) the victim was unknown to the accused therefore impossible to claim any sort of aforethought and intent which both requires evidence.
So when you react with such vulgar statements and continually attack others who present facts and evidences against your conjecture, it's hard to take you seriously.
You keep thinking the accused somehow had blood lust without even looking at all the pieces. It's so easy to jump on the bandwagon, but there's always those that choose logic over passion, this is what the legal industry is about.
Sending armed officers to someone's house under the pretense that the resident is an armed threat does not result in 'inconvenience.' Inconvenience is a hundred pizza guys being sent to your house delivering stuff you didn't order.
This may be the first death as the direct result of a prank call, but it is far from the first accidental death as the result of a swat team being deployed.
If inconvenience were truly the goal, a prank call to child services that launches an investigation would work much better. But that's not the outcome the caller actually wants to see happen.
Sending in armed officers with the assumption that the victim will disobey direct police orders and get himself killed is a mental gymnastic that only lies within your head. It does not belong in the courts because there's no way to prove intent without evidence. Conjectures are not accepted in court.
Of the many and varied lies that could be told to cause incredible inconvenience through the medium of misinformed police, only a few will trigger a SWAT team.
SWAT teams are not deployed by the police when they think that it is likely that they will need to behave inconveniently to someone, they are deployed when the police think that it is likely that there will be a need for overwhelming deadly force.
The point of falsely triggering a SWAT team is not to cause inconvenience through police.
The point of triggering a SWAT team is to deliberately risk someone's life.
Great white sharks rarely eat people.
However, if I admit to having deliberately pushed someone into the water with a great white shark to see what would happen and then they get eaten, quoting the probabilities is not going to impress a court very much.
> The point of triggering a SWAT team is to deliberately risk someone's life.
Unfortunately, it wasn't as if the SWAT team were going in guns blazing. The victim specifically chose to put his hands down when ordered to keep it up. He failed to do so and that resulted in his death.
Seeing the huge number of SWAT cases, this is the first time that I'm aware of, where a person has been deceased. To make the argument that calling SWAT team to somebody's house is akin to calling a hitman to your house is ludicrious.
The case falls further apart because the victim was unknown to any of the parties involved, there's no way they could've predicted the victim would disobey police orders that put himself in danger.
> There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill
“malice aforethought”, as noted uphtread, isn't the same thing as “intent to kill”. Gross recklessness/depraved indifference is also malice aforethought.
> in fact it was a random address that another third party had posted, and somebody decided to pull a prank that went horribly wrong.
SWATting is a “prank” which inherently involves the mental state of depraved indifference; the fact that the target endangered is different than the one the “prankster” expected is fairly immaterial.
Intent to kill was used as the original reasoning from parent's post which I refuted with logic and reasoning that was met with an attack on my character and "malice aforethought" which still requires proof that calling SWAT == calling HITMAN, was thrown without understanding the full sequence of events that led up to the event.
The victim was killed because he disobeyed direct orders from an armed officer. At the end of the day, this is what boils down to, not what he said or she said.
As I said, calling SWAT to somebodys house is not the same as calling hitman to whack somebody. Even in cases involving spouses calling hitman on their estranged lover, it takes an awful lot of evidence to get a malice aforethought and even more damning evidence to get intent to kill.
This is just the reality of working under a legal system that relies on evidence presentable to a neutral third party. If anything, the internet mob mentality will hurt this case as the judge will throw out anything related to the notion the prank caller technically called armed hitman, because the prosecutor will need to show evidence that the accused knew the target victim would willingly disobey armed police officer, which is impossible because the victim was unknown to any of the parties involved.
Plenty of people that had no intention to kill someone end up in jail for homicide after they do something that they didn't believe was going to kill the other party. SWATing wouldn't be a threat if there wasn't some (small) chance that someone gets hurt. Kind of like how pushing someone at a bar doesn't always end in death, but when the guy you push hits his head on a barstool on the way down and cracks his skull open, it's homicide.
My mom rented out a concrete slab in her backyard in August to a few guys living in a RV. They have access to the garage which has water and a full bathroom. And I ran electric and Ethernet to their RV.
They are not supposed to come into the main house without knocking. They do not have keys.
It is like pulling teeth to get them to pay rent and utilities. They hit one of the peoples car that lives inside the main house and refused to fix the broken taillight. The part is 40 bucks and I can replace it. But they refuse.
And this has escalated over the last few weeks. The police have been called three times over the RV guys behavior. I told my mom to get a restraining order to get them out fast but for some reason refuses.
So the eviction process has started. And they were not happy. I was there the other day and was getting the space heater in the bathroom going so the pipes don't burst and overheard them saying that when they leave they should, "SWAT the bitch".
And my mom rents out a room to a forty year old guy on disability that they say has a mental capacity of a 12 year old. He is somewhat impulsive. If the cops poured in he would not understand what is going on and would probably get shot.
I went with my mom to the police station to tell them what I overheard. So hopefully before they send a SWAT team a note pops up that they were warned about this and it is probably false.
Having done work on 911 call-taking systems, I can tell you that they do have the capability of placing notes on properties. Things like "large dog in backyard" or "known gun owner." That way they can inform responding officers as best they can. Talking to the police might not be enough, because that report won't make it to dispatchers who need the info. I don't know the proper procedure to get a note placed on the property.
They are very likely to note perceived threats to an officer's safety, as that helps them both avoid injuring an officer and helps cover their ass if they decide to kill something innocent. They are NOT likely to note things like you mention because it open them up to liability. If they have a note on your property saying someone is likely to make a fake call about it, and then someone does and they show up and decide to kill something innocent anyway, it's going to look a little worse for them if there's a note telling them that.
I agree they are probably going to be hesitant to put a note on there saying something like "property owner is afraid of fake swat calls" or something like that. But they do indeed put notes like the exact ones I mentioned in my comment above, as I've seen them.
Talking to police is the first step. Not sure if he mentioned this in the article, but Brian Krebs himself has done it, since he was getting swatted with some frequency on account of his reporting.
I've thought similarly about people who are feeling the threat of being swatted informing local authorities of the possibility but that presents another problem. The police aren't going to 100% trust people calling in to say, "Hey, if anybody calls you to say I'm doing something illegal I am calling you to tell you right now that I'd never do anything like that!" and it makes me feel that forewarning them might pose more problem than not. The entire situation is sticky and grimy and I agree with Krebs that the punishment for causing a swatting incident needs to be a felony in all 50 states.
Do they really have a process in place to check if addresses are on a 'do not SWAT list' before sending in the cops? How is such a list maintained and verified? Who approves changes to it? How long do addresses stay on it and what's the process for removing them?
There is no such thing as a 'do not SWAT' list, and there is no such process in place.
They really aren't though. Anyone who knows your address could swat you anytime, and the reason most people are safe is merely not being an interesting target for those people unstable enough to do it.
Yes you might be surprised but the police keep notes/tabs on the community. If you call something in or otherwise inform them you will be in the system which would alert them.
Indeed, seems plausible the police keep tabs on individuals in the community (yay for the privacy implications there) but the point of the gp is the cops have a disincentive to take X citizen's statement "Hey, I'm doing nothing but someone might swat me" since that's what a criminal would say. ("There is no 'do not Swatt' list" is a great tl;dr;)
I mean, if there was a special thing someone could do before hand to keep the cops from showing, guns blazing, when they thought it was appropriate, nearly everyone would do it and that would be a problem if such a response was appropriate.
So there's really only approach - make cops dial back on the use of deadly as their default. That's the only thing, there's no way to get a special "no don't shoot" card for random in random suburb, much as people might want it. Well, unless you are a neighborhood with money, then it's different.
Edit: And don't think the cops would cough-up their notes on house X for the same reason. Obviously, if the cops even admit they are keeping those notes, of course they become subject to all sort of controversies. Whether they're constitutional would come into question, etc.
In the heat of the moment (police suddenly getting a dispatch for a murder / hostage situation at a local residence) I hardly believe anyone involved is going to have the time to thumb through notes like that. Maybe in a really small rural community but I can't imagine there would be much chance of things going properly in any sort of larger municipality or city.
Are these notes available as part of a freedom of information act request? Because one should be able to have written verifications these notes exist for when the inevitable breakdown in communication occurs and the note is not passed along to first responders on the scene.
The hope isn't that they never show up at all, it's that that show up aware it's possible that the accused people are actually the victims and they need to be careful not to over react.
Whether the warning pays off is still mostly unknown ground.
That would definitely be more ideal than a simple phone call but I still can't imagine a police officer / police department finding it anything more than odd which would set off all sorts of red flags.
"One of the officers asked if it was okay to enter my house, and I said sure. Then an officer who was dressed more like a supervisor approached me and asked if I was the guy who had filed a police report about this eventuality about six months earlier."
Well, what it says is definitely not great, but in this specific case it's probably a bit less about the police overreaction and a bit more about the prevalence of guns and how to safely proceed when notified about extremely volatile and dangerous situations, such as a hostage situation with an armed individual that is exhibiting signs of mental instability (whether true or not).
How the police respond may be weighted too much towards a specific action, but it's important to consider this is the actual reason that SWAT teams exist.
I would definitely be interested in knowing how situations like this are handled in other countries, and the success rates involved. My suspicion is that in countries without the equivalent of SWAT some scenarios don't have an adequate response, while others that we use SWAT somewhat inappropriately for that are handled better. I suspect a less military approach is better overall, but an entire lack of that option isn't beneficial either. I don't think it's hard to argue that there's far too much police militarization in the U.S. right now.
It's hyperbole. Millions of citizens interact with police on a daily basis and don't get shot. That obviously doesn't excuse the cases where it occurs, but it's not like this happens on a significant number of calls.
Once we define what kind of encounters to sample, specifically encounters involving police breaking into your home, it's no longer a ratio of 1:1000000+ that you will have a bad encounter.
If I were told the chances of me dying from jumping off a cliff were 1:1000, I still wouldn't jump that cliff.
From the krebsonsecurity link, it appears that Krebs was first confronted by officers with firearms drawn and handcuffed before meeting with the supervisor.
