Call of Duty Gaming Community Points To 'Swatting' In Wichita Police Shooting (dailydot.com) 681
schwit1 shares a report from The Daily Dot: A man was killed by police Thursday night in Wichita, Kansas, when officers responded to a false report of a hostage situation. The online gaming community is saying the dead man was the victim of a swatting prank, where trolls call in a fake emergency and force SWAT teams to descend on a target's house. If that's true, this would be the first reported swatting-related death. Wichita deputy police chief Troy Livingston told the Wichita Eagle that police were responding to a report that a man fighting with his parents had accidentally shot his dad in the head and was holding his mom, brother and sister hostage. When police arrived, "A male came to the front door," Livingston told the Eagle. "As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon." The man at the door was identified by the Eagle as 28-year-old Andrew Finch. Finch's mother told reporters "he was not a gamer," but the online Call of Duty community claims his death was the result of a gamer feud which Finch may not have even been a part of.
UPDATE: The New York Daily News reports police in Los Angeles have now arrested 25-year-old gamer Tyler Barriss, who the paper describes as "an alleged serial 'prankster'..."
"Barriss gave cops Finch's address, mistakenly believing it belonged to a person he had feuded with over a $1 or $2 Call of Duty wager."
UPDATE: The New York Daily News reports police in Los Angeles have now arrested 25-year-old gamer Tyler Barriss, who the paper describes as "an alleged serial 'prankster'..."
"Barriss gave cops Finch's address, mistakenly believing it belonged to a person he had feuded with over a $1 or $2 Call of Duty wager."
Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
To make it clear, the man who was shot by police was not the intended victim of the swatting, and had nothing to do with either party. The police just rolled in and picked off the first guy they saw.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
You are making an assumption on the situation. What we know is that as far as the police THOUGHT they were rolling on a murder and hostage situation (hostage in danger of murder as well). We don't know if the potential hostage taker had his hands hidden, whether he made any sharp movements - basically we know nothing. We don't know if the officer followed procedure, or what he was responding to. To say that they just rolled up and shot the first person they saw is only showing your bias and not what was reported.
Fixed that for you...
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed that for you.
The problem began with the bad intel. While the police bear some of the blame due to their over-aggressive response, your characterization removes blame entirely from the original intel source - the prankster.
Bear in mind that even if the police respond appropriately, this sort of pranking still incurs a cost onto society. If there's no pranking (or a small chance of it), police can assume the intel is probably correct and barge in ASAP to neutralize the situation. But if pranking is common, they have to take more time to assess the situation once they arrive on-site, increasing the possibility that (had it been an actual murder/hostage situation) the hostage-taker will notice what's up, decide there's no escape, and kill the hostage and himself.
The prankster needs to go on trial for destroying two lives. The guy who was killed, and the police officer who now has to live with knowing he killed an innocent. That's independent of whether or not you want the police officer to go on trial.
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Fixed that for you...
Only if you want to abolish the word "know" because any kind of evidence, records, testimony etc. can be false or unreliable including first-hand knowledge. If he'd pointed a replica gun at the police saying "as far as they knew he was pointing a real gun at them" would be a completely ordinary and acceptable use of English. By that standard I doubt you even know if there has been a swatting incident, sure there's news reports and eye witness accounts and video footage... so aliens landed in Roswell, New Me
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless the guy answered the door shouting he was going to kill the cops, or unless he was holding a firearm as he opened the door....
There's pretty much no scenario where the swatting aspect is significant compared to the cop killing the guy who answered the door.
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Exactly the OP's point. At the moment, we don't whether that was the case. It does seem unlikely, but until we know more, we can't say.
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We know something. If he had done something obviously threatening, the police would be shouting it from the rooftops and releasing all their bodycam footage to provide justification.
When they clam up and give only the fewest details possible, you know they have no excuses.
The body cam video is at the top of the page of the very first link in the summary...
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'm doing is not blaming the officer for believing in that half of a second the person was about to open fire, nor blame the officer for not waiting the tenth of a second or less to hear and see someone get shot or not.
I am. I'd prosecute the cunt for murder, because he just shot an unarmed man with no warning and with no justification.
If he really felt at risk, wearing his body armour, crouching in his cover, with the support of twenty colleagues, then he needs putting in jail to protect the public anyway. There is no self-defence justification going on here.
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You are comparing apples and oranges there. You are assuming that the officer would react exactly as a civilian would in that situation. The police are supposed to be trained for situations that you and I are not trained to deal with. If they react as the average citizen would then their training was crap.