Right. The point is that someone who appeared to be a supervisor, in other words in charge of the swat team, was apparently already aware of the chance that this was a case of swatting. Going into the situation, that knowledge likely made the swat team's approach more professional and safe, thereby possibly saving Krebs' life.
Yes, agreed. Just because he was handcuffed for a period doesn't mean they weren't trying to be careful and already under the impression it would be a false alarm. That doesn't mean they let their guard down and don't take it seriously, which depending on the reason they are there may mean securing the area and people in it.
How insane is it that you have to pre-empt SWATing now?
The only reason this is even a problem is because (too) many people know that the police is so trigger-happy these days that all it takes is say something dangerous-sounding about someone else and there's a not insignificant chance that the police will murder them.
That's how out of control the "Serve and Protect" police has gotten in the US.
My claim was that I fear it, which is true, although I cannot provide a citation. I could certainly point to many instances of people preemptively calling police (i.e. not reporting a crime) and the police showing up and doing horrible things.
I see what you're saying, but I think it could stave off a lot if a cop visited your house, looked around, and verified that you're not Walter White. If the 911 call came in, I'd hope the local PD would be a bit more likely to think "isn't that the nice scoggs guy we visited last week and not the bomb maker the person on the phone is claiming?" I'm sure they'd still come and investigate, but hopefully not with guns blazing.
Just to be sure: have you heard of or looked into police violence in your area?
After that execution in Arizona[1], I wouldn't rule out the possibility that some of your local officers, depending on where you are in the country, are more interested in getting some action and shooting "criminals", than helping you and your mom.
The thought of wannabe-action-heroes or, god-forbid, psychopaths like Charles Langley, getting ready to tear through my family's property, terrifies me.
I think this comment is unhelpful, but it does raise the point that landlords doing unsafe/illegal things like that electrical feed (I assume that's not to code) does put a landlord in a vulnerable position: "you mess with us and we'll report you, too."
A lot of people have been talking about the evil of this one individual kid, or the irresponsibility of the police department, but there's another aspect being glossed over here:
The first thing I thought when I read this article was, "Wow, the toxic Call of Duty community finally killed someone."
I've been playing CoD WW2 online off and on since it came out last month. I have been astounded by the behavior of many people in those games. Players with racist and genocidal names who spout horrible things on chat about minorities. Threats of real world physical and sexual violence. Homophobia and misogyny. And of course just childish spamming and yelling and cheating and complaining and other nonsense.
It is a terrible, terrible community.
It does not surprise me at all to see it escalate to actual real world violence.
Yes, the kid who made this particular call should be punished. And the police department needs to be held accountable too.
But the root of this problem is the CoD community, and to some extent the gaming community at large. I don't know how to fix it, I don't know how you get an entire community to start treating each other like human beings -- but that's what needs to happen.
As much as I hate CoD and wish the issues you highlighted were limited to the CoD community, they are not.
The behavior you described fits many if not most online, semi-anonymous, young, male majority communities. CoD is just one community in that bucket.
Edit:
> I don't know how to fix it, I don't know how you get an entire community to start treating each other like human beings -- but that's what needs to happen.
Hang out around a group of young guys and you'll realize that the groups you described are just an amplified reflection of IRL groups of similar makeup.
If you want to fix this type of behavior you have to change it at a much deeper level than online gaming communities because its a mindset.
People do it mostly for the laughs - even the extreme idiotic shit like SWAT calls... just like they do extreme idiotic shit IRL like fraternity initiations that get people killed. IMO the stuff you're describing is systemic.
I haven't seen the same level of vitriol in most other games. I also play World of Warcraft (off an on, hop in every other year or so), Dota 2, Company of Heroes 2, and a few other games. I'm also active in a couple different gaming communities online. Yes, there are toxic players in each of those other games but nothing as extreme or as densely-packed as in Call of Duty. (Dota 2 is probably the worst, but most of the toxicity is just complaining about game-related issues. I've never seen physical threats or racism/genocidal chat.)
I will say that BF1 in-game text chat on PC can get pretty bad (reminds me of the old IRC days), however I don't see physical threats much (only one threat in the last 4 years) -- however when I played halo 2 online it was constant trash. Are your experiences with console or PC players?
And like to be clear, I think you're right that it's a bigger problem than CoD. Absolutely. The toxicity in the other games I play isn't okay either. It hasn't been as extreme or concentrated as CoD, but it's definitely a problem too.
CoD is really the worst, most other communities aren't like this.
I've been in plenty of online, semi-anonymous, young, male majority communities that were overly friendly, welcoming and inclusive to see that CoD is just a pisshole. A bad place. End of Story.
The stuff describes might be systemic but only systemic to a subset of communities, not all of the gaming community.
I took OPs point to be more about the intensity of the behavior rather than that it exists at all. We shouldn't limit the goal to the eradication of it, when the mere reduction of it would still help a lot. If the CoD community is "amplified" in some sense, then it by definition means that it is possible for them to improve it.
> As much as I hate CoD and wish the issues you highlighted were limited to the CoD community, they are not.
While I agree with the gist of your post, I can't help but feel that pointing out that it's not "special" is the opposite of helpful.
People are mostly equipped to notice problems in their ballpark, and are right to call out problems as they see them. Whether or not similar problems exist in another ballpark is beside the point. Even if other ballparks are worse it's beside the point!
I frequently play Dota 2 and it has similar problems and I don't want to see them there, either.
> I can't help but feel that pointing out that it's not "special" is the opposite of helpful.
I disagree -- I'm pointing out that the issue is not CoD or even online gaming, its a larger issue. You can't really address it on a small scale without understanding the bigger picture.
Can't you? There are lots of higher quality communities out there and if gaming ones were such it'd create pressure for people to improve or stay out. Right now, most gaming communities accept it because of the all-around "well all gaming communities are like this", which contains an implicit "and therefore it's OK and should not alarm you".
Pretty much all issues in life are systemic, this does not at all mean addressing them in a smaller area is ineffective. I'd say most people have a much better chance of addressing it in a smaller area than addressing the systemic problem. I don't see how I, as a gamer, can go modify how "young men" (assuming this generalization is correct) behave, but I can definitely discourage it in any gaming communities I'm a part of.
I don't think some other nice communities I'm in, if they followed the notion of "well, other communities are bad already and it's a systemic problem..." would have been successful.
A small (or maybe large) army of well-paid moderators who will boot people for abuse would be a good first step. Sure, it's not cheap, but it's got to be worth a shot.
Maybe you should be ashamed of this behavior and stop? I play games on-line and not only do I manage to avoid doing these rather reprehensible things, I will chastise others who do so.
You have a pattern of posting race-baiting comments to Hacker News. That's definitely not what this site is for and if you keep doing it we will ban you, so please stop.
Although the toxicity that is a regular and observable part of the CoD community is awful, I'm having trouble coming around to many of the comments who view the caller as of equal responsibility as the police.
911 is an open API with no authentication. It cannot possibly prove guilt. Therefore, in a society which values innocence absent proof of guilt, police are bound to treat anyone they encounter by dint of information from 911 as innocent.
Also, it is not unlawful to carry a firearm in the USA nor in Kansas. Therefore, even if this person had been wielding a firearm, they are still to be regarded as innocent.
I'm actually of the mind that it makes sense to intentionally subject 911 to incorrect information (like we do with the TSA) in order to audit and pentest it.
We need a society where incorrect information given to open, authless APIs never leads to anyone's death.
And in fact, in this case, the officer who fired a weapon is, to my way of thinking, the only person at fault for this murder.
The caller is certainly an asshole and is even culpable for homicidal intent, but I don't think that their conduct is tantamount to murder - more like involuntary manslaughter. After all, with the exact same intent and the exact same conduct, they can reasonably expect that the other party is killed only a very small percentage of the time, and in every such case there is another more directly culpable party.
I'm also concerned, despite solid reasoning from many other commenters here, that any deference to the police officer in the form of pointing to mistaken information is a roadblock to advocacy of police reform.
In short: when the state murders someone, it's the state's fault. It doesn't make for a peaceful and just society to hold the state to the same low standard we hold some idiot CoD player.
Yeah, my first thought was "Anyone can summon cops to shoot me with just my address?". Should society get a CVE entry for that?
If there was a magic button in the world that killed someone every time it was pressed, I'd be much more concerned about getting rid of the button or enacting societal change to keep the button under protection than I would care about tracking down people that pressed the button. Sure, some degree of that is good to discourage it too, but if the button remains out in the open, easy to press, and pressed by more people than actually do get captured, then something isn't right.
On a side note, you might like a movie called The Box (2009).
Basically a couple receives a box with a button and pressing it will give them $1 million but a stranger somewhere in the world will die at the same time.
I don't remember if it's any good but your scenario reminded me of it.
Something that I haven't seen much comment on is that the fact this call was false is somewhat irrelevant to the failure of the police here.
Even if this had been a real hostage situation, that absolutely required the presence of SWAT - they still shot an unarmed man by the front door - in a real situation that's a hostage.
Dealing with a house full of only innocent people is objectively simpler than one with a mix of innocent people and bad guys even if you don't know which you'll face when you open the door.
But laying this at the door of one man is not much help - there's no deterrent needed here just better systems/training.
Given that it is common knowledge that american police officers shoot first and ask questions later[1], intentionally sending them to a residence under the false pretext that there is a dangerous murderer actively killing people at the location should be at least second degree murder + some type of "fraud with intent to harm".[2]
It is crimes like this that make me think we've got to break down the walls protecting anonymity on the internet -- which makes me sad, because I've always kind of liked anonymity on the internet...
[1]which is entirely wrong and should absolutely be stopped and as a nation we need to have a real conversation about this...
[2]I'm not a legal expert, I just have a functioning sense of morality...
I agree with you 100%. Also because this is the first death, we have pretty much narrowed in on what the probability of someone dying is. I'm surprised it went this far. Sadly, because of how awful human beings are, I suspect the number of swatting incidents will only go up and be harder (much harder) to trace.
I live in Wichita and watched the police debriefing including the 911 call.
The caller spent upwards of 20 minutes on the phone with the police describing a homicide scene with the intent of misleading the police to cause this type of reaction.
He could not have known the murder would take place, but the intent was obvious.
In the same vein, if a database is breached and personal information leaked, I think most people here would agree it is the company/system at fault, rather than some scapegoat programmer/sys-admin.
I can't believe the amount of deflection/justification in the comments section here. A police officer showed up to a house and shot an innocent person. They either shot a hostage (if they believed the threat to be real) which is unacceptable, or they shot an innocent bystander (if they believed the threat is not real).
This is a process failure, as is evident by how "SWATing" is a known/common thing.
> I'm actually of the mind that it makes sense to intentionally subject 911 to incorrect information (like we do with the TSA) in order to audit and pentest it.
This is a good example of moral hazard. The risk is born not by the first responders, but by the people they affect.
But can't you say that about any simulated attack routine? Or is this a special case in your mind because 911 is a service typically run by the state?
If it's the latter, then I want to suggest that this is a strong indicator that emergency services are better built in a manner where the state is unable to substantially influence their particulars.
I can't find the link but this isn't the first time that someone has wrongly called the police on a household where one of the innocent occupants was killed. The person making the call was charged with manslaughter I believe, so that person is being held liable.
That is because there is intention behind the action, that has caused the death of another.
It is the same as shouting fire in a crowded movie theater, which again is for the intent to cause potential harm.
So the person making the call in this case when they are identified will 100% be charged with a rather serious crime.
There are probably other charges that the person can be brought up, but most likely there will be something manslaughter related.
> And in fact, in this case, the officer who fired a weapon is, to my way of thinking, the only person at fault for this murder.
You seem to be completely disagreeing with this statement when you later agree that "The caller is certainly an asshole and is even culpable for homicidal intent" and "when the state murders someone, it's the state's fault"
Who hired the police officer? Who makes the standards for police training?
Who is the "CoD swatting community"? Who is the ACTUAL person that called in this specific swatting?
Also...
We need a society where incorrect information given to open, authless APIs never leads to anyone's death.
What the heck? Imagine this scenario:
911 What's your emergency?
Caller) I'm wearing blue jacket & red hat in Terminal 2B at the airport and will detonate a bomb killing everyone at the airport in 10 minutes.
Can you suggest to me how this ends well?
Is it real? Is it fake? You have 10 minutes to make a decision here. Are you going to have your officers walk in without guns to make sure no one accidentally gets killed?
> You seem to be completely disagreeing with this statement when you later agree that "The caller is certainly an asshole and is even culpable for homicidal intent" and "when the state murders someone, it's the state's fault"
I'm saying that, even though this person had homicidal intent, they did not commit murder - the police officer did that part.
> Caller) I'm wearing blue jacket & red hat in Terminal 2B at the airport and will detonate a bomb killing everyone at the airport in 10 minutes.
> Can you suggest to me how this ends well? Is it real? Is it fake? You have 10 minutes to make a decision here. Are you going to have your officers walk in without guns to make sure no one accidentally gets killed?
I don't think that Hollywood-inspired hypotheticals have any place in the architecture of an emergency response system.
Incidents like the one you describe are rare enough not to need any specialized protocol at all, so a more general protocol of investigation and verification applies. In an age where cameras are everywhere - including in the pocket of every person in Terminal 2B - a great deal of investigation and verification can happen in 60 seconds.
> The caller is certainly an asshole and is even culpable for homicidal intent, but I don't think that their conduct is tantamount to murder - more like involuntary manslaughter.
The difference between second degree murder and manslaughter is intent. If he's culpable for "homicidal intent" then he's committed murder.
Assuming the SWAT call itself was a felony, there's something called 'felony murder' which could apply here. The way felony murder works is essentially that if you commit a felony and someone is killed as a result, you're on the hook for that murder.
Probably better was for me to phrase is as "criminal negligence" I suppose.
But to me it's more like in the legal category of assisted suicide (which has clear intent to kill, but is charged as manslaughter): The person played an "assistive" role in ensuring that the circumstances for homicide came to pass, did not themselves make the decisions that led to the homicide.
In the case of assisted suicide, the actual perpetrator is the patient (whom, to my eyes, has committed to affront to justice) while, in this case, the actual perpetrator is the police officer.
In both cases, the "assistant" is culpable for some form of manslaughter, but not murder.
We can multitask. Swatting is a problem that needs fixing. But also people abusing it is a problem, and applying meaningful consequences can help significantly in that regard. The "idiot CoD player" knew what they were doing, and should face a jury for it, while at the same time we can push to reduce the risk of anyone doing anything similar in the future.
Note, even if swatting was 100% safe, it's still would be a serious criminally false report, and consequences would help dissuade abuse.
> 911 is an open API with no authentication. It cannot possibly prove guilt. Therefore, in a society which values innocence absent proof of guilt, police are bound to treat anyone they encounter by dint of information from 911 as innocent.
No, "innocence absent proof of guilt" is a courtroom standard. Police encountering suspects do not apply the same standards of evidence as a courtroom.
Every component of the framework of individual rights in common law societies, including but not limited to trial by jury, a speedy trial, public proceedings, and prohibitions on excessive bail are all designed to ensure that the state can't capriciously violate the rights of innocent people.
Although, like all legal principles, its application is entertained and applied in a court room, it is pervasive throughout every component of the mechanisms by which the power of the state is restricted.
That the presumption of innocence is a legal right (you use the phrase "courtroom standard" - fine) and not the SOP of a civilian police force serves to lengthen its reach, not shorten it.
...and to the degree that this principle is about restraining the moments at which the state may encroach upon rights to lawful findings of guilt: shooting someone at their front door is about as violative of an innocent person's rights as I can imagine state conduct being.
Granted that the innocent should not be shot. I don't think you'll find anyone to take the other side of that argument. Nonetheless, the question of "proving" guilt does not even enter into the consideration when the police are initially encountering a suspect. At that point it is about restoring order (making sure everyone is safe) and beginning to gather evidence. The notion "proof" having relevance in the initial police encounter with a civilian is the portion of the comment I was reacting to.
Most people that police encounter (like the victim in this story) are not suspects. They are just people. It's actually part of the problem that (many) police consider "not-police" to all be suspects when on a call.
It appears that he was shot from across the street as he raised an arm. It sounded to me like an order was given to fire (or a voiced, mistaken observation, like "gun!"), rather than a purely organic reaction by the shooter to a specific provocation. In any event, it's unthinkable to me that an uncorroberated "threat" like this, at that distance and with no observable, immediate threat to others in the home, justified firing at that point.
It's important, for society, to ensure the cop never kills again.
Unfortunately firing him is not enough -- he will almost immediately be able to get another job carrying a badge and a gun unless he has a criminal record.
According to the article, allegedly two Call of Duty players were threatening each other over a $2 bet. One call of duty member gives the other a fake address when the other threatens to SWAT him. Police go to the fake address and shoot somebody. Guy who got shot couldn't have possibly prevented the situation and is ironically the least at fault of anybody involved.
I recently saw a comic/meme that portraits the situation in the US like this: Waste your life inside playing computer games or go outside and get shot.
There is some sad truth in this comic as this case shows. Here, just opening the door got him shot.
“A male came to the front door,” Livingston said. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.”
This has absolutely nothing to do with Call of Duty, full stop. The issue is the threat de-escalation training used by the Kansas police and their inability to safely and competently serve the general public. "hostage situation" does not translate to "shoot to kill." The proper response is to establish a perimeter, establish communication, and work to neutralize the situation without a violent escalation.
I think he should face some jail time or community service or something. We give these punishments for crimes of much more innocent nature. Taking someone's life is pretty much one of the worst things a human can do.
I think there's enough blame to go around: 1) police send an entire SWAT team because of ONE anonymous phone call, even though they should know by now that people abuse that ability 2) the gamer guy who made the phone call.
Kind of reminds me of bomb threats -- how many people who actually place bombs make a phone call first? It's almost like if a bomb threat is called in, you can be sure there's no bomb. I remember my high school years ago kept getting bomb call threats, and eventually started ignoring them, figuring it was a student making the calls.
I think the IRA usually warned of a bomb a few minutes before it going off, so that it would cause a lot of inconvenience, a lot of material damage and relatively little human casualties.
I thought it was interesting to find the information via a 20 year old online newspaper article, instead of a link to Wikipedia or some more recent rehash of the information presented in the article.
That line of thinking in regards to bomb threats is dangerously wrong. Politically motivated bombers often make warning calls to spare innocent people. Today it may seem legitimate bomb threats are rare but this was certainly not the case in the late 60's and early 70's in the US.
From the memoirs of Richard Nixon. "From January 1969 through April 1970 there were, by conservative count over 40,000 bombings, attempted bombings and bombs threats-an average of over eighty a day. Over $21 million in property was destroyed. Forty-three people were killed. Of those 40,000 incident, 64 percent were by bombers whose identity and motive were unknown."
> I think there's enough blame to go around: 1) police send an entire SWAT team because of ONE anonymous phone call, even though they should know by now that people abuse that ability 2) the gamer guy who made the phone call.
The police react to the incentives we create for them. How many articles did you read in the 1990s flipping out because police didn't react to some tip. How much "the police should've known about the 9/11 bombers all along!" In contrast, nobody will remember this accidental shooting.
Clearly the guy who made the false call committed murder and should be charged as such. However, there should also be civil and possibly criminal liability for the officer and department.
SWAT should be held to a far higher standard for weapons use when they have time to show up at a location in force, in full gear, with superior training, and take up a defensive position before starting the engagement, vs. what I'd expect of a solo officer encountering a suspect on the street. If you're in cover, with a team of other people also in cover, all behind rifles, wearing level III or IV hard armor, with massively overwhelming force, immediate medical support, and technology, you have time to wait to see if a furtive movement into a waistband is pulling out a handgun. Even if someone is reaching for a handgun, it's probably not going to be an aimed shot at the 4x3" or so of exposed target you're presenting at 10-25 yards, and you should be able to take your shot in 0.2 seconds or so from seeing the cue. And yes, this might increase the risk to SWAT officers by a small amount, but it's already a very low risk, so even doubling that risk, if it halves the higher risk to the public during SWAT callouts, is the correct choice. And it's probably more like doubling a very tiny risk while 100x reduction in risk to innocent people and halving risk to criminal suspects.