The problem is that police are trained to think that everyone not wearing the same uniform as they are is a dangerous criminal and lives only for the chance to kill them. And that sends the message to the
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If there was a gunman with hostages, the odds are the person sent to the door first is a hostage, not the gunman. So he should not be shot by police. If there is no gunman and no hostages, then whoever answers the door definitely should not be shot by police.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
I do fucking blame him, outright. I also said he should be prosecuted for murder - that's the process by which my interpretation gets examined and justice is applied.
The 911 call is no justification at all. That's a prompt for the police to attend a situation, assess it, and respond appropriately. Killing an innocent man is not an appropriate response.
The video shows a man doing what he was asked to do - raise his hands. So no, that's not something to react to.
I recognise that you blame the idiot that made the 911 call, and not the victim. I agree with you on those points. I also blame the murdering cunt that killed a man, and want to see him face a court.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'm doing is not blaming the officer for believing in that half of a second the person was about to open fire, nor blame the officer for not waiting the tenth of a second or less to hear and see someone get shot or not.
You should blame the officer for that. He shot an innocent civilian who is now dead because cops think their safety comes first. It shouldn't. Reacting to an obviously armed guy clearly in the progress of doing something criminal is not at all the same thing as reacting to a civilian in a situation that is not at all clear, where it isn't even certain whether the guy is armed or not. In that case cops should take due care, take cover, and give the guy all benefit of the doubt. That does mean that the guy might get off a shot (with a rather low likelilood of hitting anything), putting the cops at risk. Well, that's what they are getting paid for.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
The cop was behind a car and is supposed to be a trained professional. Why didn't he just duck? The camera shot clearly shows that he had that option. Sorry, but the hard part about being "the good guys" is that you don't get to shoot first when you're too far away to verify your target. If you shoot first, you're just another goon with a gun and innocent people end up dead.
The lot of them were literally tools. They were the tools of an outraged gamer getting disproportionate revenge against the wrong target over a couple dollars.
The police should ask themselves "were we a force for good that night?". Considering that an innocent man was shot dead while doing nothing, the answer can only be NO. They were not a force for good that night.
Rather than making excuses, the police need to be explaining how they will change their response so that never happens again.
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the hard part about being "the good guys" is that you don't get to shoot first
Except, of course, thanks to the jackass gamer who set this in motion, the cops believed the man himself had already TOLD them that he'd shot first (and killed someone with a handgun in his possession) and that he was willing to kill more people, and that he'd soaked the home - with people still in it - with gas and was thinking of torching it. And then, alas, made a sharp move when told not to do that exact thing, because he's (according to what police believed was the man himself) probably armed with the
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The caller also claimed he was in a single story home, not the 2 story home the cops rolled up to. If they're going to trust what they were told over the phone, they were at the wrong place. If not, then they shouldn't have necessarily have believed that anyone shot at all.
Also, they were told there were hostages. They had no reason to believe the person at the door wasn't a hostage.
No force for good kills an innocent. So they were not a force for good (whatever their intent). That they fell so very far fr
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Except, of course, thanks to the jackass gamer who set this in motion, the cops believed the man himself had already TOLD them that he'd shot first (and killed someone with a handgun in his possession) and that he was willing to kill more people,
Wrong. That gamer didn't force them to believe that. When a report like that comes in, they should be ready for the case in which the report is correct, but they also have to be ready for the case in which the report is false. They were only ready for one of those cases, and now someone is dead because of their lack of readiness.
Because they saddled up to go to a situation where death was already a factor
I saw Andy Kaufman take a shit on Hollywood Boulevard today. You know it's true because I said so.
Your expectation that cops be willing to die (as another two of them just did today) is absurd, and you know it.
Cops need to be willing to die before they execute an innocent, or they need to not
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Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
To say that they just rolled up and shot the first person they saw is only showing your bias and not what was reported.
Essentially, they did just that, shooting the 1st person to come to the door... bad luck he fit the physical description of the reported assailant. From the footage, it appears the police are hundreds of feet from the front door, so in exchange for placing themselves at a relatively safe distance, discerning a sudden move as harmful intent or honest-to-goodness surprise was near impossible.
Moral of the story? When the police have weapons trained on you, hopefully you don't need to sneeze...
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't comply immediately? Get killed. Comply too quickly? Get killed. Don't resist arrest? Get killed. Run away? Get killed. Unable to control your body's reaction to getting suffocated? Get killed.
Discerning intent was not impossible. They were, as you say, at a safe distance. There is nothing wrong, if you think the person is about to shoot, to find cover and assess the situation, especially if you were already at a safe distance. There is nothing about policing that demands you shoot first and ask questions later. There's something wrong with Americans thinking they're going to be the hero. There's nothing wrong with hiding. You're supposed to be the police. You're not a fucking soldier.