The whole justification of giving these teams massive amounts of weapons, armor, and other equipment is so they'll have overwhelming force and will be able to apply more discretion. We don't want the fight between police and bad guys to every be anything close to "fair". It should be like an adult breaking up a couple of children fighting, where the goal is to avoid injuring them.
There's a separate problem of SWAT being used for a lot of no-knock drug warrants and other stupid things, but the solution there is to decriminalize drugs and get rid of those searches.
1) Interview neighbors: "Did you hear a gunshot tonight?"
2) Get more info from the caller. "How do you know this detailed information from inside the house?", "Where are you so we can talk to you face-to-face?", "Can you describe the house?"
Anyone can call 911. It is an unreliable source of information by default. I understand that the police want to act quickly in a dangerous situation but there has to be some parallel fact checking happening that can suss out the facts before someone gets killed.
I don’t understand how any of those points would help at all. Number 1 is irrelevant and number 2 is easily handled.
“Oh, neighbor didn’r hear a gunshot? Well let’s put down the guns and knock on the door nicely instead”. Come on now.
> "Well let’s put down the guns and knock on the door nicely instead”
And why not? In the same situation in Europe, this is what would happen. Regular cops would confirm the situation first. And it works. Units similar to the SWAT do exist, but I've never heard of them being dispatched directly after an anymous call.
"if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...", and well, the SWAT is pretty much a hammer in this kind of situation.
If the call goes on for 20 minutes in great details on an ongoing hostage situation with already multiple casualties, I certainly expect the European SWAT to show up as soon as possible.
I'd personally be shocked if it were any difficult to get a hold of the GIGN, the RAID, the DGSE, the GCHQ or the UK SWAT when necessary.
Greeeeeeeeeat. So we can go down the rabbit hole of dissecting SWATting and criminal culpability of those who SWAT, but I'm sitting here wondering how safe we are in general.
Cops get addresses wrong on warrants and execute SWAT raids on the wrong house. I recollect at least one innocent guy killed this way. Let's see what a quick Google search turns up:
If a person directs a dog to maul another person, the person is responsible and the dog needs to be put down. If a person reports a hostage situation that directs SWAT to raid a home where somebody dies, the person directing the action must be accountable and the police who killed in error must be, at minimum, removed from police work. A police officer who shoots an unarmed person has positively proven their unsuitability for the work. I'd like to see the officer charged with negligent homicide, but as case after case has shown, the US public is unwilling to convict officers.
It looks like the police shined high beams in his eyes, causing him to reflexively raise his arms to block the bright light. Another officer shot him for raising his arms.
I don't know whether the police can be 'legally' pinned with criminal culpability here, but there is no doubt that they royally fucked up. No amount of presence of mind on the part of this guy would have prevented an entirely uncontrolled, reflexive action in response to them shining incredibly bright HID lamps in his face.
Juries are told not to focus on the shooting, but to think if the officer believed his life was in danger. If the officer thinks his life is in danger its acceptable use of force under most department policies TO KILL YOU.
Most people in stressful situations do not follow orders well, people are not trained to "jump" on yelled orders. Barking orders at a confused/drunk person is the worst thing you can do. People are not trained to even think about their hand location except while pulled over, hands on the steering wheel.
But, we also do have criminals who do go for weapons.
I guess we just need better training and to have cameras, because each shooting is different, could be bad cop, bad training, bad situation or justified, nobody knows.
It says a lot that a supposedly professional's feelings doing his job are more important than some uninvolved random persons life. Any warzone's ROE are stricter than what US-cops are allowed to get away with.
But it's been shown multiple times that a camera doesn't make a difference. People still die from bad cops and bad training, but the punishments are just as rare.
Seems one solution could be for officers to use loudspeaker to state why they are outside, and give very specific protocols for safely exiting the residence. Possibly offer a communication channel to dispute validity of their arrival. I imagine they have the phone number of the land-line or cells within a certain radius of the residence, along with social media profiles they could examine to 'profile' participants in the situation and assess validity. You can't have a system that solves the problem 100% and is immune to being gamed by criminals, but with data and clear lines for communication it seems you could pretty easily create a reliable 'safety net' for people caught up in fraudulent 911 calls without exposing the responding officers to any risk.
FWIW, I'm hearing-impaired (though not deaf) and I'm reasonably certain that if I ever end up in a situation with cops pointing guns at me, for whatever reason, I will end up dead.
Edit I'm responding to the point about using a loudspeaker, in case that wasn't clear.
I don't know if I'd call this a swatting but it is definitely a classic case of Ohio police murdering black people.
1. Cops didn't order a single verbal command before Officer Sean Williams shot him to death -- first murder.
2. A woman in the store had a heart attack and died as a result of their insane recklessness -- second murder.
BONUS: Knowing there was no gun they still interrogate his girlfriend in custody for 90 minutes. At the end of the interrogation they let her know Crawford died. Months later she dies in a car crash.
Zero charges for anyone involved. Everyone in the department should be facing prison for not taking action against murderer Sean Williams, it was obvious he was far too dangerous to wear a badge much less carry a weapon:
> Beavercreek police officer Sean Williams used force 10 times more than the staff average during his first eight years in the department. His 36 “response to resistance” incidents from 2006 through 2013 does not include the Aug. 5, 2014 shooting death of John Crawford III at Walmart.[0]
I just want to say I've cross trained SWAT and other LEA's, and other countries militaries etc while I was in the military, and as a combat vet I cannot express how scary some of these groups are due to realizing the makeup of their teams. Lack of trigger control, lack of tactics, too little training, and fragile egos combined with a "war" mindset results in this sort of thing. The kicker is you would be amazed at how many of the swat guys I met were noncombat pog's in the military who wiggle their way onto SWAT to make up for their lack of combat oconus.
We need to be addressing these issues at the training and policy level, but the thine blue line needs to be busted up first. I knew an old school LEO who had done undercover and cartel work, and even he complained constantly to me about the death of the concept of the "peace officer".
Police forces are way too eager to be in a war zone and they are going to keep doing this shit until the public stops them, the ultimate irony is that most of these incidents are because the war-wannabes are actually cowards who get scared as shit at every blade of grass and end up emptying magazines for no reason... Essentially SWAT is mostly just COD players who grew up but couldn't handle war if they got what they think they wanted.
Its like they never heard of an OODA loop.
Oh, and let's not let this opportunity to talk about how much the cops protect rich corporations and pillars of the community at the expense of everyone else... Their pinkertonian origins make things like CIA working with them against occupy wall street that much more disturbing.
Oh and one more thing. Many of the bad escalation of force policies and training are because a huge amount of these guys get cross trained by Israelis...and I'm just going to let the implications of that sink in.
Pog = "Pogue is derogatory pejorative military slang for non-combat, staff, and other rear-echelon or support units" (in other words, REMF).
I would agree with your characterization of LEOs as cowards.
So many LEOs are bullies and thugs. Scratch the surface of a bully and you'll find a coward.
First paragraph got my upvote. Then I got to this part:
> Many of the bad escalation of force policies and training are because a huge amount of these guys get cross trained by Israelis...and I'm just going to let the implications of that sink in.
Yeah, lots of your local leo, for some reason usually sheriffs, make trips to Israel for training, or have them come to the US for it, and their methods are much more "war" oriented than American ones should be.
Computer tech for an MSP here, sometimes I'll call clients from my mobile with the number blocked so they don't have any opportunity to call me on my own time for "just some really quick help with this small problem". That's my use case for blocking caller id.
That's also a use case for having two phones. I know that's not ideal for a lot of people, but your use case is essentially putting convenience above security.
No, that's no reason to be able to spoof callerID. That's a reason to have it show the main office number. The callee should have some idea how to get back to the caller, there is never a reason for this to be subverted.
The only way I know to have it "show the main office number" is by spoofing the outbound caller id, whether this is done on the customer's equipment or by the provider. Do you have a deeper insight into the phone network, am I missing something?
The phone company is accepting calls from the PBX or whatever at the company. They most certainly could enforce that the caller ID match the main number for the office the call originates from. It's been over 20 years since I worked for a phone company, but all calls from any line were associated with a BTN (billing telephone number). There is no technical reason the caller ID could not be forced to the BTN or something similar. In that case you could always call the phone company and find out where the call originated - or at least where they send the bill for it. I guess that's the point, the phone company can identify the origin of a call for billing purposes and I think the callee should also be provided the identifying information - certainly not lied to about it.
Of course the originating network (presumably) knows the billing number, but how do you propose to enforce correct reporting across hundreds of telephone companies in hundreds of countries? Most caller ID spoofing today happens over poorly secured or fly by night VoIP networks. If the telco can send ANI of a "main office number" instead of the number of the actual originating line then so can a hacker or any entity with access to ss7. Theoretically you could block calls from numbers not served by the originating network the way many isps ignore advertised routes for ip ranges not served by a particular AS, but LNP complicates this further.
I haven't read all the comments here, but I am rather disturbed by the high focus I have seen so far on the police violence angle which largely glosses over the horror of an individual abusively and maliciously dispatching enormous power with a single prank call. That power is supposed to be available as protection, not as your personal means to settle an incredibly minor vendetta or whatever.
It is absolutely disturbing that an individual would do that, but cops should be held to a much higher standard of morals and responsibility than civilians.
I don't happen to think that expecting the police to be ever more perfect while the ability of ordinary civilians to intentionally fool them climbs will solve this problem.
In all seriousness, this is the biggest reason that I don't use Twitch. I know the risk is low, but all it takes is a single troll somewhere in the world to find my CV or a WHOIS record.
My (UK) ISP puts my full name and address, home phone, email etc. in my /64 v6 allocation, and I think also for the v4 address. It's not optional, but then again I'm not worried about being randomly shot by SWAT.
Honestly, we can only wonder how much more will the US regress in it's undeveloping. Remembered about the 'hypernormalization' Adam Curtis documentary. So much fucked up stuff and people still try to find ways to justify, to treat this status quo as sane, and by this I mean a lot of things, not just the odd freak incident. Eh, sad..