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A death had already been reported at the residence, with future deaths eminent. The poor bastard who opened the door did not comply instantly with their instructions, as he was righteously confused... but he does appear to make some ill-advised quick movement with shaky spotlights and police rifles trained on him.
Right or wrong is, unfortunately, for later discussion... if living through the ordeal is your goal, just put your fracking hands up and move slowly.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine cops burst into your house right now. You're telling me you'll be calm and collected in that situation? Maybe you are. But to demand that of everyone is just ridiculous. They're cops. They're paid and trained to handle these situations and should be held to a higher standard. As they are in saner developed countries.
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And, furthermore, the entire point of them busting into the house unannounced is to *surprise* the occupants and make it more difficult for the occupants to react in a predictable manner. That's the entire point of knocking the door down. Radley Balko points this out every chance he gets.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
The poor bastard who opened the door did not comply instantly with their instructions, as he was righteously confused...
A decent system allows for innocent people to be confused and not comply instantly, without getting executed on the spot.
A police officer could carry a shield to protect himself, instead of a finger on the trigger.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Discerning intent was not impossible. They were, as you say, at a safe distance. There is nothing wrong, if you think the person is about to shoot, to find cover and assess the situation, especially if you were already at a safe distance. There is nothing about policing that demands you shoot first and ask questions later. There's something wrong with Americans thinking they're going to be the hero. There's nothing wrong with hiding. You're supposed to be the police. You're not a fucking soldier.
Even soldiers are held to higher standards and typically cannot, and will not, shoot unless shot at first. Obviously different when they are actively invading a building after having tons of intel, but normally on patrol they do not shoot first in hostile zones.
I love how city policy do more killing, with less info, and in less hostile areas, than our military.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly right. In response to the epidemic of police shootings of innocent, unarmed, (and often black) civilians, veterans have come out saying they wished police forces would hire more vets because they have training in situational awareness that police forces sorely need.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Informative)
Case in point (warning: disturbing):
http://www.newser.com/story/252649/video-shows-cop-fatally-shooting-unarmed-man-in-hotel.html
The officer in this video is clearly amped right up, _screaming_ at the poor fellow on the ground who is readily complying with the officer. Officer says he's going to shoot if the man touches his lower back one more time. Then instead of walking over and cuffing the man while he lays down with his hands out, the officer asks the man to crawl toward him. I've Never seen that request as part of a police procedure. Man starts crawling and pauses to pull up his pants. Officer then lets 4-5 shots go and kills the man instantly. Claims the main was reaching for a gun.
The way the office set up this situation is to create an extremely tense situation, amps himself right up, gets the suspect probably hysterical, threatens to shoot him if he does anything wrong, and then sets up the required actions so the suspect is liable to fuck something up, and when he does the officer has permission to get his gun off. Goal achieved.
What's even more sickening is that this officer was cleared of any wrongdoing and even claimed he'd do it again if he had a chance to do it over. If I were in charge the officer here would get death by lethal injection and be made an example of.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Interesting)
And the reason the jury did not convict in the Brailsford case is that they were not shown the video that is now viral online, nor were they told about the inscription on. Brailsford’s gun. Both cane out after the trial.
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Both exclusions by the presiding judge are cited here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1... [nytimes.com]
Re: Reporting on this is terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole reason swatting works is because the police are notoriously over-anxious when going into these situations. If police were calm and collected and approached these situations even slightly more deliberatively, this would not be an issue.
What confounds me is what even IF this were a real hostage situation, why would you shoot at whoever comes to the door immediately? You might just as easily hit an escaping hostage as the perp. If all we care about is protecting police lives over that of the general populace, just donâ(TM)t send the cops at all. Simply refuse to show up, or immediately bomb the house from a plane. I admire the ideal of the police, but it is not a useful institution if they consider their safety more important than that of the people they have sworn to protect.
Re: Reporting on this is terrible (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, no.
Murder rate in Africa is about twice the global average, and close to three times the USA's murder rate.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
He is, but in his case the consequences aren't that somebody dies.
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I made no assumption of the situation. Please point out any specific assumptions I made. I stated information only.
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You are making an assumption on the situation. What we know is that as far as the police knew they were rolling on a murder and hostage situation (hostage in danger of murder as well). We don't know if the potential hostage taker had his hands hidden, whether he made any sharp movements - basically we know nothing. We don't know if the officer followed procedure, or what he was responding to. To say that they just rolled up and shot the first person they saw is only showing your bias and not what was reported.