Move to a country that doesn't send storm troopers trained to kill you at the slightest 'provocation' (and often without) based on a single phone call from a blocked number, and then later exhonorate your killer?
I was just thinking that even people who aren't even involved with these situations are potential victims, so what could someone do to protect themselves? Just some ideas off the top of my head:
Spend some money on home surveillance, inside and outside. Cameras that are connected via some sort of home automation that can provide not just an early warning, but evidence for yourself and your family in the event something goes wrong. Offsite storage would be ideal, something that cannot be held, removed, or destroyed at the scene that only you or a limited number of trusted people have access to.
Alerting when there are people outside of your home. This way you'd be able to contact 911 if there was suddenly a large police presence around your home and let them know there is nothing happening there, you are extremely willing to cooperate, unarmed, and awaiting further instructions. It might give you some time to deescalate the situation before it starts.
Maybe contact the police and let them know that because of the work you do, you feel you may be targeted for these kinds of things. Ask a lot of question and see if they can put some sort of process in place like attempting to contact you or a neighbor if something comes in, or at least having the dispatcher let the responding officers know that the call might be fraudulent and to proceed with that in mind?
Do everything you can to minimize your online presence. I know that's saying a lot these days, but every little bit helps. If it takes someone an extra few minutes to find information about you, that might be just long enough for them to lose interest or find an easier target.
I'd love to hear other ideas because I'm kind of at a loss myself for how you can protect yourself from this.
I've heard that some minor internet celebrities will call their police department when moving to a new area to warn about potential swatting calls. You could try to do the same, but it's probably hit-or-miss.
Do your best to avoid pissing off or making yourself known to crazies, and do your best to make sure that any actions that might piss off crazies or make you a public figure can't be traced back to an address.
It's not a great solution, and there might be other ways, but this would be the common advice. It's not exactly feasible all the time though.
Raise your hands slowly and don't move. If possible, sit down with your hands visible in the air, in the middle of the room. Talk to them if you can. But don't move. Just let them kick the door in. Don't go open it.
“As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.”
Oh... ok. So the takeaway is, when someone pounds on my door at 3AM, it's safer just to not answer in case it's the police and an officer discharges his weapon (A lovely euphemism that shifts blame away from the officer).
In fact, any time you get a knock at the door, it's probably best you retreat to the farthest corner of your house and lay down with your hands on your head because that's basically the only way you can maximize your chances of not getting blown away for responding like a rational human being.
>Even then, the Administrative Leave isn't fun. The take your badge and gun and you are basically on house arrest between the hours of 8am and 5pm on weekdays. You cannot leave your home without permission of your superiors, even it its just to go down the street to the bank or grocery store. You must be available to come into the office immediately at any time for questioning, polygraphs, or anything else involved in the investigation. Drink a beer? That's consuming alcohol on duty, you're fired. So even when officers are cleared of the charges and put back on the street, Admin. Leave still isn't "paid vacation."
I encourage anyone to read the entire comment, as it explains much more about the process. Given that the review process can reasonably multiple to many weeks, it's not unreasonable for that time to be paid. If we're being honest, most people are not in a good enough financial position to pay 1 or 2 mortgage payments without any money coming in the door.
If it were unpaid time, why would I as a police officer want to volunteer to serve in the parts of town which are more rough?
If someone accused an officer of sexual harassment, the response would probably be the same - paid administrative leave. If 5 people came forward with completely untrue complaints against an officer sequentially, they could bankrupt the officer who literally did nothing wrong.
For a regular person, the potential to need to kill somebody isn't part of their job duties. Of course there are very limited times where it's appropriate to do so.
> the potential to need to kill somebody isn't part of their job duties
This is true. However, I interpret it as yet another reason why police should be systemically held to a stricter standard for unjustified killings: they know they are far more likely to get away with it, so the process of investigation should be a deterrent in itself to counteract the low likelihood of punishment.
Think about this case for a second. The chief gave no information about whether the victim was carrying a weapon or threatened the officers. The victim was surrounded by cops and yet there is no immediate clarity about precisely what happened.
Cops are a fraternity, and they deal extensively with the justice system. There are systemic benefits that they enjoy due to this. Many cops have gotten away with murders that were documented on video, and witnessed by other cops.
To counter this, you have to construct parts of the system as a deterrent to killing nonthreatening people. That may make the job more dangerous, but it's better to put a trained officer in danger of being attacked, than to put an innocent and clueless civilian in danger of being gunned down by a careless SWAT team.
That is bullshit. The police do not have a "job duty" of killing someone. They are entitled to employ lethal force in self defense when their lives are in danger, which is exactly the same legal standard as for civilians.
Any time a cop shoots someone for any reason, they are automatically put on administrative leave. (This varies by department but it seems to be how it works in Wichita.) After the investigation, it will be determined whether they should be punished.
For the record, a regular American sent to jail will typically be afforded the opportunity to post bail and continue to conduct their life as an innocent person, pending the outcome of their trial.
It's true that sometimes people can't make bail. Just a few quick notes about that.
1. Bail is refundable collateral. It's supposed to be priced within attainability, but it needs to be an amount sufficient to motivate compliance with the court. And when you're looking at criminal charges, that amount generally has to be quite significant, since compliance may result in incarceration or other seriously adverse outcomes. Also, bail will be set based upon the totality of the circumstances including the severity of the crime; the amounts you hear are frequently high because the crime must be serious and/or noteworthy to grab attention on the news.
2. There is a whole industry built up around helping people make bail. "I can't make bail" is not a novel problem and there is a lot of infrastructure in place to assist with this.
3. Excessive bail is not allowed and motions can be filed to get bail reduced.
4. No matter what, in every large system with rules that get enforced, there will be anomalies and anecdotes about the rules going awry. Isolated heart-wrenching stories of breakage should be addressed, but are not grounds for condemning the system as a whole.
Many humans manage to avoid alcohol consumption between 8am and 5pm on weekdays. Is this difficult for police? What could that imply about their sobriety when they're not on administrative leave?
I agree that you should keep being paid, but spending your work hours in your own home does seem unusually generous. Compare the "rubber rooms" teachers are sent to under very similar circumstances.
I think being put on paid leave during an investigation is not that uncommon. Especially in adversarial jobs where the people who bring complaints are more likely to be malicious, you don't want to give them the power to disrupt someone's paycheck without an investigation. Otherwise you'd have criminals getting entire police departments fired.
The comparison isn't what happens to someone's job when they're facing a complaint relating to that job, but what happens to their job when they're facing criminal charges. Garrity basically sounds like institutional corruption whereby the (administrative face of) the police to avoid asking questions that could help the (criminal-prosecuting face of) the police. At any other job, the internal investigation would demand answers to questions that would criminally implicate you (under pain of firing), and the police wouldn't agree to close their investigation due to the administrative inquiry beginning!
Also, these separate serial investigations seem like a powerful incentive to brush over the criminal inquiry as quick as possible - figuring wrongdoing can still be punished by the second investigation, and also not wanting to delay it.
Livingston didn’t say if the man, who was 28, had a weapon when he came to the door, or what caused the officer to shoot the man. Even if you were innocent before the SWAT team showed up, threatening them afterwards will get you killed and no court is going to convict them. So far it is not "established" that the officer should not have shot the man.
It doesn't take more than a few minutes after the man was shot dead to know whether he had a weapon. Frankly, it doesn't matter why the officer shot the man so long as he hadn't threatened the officer. In the time it took me to write this comment, a clear determination of whether the officer abused his power could have been made. If he did in fact have a weapon, you could bet your ass the police chief would have confirmed that.
What exactly do you think this investigation is going to yield? "It looked like he may have had a weapon" or "He made a threatening comment"? Neither are reasons why the officer should have shot the man.
It took 6 months for a grand jury to exonerate another Wichita officer. http://www.texomashomepage.com/news/local-news/wichita-falls... The appeals etc took years after that. My point is, you don't let the cops make the determination about whether a cop is guilty. There are whole other layers of accountability.
Edit: and yeah I agree cops don't get convicted often enough. Either way a real investigation is going to take time.
Did it occur in a state where being in possession of a weapon inside your home is a crime? And if they felt threatened, it should be up to a jury to determine if it was self defense or murder based on why they felt threatened.
Its best practice in HR for serious cases for those accused to be put on administrative leave prior to any investigation -just firing some one who then turns out to be innocent would lead to expensive lawsuits.
Though being put on house arrest and being treated as on duty whilst on leave is on dodgy grounds I am surprised the police unions haven't challenged this in court.
Is there any reasonable doubt that the officer abused his power? The officer shot a man with witnesses. There's no doubt that the officer killed an innocent man. The facts have been established that the officer had no cause to use that amount of force. That being the case, what reason is there to not put the officer in prison awaiting trial like any other person that committed murder?
You really need to look at this as two separate incidents.
The police could end up at the wrong house for any number of reasons not all of which are malicious. There is no excuse for the actions of the police officer. The manner in which the SWAT team arrived at the house does not in any way change the culpability of an officer for their actions.
The prankster also has culpability here since they did what they did with the intent to cause harm and they should also be held accountable. To say the prankster is the root cause though is non-sense. The root cause of the man's death is the police's unprofessional handling of the incident.
Here are some statistics, to help put things in context.
There have been 976 people shot and killed by police this year. "Three out of five of the people shot and killed by police were armed with a gun, while fewer than 1 in 10 were unarmed." [0] Note that the category of armed with something other than a gun seems very context dependent (being armed with a knife or vehicle is a wide range of life threatening to someone armed with a gun).
"As of Thursday, 128 officers have died in the line of duty this year, with 44 shot and killed." [1]
While this is not enough data to get a good false positive/false negative (is there any data on how often SWAT responds appropriately? Talks down an armed, threatening person or similar?), it gets us partially there. While all incidents such as this one warrant a response, I feel that a societal response needs to be based on how frequently this happens, in context with total number of events (ie: 10% requires a much different response than 0.1%)
It’s really sad but a lot of things went wrong here. I really hope the person who called in the swatting goes to prison for murder. The person who gave the wrong address, I think they should also get a prison sentence for what they did. Giving an address to someone who they know is trying to do harm, should be illegal, but I’m not sure which law would cover this. Finally, it’s sad how things went with the cops. If cops fear for their life they are going to protect themselves. They just want to go home to their families.
I have no numbers to back this statement up, but one would assume that cops draw their weapons often, and of course we hear about the times when they have to discharge them in stories like this one. I’m not saying all cops make perfect decisions all the time and there are no bad apples in the force. But I’d assume that cops just want to get home to their families safe every night.
“A male came to the front door,” Livingston said. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.”
Livingston didn’t say if the man, who was 28, had a weapon when he came to the door, or what caused the officer to shoot the man. Police don’t think the man fired at officers, but the incident is still under investigation, he said. The man, who has not been identified by police, died at a local hospital.
This seems quite unusual. Looking at details, Wichita KS has a population of 380K. Perhaps they don't see much of hostage situation and were ill prepared for it. Would be interesting to see the results of investigation. Also there were studies that looked at how stress could result in these kind of scenario. IIRC, one of the triggers were being on a suicide watch/dispatch call.
Can someone elaborate how response to hostage threat works in US?
Here in India, depending upon the situation, one of the security forces(police, paramilitary, Army, special forces, swat, etc), or combination of them, respond, and first cordon off the area.
Then, the alleged criminals/terrorists are asked through loudspeakers to surrender. If they do, good. If they don't, and start shooting on security forces/civilians, then they kill them. How does it work in US? Was this guy not asked to surrender?
Yeah I'm going to go with I'd rather chance dying in a incredibly low likely-hood 'active shooter' situation than face possible death from prank phone calls. The probability you are going to be in an active shooter situation * the probability that a few minutes of investigation would make a difference in your survival approaches zero.
When a police officer kills an unarmed man, the excuse of feeling endangered should never be allowed, since the officer was never in danger. At the very least, this police officer should be fired because they committed the ultimate sin: incompetence in their job resulted in the death of a completely innocent person.
I think we should take away this excuse from cops to kill innocent people with a flimsy excuse like this. They should show actual danger before being allowed to shoot people. Just feeling in danger should not give them any protection. The Arizona cop who killed a man crawling on the ground is a prime example of this. If it results in some cops hesitating and getting injured, then so be it, that's what happens when this privilege is abused the way it has been over the last 10 years. Better a few cops get injured that absolutely innocent or unarmed people getting killed.
Police should start using social engineering for fact finding. Simply call and ask "Just confirming that "Supposed Hostage" placed an online order for 10 pizzas". Or something of that nature to listen in on background noise and voice patterns.
I personally think his punishment should be long enough to be some kind of deterrent to this, perhaps 10 years in jail?
Apparently there is something like 400 of these swatting incidents in a year. So while it sucks that the person died, most of the blame does actually belong to the swatting culture, not the police officer.
Think about it, 400 incidents in a year * 5 years this has been going on = 2000 high stress events involving 5 - 10 police officers = 10000 to 20000 police officers with weapons cocked and ready to fire at people.
So 1 out of 20000 police officers makes a mistake - yes its the culture that caused this, and when this number hits 40000 or 100000 what will the body count be?
What I can't help thinking is that when in Las Vegas Paddock was shooting people, it took the police more than an hour to get in (shooting started at 10:05pm, police entered Paddock's room at 11:20pm). But when the police sees a regular citizen, unarmed, without any signs of anything bad going on except a report on the phone made by unknown person, the person gets shot almost instantly.
>Swatting needs to stop, and unfortunately as long as there are few consequences for swatting someone, it will continue to be a potentially deadly means for gaining e-fame and for settling childish and pointless ego squabbles.
Penalties are hardly an effective deterrent to crime. As with all forms of undesirable/antisocial behaviour, proper education would be far more effective.
Here is some food for thought: Look up the number of "deadly swatting incidents" outside of North America, they don't exist.
This is a phenomenon which, in its severity, is pretty much exclusive to the USA, with some cases also happening in Cannada, but that's about it.
Does that mean that police in other countries don't get fake calls? They also get them, but they usually react to them in a somewhat more reasonable manner which prevents the worst from happening.
The same doesn't seem to work for US police due to cultural differences (abundance of firearms everywhere) and the resulting police mentality (better shoot first than to get shot first).
In that regard, some of these "pro-gun ownership" and "guns are not the problem" comments here are simply mind-boggling, still denying a problem exists. A problem pretty much everybody recognizes as such, except for the people who still think that their AR-15's will prevent the US from becoming some fascist police state.
Not a week goes by where not another totally absurd case of irresponsible gun owners end up getting somebody killed or hurt: Babysitters getting babies killed [0], dogs shooting their owners [1], parents getting shot by their own toddlers [2], heck even when people are meeting at church to discuss a shooting spree, they end up shooting each other by accident [3] it's a collection of absurdities that wouldn't be possible anywhere else, but in the US it seems to be considered "normal".
At least that's the only way I can explain how some people still pretend there isn't a problem. It becomes especially grating when these very same people use countries with high ownership rates (and pretty strict regulations) to argue for their case of "everybody should have a gun!", straight out of the NRA meme book.
Case in point: Citing Germany and Switzerland as examples for societies where "high gun ownership and low crime" exists, while at the same time completely ignoring the massive gun-regulation laws in said countries.
Similarly: Hitler could only take over because he banned all the guns, when in fact he did the exact opposite to arm his SA thugs.
How on Earth do the gamers get the other player's actual physical location? Is it IP? I thought that could get you close but not an exact address. And, more importantly, what can people playing online do to prevent their address from leaking?
Although swatting is horrible practice, the sign of the bigger problem is that US police force is so trigger-happy that it is easy to trick them to kill innocent people. I can’t imagine this happening regularly in most of Europe.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, cops are lynched by a mob of blacks and arab thugs for daring to respond to a call for help (Champigny in France on New Year's eve).
Maybe the cops should not execute people after a phone call? It's kind of weird that there are more blame for the negative action of someone who places a prank call Than for someone who murders another human being. Just because they wear different clothing??
By the way the reason they don't fix the issue of trigger happy cops and the reason they send an entire SWAT team for a prank call is simple. It is because it's good for business. (That is the business of selling weapons)
Regardless of how it started, the article makes it sound like the man was shot immediately upon exiting his front door. Will be interesting to see the body / dash cam footage, so that we can have another 3 days of outrage over police action in the US and then return to the status quo.
I'd guess that Wichita police will be relieved to be able to pin some of the blame on the prank, despite the fact that it may have no real bearing on whether their response was justified given the situation and what they knew.
And it was supposedly a "hostage situation" that the police knew about.
How common is it for the police to shoot the first person on sight coming out of a "hostage situation"?
Regardless of how reckless the cop was, it's all a matter of how the prosecutor will spin this to the Grand Jury. It's why only 33% of the cops ever get indicted, while the prosecutors otherwise have a indictment success rate of 99% for everyone else and can indict "even a ham sandwich."
> The department should be held responsible even though it was an individual who made the fatal mistake.
Both are culpable, if the facts are as reported here. The cop was either improperly trained or did not have the personality to remain calm in a situation where use of deadly force might be required. Maybe both. That's the department's fault.
But the cop is the one who pulled the trigger.
> As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder.
Reckless or negligent homicide is probably more realistic.
The third factor is legal system that rarely if ever punish officers while being eager to punish anyone else suspect.
What incentive the department has to promote training that leads to less violence? It seems to be very little. They have trainings that makes cops more paranoid, more afraid and more aggressive (per Radley Balko reporting). It is not poor training as in "little of it". It might be result.of training itself.
They did release the bodycam footage. It looks like they shined high beams directly in his face, he raised his arm to shield his eyes, and then they shot him.
All it takes is for that person to reach in its pockets or to carry a long black stick for such an accident to happen. SWAT isn't regular police, they are trained to deal with active shooters. If such a situation happen, you are to exit with your hands in the air (when asked) and then get on the ground without resisting as they restrain you. Anything else will put your life in danger.
They came in with the following information: "a call that someone had an argument with their mother, that the father had been shot in the head and the shooter was holding his mother, brother and sister hostage."
It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. It was not a trigger happy cop reacting badly to a traffic stop. It was officers that acted on information that were planted by a malicious individual. The prankster is the one that needs to go to jail for this.
---
Edit:
Yes, the situation wasn't right. That doesn't mean that the officers on the ground were in the wrong.
There is a more systematic issue going on, you can't put all the blame on the door kickers.
Quoting @matt_wulfeck's comment on another comment thread as he made the same point as I did but with better wording:
"Adrenaline and poor training lead to situations like this.
The department should be held responsible even though it was an individual who made the fatal mistake.
As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder."
It's crazy that as a citizenry we allow our police to operate in this manner. Kansas is a constitutional carry state, in which all adult citizens are legally allowed to carry a pistol on their person without a permit.
Why should the presence of a firearm, or the reach for a pocket or "long black stick", be a death sentence for a citizen? Why do we allow state actors to behave in this way at all?
States with constitutional carry: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho (residents only), Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota (residents only; concealed carry only), Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#U.S._juri...)
And more cars = more car accidents and more multi-story homes = more people falling down the stairs. As a society, we're concerned with overall safety and reducing overall violence and crime metrics.
While an interesting metric, a sample size of 3 (states) seems insanely low to draw cause between guns carry == safety. There has to be more meaningful ways to glean that data, no?
May as well tie it into most popular music if we're using sample sizes that small.
I wasn't making the argument that more people carrying == safety. I was countering the argument that more people carrying inherently means less safety.
This just isn't true. Canada and Switzerland, as examples, also have a high number of firearms and not nearly as many firearm-related deaths (at least from 2014 data I could find; I doubt it's changed).
A long-gun stored in a locked cabinet in the attic with a trigger guard and ammo in a separate locked compartment is very different than carrying a loaded pistol on your hip in public. In Canada it is essentially impossible for normal citizens to carry a gun in public, let alone a loaded handgun. IIRC you need a separate license to transport your weapon (in a locked case, unloaded, and carried securely in your trunk). The idea of adult citizens carrying loaded pistols around in public is completely foreign in Canada.