This is untrue.
The police have released the 911 call audio, a dash camera video, and the body camera video from the police officer who made the shot.
All of this is linked in the article above, specifically the kansas.com news URL.
You can see all of the things you claim "we" don't know.
You can see the victim raising his hands, but then turning sideways and making a stance with his legs that one might do if they are about to angle a weapon on someone. At that moment one of his hands was, from the side view,
Re: Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
The police didn't murder anyone in this story.
Armed man sets up ambush outside man's house, waits for him to open the door, yells incomprehensible instructions while blind the man then shoots him dead a quarter of a second later.
Sounds like murder to me.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Reporting is intentionally terrible (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have never had a non-friendly interaction with the police and the police suddenly tell you to do something, you aren't going to do it. You are going to wonder what is going on. It's perfectly reasonable for Finch to not raise his hands. It's likely a situation he ever thought he would be in.
In some places in the USA blacks are taught how to interact with the police to avoid being shot. Maybe they need to extend that training to visitors and the general population.
I'm a white Canadian. I've twice had American police officers reach and hold their guns (not point) when interacting with them. Once at a traffic stop when I was looking for something the officer asked for and once when a black friend and I ran up to a police car to ask for directions. My youngest son at 9, also had an ill advised interaction with a SWAT team. As a frequent visitor to the USA, a couple hours learning how to interact with the US police would definitely have been useful.
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People shoot the police in other countries too. But those officers don't have the habit of shooting first. The majority of police forces have a military mentality that goes right to their recruiting videos which show officers kicking doors in, shooting guns, and other such things. Plus the police are picking up surplus army equipment.
Policing in the US has to change and engage with the community again. Learn how to calm situations without using their guns. In fact stop pulling their guns out first would be
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:5, Informative)
Because it would have been so much better if they'd got the "right" guy...
Any time a SWAT team is used, police come prepared for war, and where you have war, you have fog-of-war. Everyone knows hasty decisions are unreliable, and none are more hasty and unreliable than split second decisions made under the belief that it's your life or theirs.
Consider the fovea, the only part of the retina which provides clear, high resolution images. It covers an angular extent roughly equivalent to twice your thumbnail's width held at arm's length. And yet we experience the world as if in super-HD resolution. That experience is interpolated by the brain out of a narrow stream of visual data. That is how police have, in documented cases, mistaken things like a slice of pizza for a gun. They expected there to be a gun, and their brains put the gun where that blob of pixels was. It's exact the same perceptual phenomenon that caused the Apache helicopter pilots to mistake a journalist's camera for an RPG in the so-called "collateral murder" video.
Seeing what you expect to see is why stage magic works too; magicians exploit the fact we each live in a conjectural world, the product of the brain's building complete and coherent models of our surroundings from incomplete data. These models only have to be good enough to confer an evolutionary advantage, and they're often exaggerated as anyone who has ever been surprised by an animal they don't immediately recognize can tell you. Your brain makes the critter larger.
All this makes sending men in primed for a fight for survival tantamount to manslaughter if there is no actual need for that.
Re:Reporting on this is terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
But you do know that the police in other countries - including the SWAT-Teams - are trained differently?
That the police is trained way longer than in the US before being released to the public?
That police is trained to deescalate a situation and is only shooting if you are actually approaching them with a gun?
Your police shot one innocent man with more bullets than our police shot in a whole year, including the mercykills on animals? And this includes encouters with criminals wielding guns.
But that costs money. Buying cheap is sometimes very expensive.
I am shure british, french or russian people could provide sources to backup my post, but here are my sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
2 years! Compare that to the US. For fucks sake, people here train harder to be a certified private security guard on private property than your actual police in most of the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
No one here fears for their lives on daily encounters with the police. Even if the suspects run away or do not comply, as long as no violence and no weapons are involved. And they are not trained to shoot first and ask questions later.
You risk broken bones, but the brutality and recklessness we see in those videos are not there. Some policemen are assholes and there were actual murders by the police that were swept under the rug, but if you show the footage of the most infamous killings in the US to German Police Officers, they‘d tell you that this goes against any training they had.
You know - the first step to solve a problem is to recognize there is one...
There's nothing else to say (Score:2)
Murder charges all around... (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoever made the call, as well as the officers who couldn't be bothered to Not shoot someone.
With their record, does anyone actually Call the police anymore for real calls anymore?
Seems like when people call for service, they're calling to be murdered...
Re: Murder charges all around... (Score:4, Insightful)
With their record, does anyone actually Call the police anymore for real calls anymore?
Seems like when people call for service, they're calling to be murdered...