What you describe is more what things were like in Italy - you can have a gun there, but you have to prove you are responsible, and it is a privilege, not a right. It seemed to work out ok in that people could still own them for self defense or hunting if they put in the effort to do so.
Oh of course, I agree with you. My point is purely statistical i.e. those are the numbers open for interpretation. The gun cultures in Canada and Switzerland are completely different to the US, but it's disingenuous to simply say more guns == more deaths.
Right, I see your point. Absolute gun ownership isn't the number we should be discussing-- it's the number of guns that can be easily carried and used in public. In Switzerland guns are everywhere, but the ammo is stored in sealed containers to prevent frivolous and unaccountable use of the guns. In Canada you can't ever carry your gun around on the street and handguns are almost completely illegal for all intents and purposes. In most of America you can carry a semiautomatic pistol in public with no consequences. Firearm incidents occur when you increase the availability for people to get and posses guns in public-- whether they buy them at Walmart or steal them from unlocked cop cars. That's indisputable.
Except that data is there to prove the point - more guns correlates with more deaths. Regardless how you compare - different states inside US or different countries.
This is typical "advocacy research". They don't care about science; they only care about getting funded. The general public knows this, so for the most part their research is completely ignored.
Don't even get me started on the "suicide is always terrible" bullshit. Many suicides are rational responses to untenable situations. I'm glad that my grandfather had a gun, when AEC and his physicians had both failed him completely.
Looks like your numbers are badly off (those countries have less than half the guns the US does per capita, so not all that high), and in Switzerland there are a ton of restrictions on the guns (and on the ammunition!) compared to the US, to boot.
I believe that the post above is a reference to household ownership rather than per capita, there are a number of countries where the household ownership percentage is similar, but the number per household is much lower, that is true of many things, cars, TVs, guns, etc.
I'm talking about gun deaths in total, not mass shootings as in your link. Yes, the number of guns is far below the US (every country on Earth is) but looking at the number in isolation is disingenuous.
As to legal restrictions in Switzerland, that is absolutely true but orthogonal to the point I've made. The issue lies in the number of guns per person (and I'd personally argue the culture surrounding guns which spurs it), not the legal framework. South Africa has tighter gun laws than the US but still suffers from greater gun deaths (again, in total not mass shootings).
"Gun deaths" always seems like a silly metric to me. Who cares if you're killed with a gun instead of a knife or baseball bat or whatever else? Why not just compare murder rates?
I think people care because when was the last time someone stabbed 546 people, killing 58 of them?
Guns are an efficient tool for killing people, much more so than knives or baseball bats.
This is, incidentally, the same reason other things that are efficient for killing people and not constitutionally proteced, like dynamite, are not something you can walk in and buy in Walmart.
While attacks like that are absolutely a massive and terrible problem, I think that problem is orthogonal to my original question. Those victims are also tallied under general violent crime and murder statistics. When trying to determine whether legal gun ownership is a net positive or negative to society by comparing stats across states, it makes more sense to compare general rates. Presumably gun deaths will be lower in states where it's very hard to legally get access to a gun. But does that matter if far more people are being murdered overall in those states even with mass shootings occurring in gun-friendly places like FL & NV? Chicago sees more people shot and more people murdered each month than any single mass shooting.
> Are you arguing that the police are more likely to kill people at random in areas with higher amounts of gun ownership?
Cops have to make split second decisions with their own lives on the line. In a country where it's very likely that the person they're interacting with in a tense situation could be armed with a gun, it's going to make them more likely to shoot.
Perhaps not quite so relevant to this particular case, as the caller said the person was armed, but I think this would have played out differently in a lot of other countries.
There are other countries with similarly high rates of gun ownership and divergently lower rates of police firearm deaths.
The problem is in the police culture towards discharging a firearm, not the greater ownership of guns. American society bears much of the blame for lionizing cops instead of scrutinizing them.
Many cases of police officers killing innocent civilians involved civilians who were either fleeing, submitting, or already subdued and pinned down. Cops in the US tend to be exonerated for using deadly force, even when the victim could not arguably have endangered others.
Most UK police do not carry guns, yet those police forces still have firearms officers, and in a case like this where they would be responding to a suspected armed murderer and hostage taker, you can bet that firearms officers would be involved. Those police forces have substantial armories, they just don't issue a firearm to the majority of cops. Comparing UK firearms officers to US cops, I would contend that armed officers in the UK are less likely to kill because of the cultural and structural unacceptance of such killings in their country.
What was the "right" interaction from your point of view?
Please keep in mind... I used to live in an Atlanta neighborhood where a Sheriff and his deputy responded to a domestic violence dispute. Sheriff responded to a call and knocked on their door. The man inside the home opened the door, shot the deputy in the chest at point-blank, slammed the door shut, and then barricaded himself inside for a 6-hour standoff (ah, the memories of that neighborhood!). Thankfully the standoff ended peacefully thereafter.
Keep in mind the shit that SWAT deals with on a regular basis: they're putting their lives at risk for public safety. That doesn't give them carte blanch to go shooting people, but they deal with life & death situations regularly. It sucks.
I don't want to be the defense lawyer for the police but all the Silicon Valley and other office workers on good life always criticizing every move police makes should show an example and become a cop. And show how it's done. Make a sacrifice and show what's the right way.
I think we can all agree that swatting is an incredibly dangerous and should obviously be a criminal act. I haven't seen anyone defend it as anything other than that.
So let's talk about the part that isn't generally agreed upon…
> It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong.
That may be your _assumption_, but going straight to "belief" is a HUGE step considering the lack of information. We don't know that the police identified themselves. We know that the police had an _entire block_ instead of an actual address. For all we know this was a random person stepping outside to see what was, to their mind, happening "across the street". We have near-zero information about how the shooting happened.
Why the strong desire to pick a side?
I'm not saying that I think you're wrong. I just think it's odd to form a strong opinion _right now_. We know so incredibly little, why bother forming and espousing an opinion at all? Why pick a side now? You don't have to be on a team. You can just… wait. It's possible to not have an opinion — at all. We can all move along with our day. Why the rush?
On ending lives.
Given that you've formed and shared an opinion despite a near-total lack of information, it seem to me that you're of the more general opinion that cops have the right to end lives with little information. At best, information that they know has a reasonable probability of being incorrect. Cops jobs center around dealing with false information.
My question given that world view: In the spectrum between "someone was shot at this address, your life is in danger while near that address" and "there are dangerous people roaming our streets, your life is in danger", where is the line? Should cops be allowed to end the life of any person who places their hands out of sight while in their presence? There are, after all, dangerous people roaming our streets.
I never said that the police were in the were not in the wrong. My point is that you can't put the blame on the officers that responded to the call. A suspect can pull out a weapon in the blink of an eye. For all they knew, it wasn't a swatting prank but suicide by police. As much as it sucks, SWAT isn't trained to ask questions first. Those officers acted as they were trained to and shouldn't be blamed for it. They should't be dealt with harshly but get therapy and counseling for it. Those individual know that they shot an innocent man.
That's not a response to any of the questions posed by my post.
With all the respect due a random person one corresponds with via the internet, the view you're espousing seems extraordinarily reductionist.
And that's okay in the end. We don't need everyone to be on board with concepts like asking questions first, compassion, mercy — with the idea that ending a life is a last resort.
Now that we have more information about the situation (police reports, call transcript, police debriefing) I still stand behind my first impression of: "those officers acted as they were trained to and shouldn't be blamed for it. They should't be dealt with harshly but get therapy and counseling for it. Those individual know that they shot an innocent man."
How someone can think that those officers are to blame is beyond me. To me, THAT is extraordinarily reductionist. It describes the situation as if we were living in a movie or a video game where people who do mistakes are "evil" and should be "punished".
(Am I wrong in using the word "belief" in the context of "the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty."?
English is not my primary language and this might be the root of our incomprehension. You say that going from "assumption" to "belief" is a big jump, so perhaps you should reread my first message with the word "assumption" where I put in "belief".
I specifically added the word for people to avoid getting the false idea that I was attempting to convince anyone since there was no hard evidence at that point.
Isn't the difference between an assumption and a belief that beliefs are rooted in previous experiences and values?
I looked at this situation through the lens of Hanlon's razor "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" and through my own personal experience with police as human beings. This led me to believe that the truth of the situation was a systemic issue in how police are trained in the USA and not in those particular officers require to be punished.
It is my assumption that acting reckless in front of police during a raid will get you shot. It is my belief that the officers which shot the man are not in the wrong.)
“A male came to the front door,” Livingston said. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.”
Regardless of the information they had their actions seem way beyond reckless. The fact that some people think that nothing is wrong with how this scenario, and I'm sure lots others, played out is mindnumbing.
> It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. It was not a trigger happy cop reacting badly to a traffic stop. It was officers that acted on information that were planted by a malicious individual. The prankster is the one that needs to go to jail for this.
[Bad] Information.
But if the 911 system is subject to malicious intent, no authentication, no verification, and incomplete signals then police need to act on that information accordingly.
If you place no blame on the police reading signals incorrectly, then there is no reason to waste money on hiring a killer to do the bloody work. There is a < 100% chance of going to prison either way and a greater chance of being successful with the police.
If the SWAT is the unthinking killing machine you're describing, then it can't be allowed to be deployed by an anonymous phone call, any more than the Army can leave armed RPGs on public sidewalks.
Information has to be verified before you can act on it with deadly consequences. Hell, I doubt if some prankster called your boss and said you were sleeping with his SO, and your boss fired you, you'd just say "no hard feeling, you are just acting on information planted by a malicious individual."
The police are, or absolutely should be, better trained to deal with a swatting situation than civilians. I refuse to absolve the police of all blame here.
>It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong.
And yet I can’t possibly think of something more wrong than trigger happy cops shooting an unarmed person in their own doorway. Swatting isn’t a new thing. It’s one scenario that cops have to consider when they receive a call like this. Unless he had a weapon, the cop that shot him needs to be held accountable. Wearing a badge does not entitle you to execute someone for opening their own door.
> It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong.
I'm sorry to be so direct, but your belief is based on zero facts. We should all withhold judgement until more facts come to light.
Your advice is probably right - I think what chafes us, myself included, is that it's even necessary for us to have to keep that sort of thing in mind; that SWAT teams can be weaponized for personal feuds in this manner.
These calls require just a few words, it'd be trivial for a single determined individual to cause a mess across the country by simply making these calls in bulk in an automated manner.
I don't know if there is enough information to say that the cops did nothing wrong. An anonymous call shouldn't lead to an innocent man getting killed and cops need to investigate these situations more carefully.
I agree the prankster needs to go to jail but if the cop really did kill an unarmed innocent man there should be some type of punishment.
Think about it: if you absolve the police, you're permitting terrorists to lever the state's monopoly on force and do their dirty work for them. All ISIS et al need do is sit down with Google maps, a caller ID spoofing setup and an American accent and cause all the havoc in the world, and to your mind, that's fine.
The innocent victim was the absolute least suspicious target the SWAT team would ever encounter and they couldn't even see it. They were blinded and under the control of a social engineer. It's pretty awful and twisted that someone would make the call, but who are these government assassins and how do we stop them?
I didn't ask for it - did you? Please be careful of the language you use when asserting something belonging to society. 100% of the time, the tyranny of police is not something the people ask for.
Dial-a-murder shouldn't be a thing - we need 100% body cam coverage and real repercussions for law enforcement officers that kill innocent people. How do we achieve this when the system is so corrupt?
So I see many people in this thread talking about "improving police procedures" a concrete example of that would be treating with suspicion any call that comes through any means other than 911.
This person called a city government office, not through 911. Someone in the city government copied the phone number to call back and had 911 call them back. This should be incredibly suspicious. Why wouldn't the person just call 911? It seems to me some means like calling a local government is the only way someone from outside of the area would be able to SWAT someone else.
To me, this is the equivalent of blaming a person when a fanatic kills in response to some perceived offense to their belief system written by that person.
There's absolutely no way that an anonymous call alone should lead to a death except in a freak, extremely rare accident.
The poster above comments on 'casual evil'. Can you identify what you think takes swatting out of the 'casual evil' bucket and puts it any other bucket? Because, it definitely stops being a 'prank' when multiple guns are involved.
There are literally no good consequences from a swatting, only bad consequences. I would argue that most actions that have literally no chance of good consequences, and high probably of bad consequences (minimum ruining a persons day and wasting police resources), are pretty good candidates for evil.
I know that nowadays "evil" has been debased a lot, but I wouldn't consider "wasting police resources" evil. Wasting a person's day shouldn't happen either - at most, a couple of hours.
Fault isn't a binary thing. It's the parent's fault for not raising their children better, it's the children's fault for not knowing better, it's the police's fault for shooting, it's everyone else's fault for perpetuating a society in which this happens.
I cannot down vote, and would rarely do so if I could, but I would here. You are blaming the hurricane on the butterfly. One guy pulled a trigger and killed someone.
I couldn't think of a more absurd reply to this incident. The whole point of swatting is to get the cops to break into your house and shake you up a bit. Anyone who's been online for the past decade knows just how trigger-happy police in America can be, and it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. This was a game of chicken fueled by a remarkable lack of empathy and conscience.
You don't get to wash your hands of the blame just because you didn't pull the trigger.
It is not even close to blaming the hurricane on the butterfly.
While it should not be possible for such a prank call to lead to a lethal outcome, it currently is entirely possible and realistic for such an outcome to occur in our society today. The perpetrator knew that was a very probable outcome, and used that knowledge to intentionally instigate such a scenario in order to achieve that outcome.
Just because he didn't pull the trigger doesn't mean he doesn't share any blame.
The world is not the perfect, logical, orderly fantasy-land you seem to think it is.
Wasting the police's time is calling them to arrest the kid next door for stealing an apple from your tree.
Calling the police for a large armed response for a fake domestic violence situation is on a whole other level. IIRC, domestic violence calls are among the most dangerous that the police face, so I guess it wouldn't be a huge leap to think they would be on edge in those circumstances.
I honestly don't know how to respond to your level of moral apathy towards the person who initiated a series of events that could predictably, and indeed did, lead to the completely unnecessary death of an innocent person and traumatization of a family and a police force and a city.
The police definitely share some blame, but swatting is absolutely abhorrent. It is not a victimless crime, it is not a casual prank, it is unacceptable, and your indifference is incomprehensible.
You forget that in any normal - I repeat, NORMAL - country, police would not have killed an innocent person no matter what.
I get sick when I think that one phone call and a random address can get INNOCENT HUMAN BEINGS killed. Is this the American idea of being the greatest nation on earth?
Knowing that the situation could very easily escalate to a lethal outcome and using that knowledge in order to attempt to achieve that outcome is not a moral fault?
Phone calls that are intended to cause violence, terror, and possibly death aren't what I would call a "prank". They might still be different in magnitude, but both should involve a jury and jailtime.
>Better to see 10 cops dead than 1 single innocent killed by the police in my book.
Those 10 cops were also innocent, and are still people with families and people who love them. I'm not saying the way things are right now is the way they should be forever and that it's all rainbows and butterflies, but it seems callous to say one innocent life is worth more than another.
To me, it’s not really about innocence, or value of life, but something more like consent and agency. A cop, like a soldier, signs up for a job that they know is mortally risky. So it’s not that an innocent cop’s life is worth less than an innocent civilian’s life, but that a cop’s life is willingly offered for (what is supposed to be) the greater good.
The idea that protecting the innocent is more important than punishing the guilty is the basis of the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of evidence used in criminal trial, and in an ideal world, we would be able to hold cops to the same standard. If they had any doubt that pulling the trigger was the right thing to do, they would not. Unfortunately, in these situations there’s really no time for deliberation.
Did you miss the part where I pointed out that cops knew what they were signing for? I know it sucks, don't pretend I would be happy to see 10 dead cops, this is insulting. But between 10 persons, employed to protect and serve, and 1 completely random person who just walked out of their front door there is real difference to me.
Suggesting that signing up to "protect and serve" reduces the value of your life to 1/10 of someone who didn't is...insane. Generally speaking, the suggestion that a person's profession influences the value of their life is abhorrent to me.
Richer people have not fought in wars, since forever. Why? They can pay someone else to go die for them.
In modern days, look at the socioeconomic status of people that sign up for the U.S. Military. They come from poorer and less educated than average families. That is basically what military pay does... you start at some level, and slowly raise it until you have enough people willing to risk their life to earn it. Everyone has a price.
I support your unpopular proposal. The idea that a cop can ever (yes, ever) get away with shooting an unarmed person is beyond comprehension. The very notion of pulling a gun on an unarmed person should be considered repulsive.
Here are three strawmen we can argue about instead of the actual case in front of us, which had nothing to do with Ving Rhames or guns or bomb threats. Oh, and as a bonus, I'll start my three with a story about a big, menacing black man and a poor little petite white woman.
This line of conversation is unworthy of humanity, much less Hacker News.
The case in front of us wasn't the topic I was discussing. The topic was the GP's absolutist view in response to that topic.
Just because these scenarios are fictitious does not make them strawmen arguments. In the first scenario, I was pointing out that even unarmed people can be dangerous. In the second, I was pointing out that often innocent lives are in danger. In the third, I was pointing out just how absurd it is to expect police to shoot "only after at least one shot has been fired by the suspect, period."
Obviously these scenarios fall apart in the real world and that's the point.
It was your decision to bring race into the discussion. I chose Ving Rhames because he's big and I had recently seen him in a movie. Apparently to have a valid point I need to pretend he doesn't exist and go with John Cena instead (as if specifically excluding a black actor would somehow not be racist). I didn't specify the race of the female officer at all.
And I was talking about a situation where somebody walks out of a front door.
For your 1st scenario, yes the police officer should be able to handle it without a gun. That's what training is for. US cops need to spend less time at the shooting range and more time studying close combat technics, like in every other civilized country.
For the other 2 scenarios, sure the cop can shoot, even if for the last one there are probably ways to avoid it upstream.
The vast majority of officers never fire their weapon in the line of duty.
US cops do study close combat techniques. Talking about the training generally is impossible, since the quality, type, and upkeep of that training varies a lot by department. Usually it depends on what is needed in their area and what funds are available.
That said, all departments put office safety first. They will not generally take unnecessary risks, so a charging behemoth who has specified his intent to kill will probably be shot, regardless of close combat training.
I started answering your examples, but why bother? They are clearly not representative of the case.
I'll just highlight: "There are plenty of other ways to fix this, including body cams and proper prosecution"
So you're saying that if cops were more afraid of being prosecuted and punished after using their guns they would be more careful before killing a citizen. As in "well, now they're almost never punished, so yeah, they can just shoot first and ask questions later, otherwise they would first make sure the guy is actually armed and hostile". This is mind-blowing to me either it is the actual state of mind of police officers or if you believe it is and think it's ok.
You weren't speaking about the case. You spoke in absolutes for all cases.
In this case? I suspect the officer was completely in the wrong, but I'll reserve judgment until I have all the facts.
>So you're saying that if cops were more afraid of being prosecuted and punished after using their guns they would be more careful before killing a citizen.
No. I am saying that body cams, prosecution, and other tools will help protect bystanders, police officers, and suspects. It will help make better policies, protect innocent officers, prosecute guilty officers, and inform the public (because the police are sometimes wrong, but also sometimes not, in shooting people).
Expecting police officers and any bystanders/hostages to be target practice before they can shoot back just makes for a lot of dead officers and bystanders. It doesn't solve the problem. And it probably exacerbates it by increasing tension in an already stressful situation, limiting officer control of the situation, and encouraging corruption (since a system so unfair to police will necessarily cause them to close ranks further).
To me, the (standard) overreaction by the police makes arguments minimizing what the gamer did here even harder. Unless you live under a rock, you're aware of the controversy about armed police response in the US. Surely this gamer knew that, and called a fake report in anyways --- one involving an active shooter and a hostage.
I'm with Ken "Popehat" White: what the gamer did here is homicide. We can argue about the degree.
† really, in almost all cases in the US, "assault officers", and we should separate the two concepts, stop hiring new assault officers, and start hiring a new class of less-armed police officers
Later
It turns out there's already a concept in US law that captures this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depraved-heart_murder