Over 1 million cops make contact with the public a minimum of 40 million times per year. Of those 40+ million encounters, maybe 1,000 will result in the death of a suspect.
Now, I realize that Slashdot isn't quite what it used to be, but I would still expect the average person on here to at least have a basic understanding of statistics and probability. The fact that you would post something so ignorant in the first place is bad enough on it's own, but the multiple upmods are really disappointing.
Re: Murder charges all around... (Score:3)
Sorry, but I think you might feel different about your "statistics" if they involved one of YOUR family members.
That's the kind of vacuous "logic" I expect to read on huffpoo, not on Slashdot.
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Oh, come on. Learn to use an internet search engine.
900k 'sworn officers' - http://www.nleomf.org/facts/en... [nleomf.org]
(although other sources suggest 1.1m people working in law enforcement, so the 1 million number stated may not be inaccurate)
1093 deaths in 2016 - https://psmag.com/social-justi... [psmag.com]
40 million times a year feels like a terrible under-estimate - that would involve each police officer contacting the public just 40-45 times a year. Less than once a week. Reality is likely to be an average of multiple time
Re:Murder charges all around... (Score:5, Interesting)
Whoever made the call, as well as the officers who couldn't be bothered to Not shoot someone.
And this should be trivial.
The stupid kid that requested the swatting call posted on his twitter account "That house I had swatted is on the news"
The other stupid kid he was arguing with also posted screenshots of his direct message with the first stupid kid, providing the address as his own and telling him to come try something.
Twitter should have all of that logged along with their home or cell IPs, which would lead back to a name on an ISP account with an address.
Their gamer tags were also used and shown, which should similarly point to connection logs with IPs.
Only the 3rd stupid kid who actually placed the 911 call himself may possibly have not left a call or voip trail.
But seeing as this will be a murder charge, and they will soon if not already have in custody the kid requesting the swatting, I highly doubt that kid won't drop the swatters name and info if for no other reason than hoping he gets a less harsh sentence.
You know nothing will happen regarding the cop though.
What intelligence? (Score:5, Insightful)
So the man at the door might be a hostage, which the police knew, were present. This is a total lack of concern for other people in the apartment.
I am going to say it (Score:2)
Re:I am going to say it (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WTF police? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think its simply because all the cops there are armed, and are taught that all situations they go to are life-threateningly dangerous (due to everyone, particularly criminals, having firearms themselves). As a result, cops in the USA have to be much more alert and ready to shoot to defend themselves.
the trouble then comes when you have so many cops which means that many of them will be relatively poorly trained. None of them get the kind of intensive firearms training a UK armed policeman (say) would get, because it wouldn't be possible to train them all to the required level.
I doubt this case was a SWAT team member shooting, but one of the beat cops who was there to provide support and was shitting himself that the suspect would come out guns blazing.
Either way, I doubt its possible to really improve the situation in the US, you have too many cops, too many guns, and as a result you have quantity over quality. These kinds of incidents are likely to happen occasionally (and they do occur less frequently that you are led to believe by the media as the media just loves to report them all).
in this case, lets hope the gamers are made an example of, big time. The cops should be finding them, prosecuting them, parading them before the media, keeping the whole "no more of this, we will come for you" message out there for the rest of the children who might think its a good idea to do this.
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The cops should be finding them
What good would killing them do? ;)
Re:WTF police? (Score:4, Interesting)
I doubt this case was a SWAT team member shooting, but one of the beat cops who was there to provide support and was shitting himself that the suspect would come out guns blazing.
When I was a kid of about fourteen years, I punched a sign in Library Park in Lakeport. I did not hit it hard enough to damage it. The sign was about three inches thick and wooden, and it had split from weathering so they had slapped acrylic over both sides of it. I did not crack the acrylic, and I clearly did not break the sign. A cop saw me do it, and he decided to arrest me for it, even though there was no evidence that a crime had occurred. The cop put me in handcuffs and put me in the front of his shitty little Impala cruiser, with my head almost against the dash where I would have been killed instantly by any halfway decent front end collision. This cop turned out later to be a total piece of human waste, involved in numerous thefts and the statutory rape of a fifteen year old. He was a member of the SWAT team.
SWAT team members are completely capable of being complete pieces of human shit.
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This cop turned out later to be a total piece of human waste, involved in numerous thefts and the statutory rape of a fifteen year old. He was a member of the SWAT team.
SWAT team members are completely capable of being complete pieces of human shit.
They should ask for volunteers for the SWAT team.... and then permanently bar anyone who volunteers. At least the first time around it would help weed out psychopaths who want a chance to shoot someone.
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So economy of scale does not work in the USA?
Interesting take. Never thought of that. Why is that?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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White guy. No big deal. (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazingly, there won't be any riots, nor TVs stolen from stores that are broken into during the riots.
Bodycam, sponsored by Slashdot. (Score:2)
I'm not sure what justifies the need for body cameras more, the death of an innocent man, or the Slashdot comments being posted here.
Comments being posted here make the SWAT guy look like a monk. Talk about trigger-happy.
A Strong Case for Gun Control (Score:3)
Let's start with the government, just to show good faith.
Everything wrong with America (Score:4, Insightful)
Douche bags being reckless with other people's lives
Criminals thinking that what they did isn't that bad.
Militarized Cops - sure of their own righteous AND the villany of their target - over-reacting and shooting an innocent man
The various businesses saying "it's not our problem" rather than preventing anonymous calls to police/spoofed phone numbers.
People going "how horrible", but not really objecting or demanding action, because of how rare it is.
Neither political party taking appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again, because hey, no one really demanded action.
Given how trigger-happy the cop was (Score:3)
He was probably a Call of Duty player.
I had police pull firearms on me (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are police so jumpy in these situations? (Score:3)
This was a really stupid prank and hopefully they catch whoever did it. But one thing I've always wondered about police work in general is this...especially in SWAT situations, why is there such a level of fear? SWAT teams are wearing bulletproof vests...they might get hurt but won't die from gunfire. The other thing is that any criminal is massively outgunned by a SWAT team. They should go into these situations feeling determined they can win, not scared!
I just don't understand why the first reaction of a cop is to pull out their gun and start firing before figuring out what's going on. Just stopping for a few milliseconds would fix a lot of problems.
Re:It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Insightful)
I noticed in the reuters report the following :
“As the incident unfolded, a 28-year-old male opened the front screen door and stood in the doorway or just outside that doorway,” he said. “Officers gave him several verbal commands to put his hands up and walk towards them.”
A police officer opened fire, shooting once, after the man quickly raised his hands and appeared to point a weapon at the officers, Livingston said.
I wonder if any body / dash cams were working...
Link :
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if any body / dash cams were working...
Given that the linked article includes body cam video, I'm going to guess the answer is "yes".
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, I only read the reuters article, so missed that.
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, we don't even RTFA! You want us to watch the f-ing article too now?!!
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Funny)
By what WITCHCRAFT doest thou know yonder article contents?
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Funny)
Don't watch that article! It turned me into a newt!
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A police officer opened fire, shooting once, after the man quickly raised his hands and appeared to point a weapon at the officers, Livingston said.
That's what the police always say when they kill an unarmed civilian by mistake. But don't worry. Like in almost every case where a cop shoots someone without real justification, when it goes to trail the cop will just say he feared for his life and the odds are that the jury will buy it. And if you want to feel even worse about this, right now the caller is only looking at misdemeanor charges because, as he correctly stated on Twitter, calling in a false report is a misdemeanor and he didn't make the co
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:4, Interesting)
Police are unnecessarily jumpy these days it seems... "Better him than me" (even a bulletproof-jacketed me, with backup present). Whatever happened to backing down? To taking cover, to de-escalation, to providing space for cold blooded moves (as opposed to hot-blooded)? I wonder how much police pride is involved in all this?
Also, I wonder how the dispacher's words contribute to this? Do they say 'shots fired' as a statement of fact, or do they use words like 'unconfirmed' or 'alleged', especially if there is only one, unknown, witness reporting the incident.
Also, bring the other coward to justice, the one who gave the fool doxxer the fake address.
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Insightful)
1. In cases where people riot over a police shooting, the person shot is usually not complying with police orders. Rule 1: do what the person with a gun says.
2. The issue here is that people are swatting, not that the swat team shot someone. Those teams are brought into the most volatile situations and must be on a hair trigger if they want to go home each night. Because of this, if they think they see a gun, you will be shot. Rule 2: if a swat team orders you to put your hands up, do it slowly and deliberately.
The real issue here is swatting. This is not a prank. It has always been deadly and it is only luck that nobody has been shot until now. I hope they catch the person that did this and put him/her in prison for a long time.
BULLSHIT
In this case, they had no verified information that they were actually in a volatile situation, and they shot a guy from 200 feet away without verifying he was armed.
The JOB of the police is to PROTECT people, not create a "volatile situation" on their own simply because some jackass gave them bad information.
They didn't even bother to verify the information they were given.
Some guy walks out onto his porch, and they shoot him from 200 feet away. Didn't bother to verify if he was armed - they were TOO FUCKING FAR AWAY TO DO THAT.
The fact that "swatting" is even possible means the police are TOO READY to be all butch.
Government in the US is out of control - literally.
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Insightful)
Something is wrong with the way Americans train police. I don't think they know this, but American police are the butt of jokes around the world. They're not real cops.
Most of them are former security guards and prison guards who think their guns are toys, like this acquitted Philip Mitchell Brailsford piece of shit [youtube.com] who forced a guy begging for his life to play "Simon Says", pumped five rounds into him, and then typically claimed self defense like an American policeman will always do.
Cops with prior military training don't act like this at all. Maybe you would be better served by unloading your current "police force" and starting anew with recruits who have been trained to respect weapons and understand that they serve the public, not the other way around.
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:4, Insightful)
Something is wrong with the way Americans train police. I don't think they know this, but American police are the butt of jokes around the world. They're not real cops.
In order to become a cop in America, you need a grand total of two years of community college, and to pass some extremely pathetic tests. In order to carry a gun as a cop in America, you have to pass some extremely pathetic qualifying exams, which are often cheated upon with the participation of management. In cop school, they're teaching recruits that there is a war on cops, even though this is the safest time in history to be a cop in America, and they are killing citizens in record numbers.
Everything is wrong with the way Americans train police.
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They were also told it was a 1 story house. From the moment they rolled up and found a 2 story house, they should have been questioning the information they were given.
Dumb fuck won't get this, just watch (Score:3)
Some people believe in fairy tales.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Where I live, swatting fails because they check where you're calling from. If youre a kilometer away or much more, they sarcastically ask why you think you know what happens elsewhere.
First of all, everyone knows that it's the Shine that lets you know whats going on so far away. Secondly, a good Swatter would use a VOIP system that lets him put whatever caller-id info he wants. He'll put the victim's number and address into the E911 fields.
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Informative)
*Knock knock* "Yes hello, is there a hostage situation at this house? I drew the short straw so have to come here to your door to take your word for if there is any problem here that requires our assistance."
Is that what you are seeking?
Yes.
In civilized countries that's how it works. Know what? It actually works, too. See, one thing you don't want to do - ever- is inject more "energy" into a situation. If there's nothing wrong going on, a simple query keeps things civil. A few questions and the homeowner is fairly likely to invite one or more officers in to confirm there's no hostage situation. No yelling, no screaming, no sudden gestures, no escalation. On the other hand, if something wrong is going on, there's some risk - yes - but there's a much better chance of talking it down.
Going apeshit is for military actions, not police actions.
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2. The issue here is that people are swatting, not that the swat team shot someone
Strange, I think they're both issues.
I mean, someone just got killed for the horrendous crime of answering the door and raising his hands when instructed by the police.
Rule 1: do what the person with a gun says.
Looks like that just isn't good enough in the US. Rule 0: Be the one with a gun, and tell the police to send someone unarmed in to arrest you peacefully.
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The issue here is that people are swatting, not that the swat team shot someone.
And the award for the most asinine comment of the day goes to: AC (That AC, boy he's really racking up the awards folks).
Tell that to the man's family. An innocent man was shot in the head for absolutely no reason.
SWATing should be a felony if it's not already
militarization of our police is a a much larger problem
But an innocent man was shot in the fucking head for no reason, and SWATing and trigger happy special ops wannabe police officers led to it.
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also: police work isn't even in the top 10 of most dangerous professions, so there's not that much call in general to shoot first before assessing the situation when dealing with a CIVILIAN (not a "perp", not a criminal, bt a suspect at best). Or perhaps being a cop in the USA isn't all that dangerous because they are so trigger happy. Don't get me wrong, being a cop is a difficult job and I have a lot of respect for the people who put themselves on the line every day. But being a cop, putting yourself on the line means just that: you take risks in order to protect the populace. If you are dealing with a member of the public, their safety comes first, not yours. Be careful but keep the damn gun holstered until there is a reason to draw it... like they do in normal countries.
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:4, Interesting)
+1 I think there has been a concerted effort to persuade 'civilians' that being a cop is the equivalent of being in the military in terms of danger. Any level of response is justifiable when your life is 'continuously under threat.' What you see on TV is not representative of the average police officers daily life.
I just parsed the 2016 statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS):(https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm) and figured out that the fatal injury rate for 'Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers' is 14.6 (the rate is a bit complicated, but weighted by total hours worked by total employees in that profession, to make jobs comparable)
Police work: @14.6 - slightly less, but roughly equivalently dangerous to Cement Manufacturing, Construction Laboring, working in Fish-Farming, Landscaping.
Professions that are 50%+ more likely to kill you than police work: Farming/Ranching (23.1), truck driving (24.7), steel-working (25.1), refuse collection (34.1)
More than THREE TIMES as dangerous as being a police officer: Roofing (48.6) and Aircraft pilots (55.5) (presumably a lot of private pilots crash?).
The most dangerous jobs in America today? Being a commercial fisherman (nearly six times as dangerous as being a cop) and Forestry Logging (more than NINE times more dangerous).
In case you're thinking it's a sample-size thing: in 2016, (according to the BLS), 108 police officers were fatally injured doing their job. 101 roofers, 91 loggers, 570(!) truck drivers.
So let's take truck driving, a considerably more dangerous profession than being a police officer, as an example. By the way, you 'need' truck drivers - it's how the food gets to your supermarkets and the medicines to the hospital. Truck driving, unhappily, causes some 'civilian' deaths, for a bunch of reasons: job stress, some bad training, some drivers don't take the mandatory breaks, maybe some use stimulants, whatever. How about we all look the other way when that happens, because, hey, it's a dangerous job, man? A lot of those truck drivers die on the job, y'know: you'd have to be one to understand.
I believe we should hold police to a higher standard than truck drivers, not a lower one. Being in danger is no excuse at all for being sloppy.
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Rule 2: if a swat team orders you to put your hands up, do it slowly and deliberately.
Do it slowly and you get shot for not following orders, do it quickly and you get shot for scaring the cops.
Really, if a SWAT team is unexpectedly yelling at you, barking orders, is your FIRST instinct going to be to raise your hands SLOWLY?
Re: It's a male, take him down! (Score:5, Interesting)
Those teams are brought into the most volatile situations and must be on a hair trigger if they want to go home each night.
So, send in a robot or drone, and assess the situation with no risk to human life. Swatting will fall out of fashion very quickly if the prankster/troll risks jail, and all it accomplishes is law enforcement sending a flying camera to peek through the target's windows for a few minutes.
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Or send someone round the back to listen/peep through a window. Or, you know, sniff. Because they'd also been told the place was doused in gasoline. You'd be able to smell that a block away.
Re:Two points on this (Score:5, Informative)
1. When the cops tell you to do something, you do it. The place to argue is in court, not when confronted with (a) police officer(s). The dead guy would probably have been fine if he did this (excluding a ND by the cops).
Even the cops aren't saying that he did anything wrong. Their statement is literally that he came to the door and one of the officers shot him. You're a cop sucker.
Re:Two points on this (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
The guy put his hands up when told to. Apparently he did it too fast, which looks as though "he's got a gun". This attitude of "cops should be treated like kings", which is essentially what you're arguing, is the problem here. Cops aren't soldiers. If the person is not complying, that is not a reason for killing them.
Yet sadly they are being armed with ex-military equipment*. I have no idea why a podunk police force up the road from me, and in a rural area has need of a mine-proof vehicle (which they proudly showed off at the state fair)
* and while the current POTUS might think this is a good thing, it has been going on for a while now.
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So you're saying, if I'm at home and there's a knock on the door, and a guy in a police uniform there tells me to do something, and I ask "why?", that justifies me being shot dead on the spot?
I am SO happy I do not live in a country where that is even a remote possibility. And I fear for people like you who consider that perfectly normal, even expected.
Re:Two points on this (Score:5, Interesting)
Two points:
1. When the cops tell you to do something, you do it. The place to argue is in court, not when confronted with (a) police officer(s). The dead guy would probably have been fine if he did this (excluding a ND by the cops).
Erm, he did. He answered the door, from the body cam video, he raised his hands when told to.
The caller ID thing is neither here nor there, the phone company will record the actual caller for billing purposes. Finding the real source number will be no problem.
But if the police try and pin this entirely on the prankster, that would be a travesty of justice. The police are completely culpable here, the officer who shot was not fit to carry a weapon.
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Either way for the call to go through, the phone company would know exactly who actually called you every single time.
Almost impossible to guarantee this. I have VOIP. It's only protected by a password. If someone manages to break into my home network and grab the password, they can add extra phone devices, and make outside calls.
Now, because your law guarantees real traceability, the police are going in even more trigger happy, because they know for sure they've got the right place.
Re:Two points on this (Score:5, Insightful)
> 1. When the cops tell you to do something, you do it.
Five cops burst into your room on an otherwise regular boring day in your regular boring life where shit like this NEVER happens. You are scared out of your mind. One of them yells "Don't move!" and at the same time another yells "Get down on the ground, NOW!" You can barely hear the instructions from the noise all five are making. What is the correct course of action here?
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Yep, just like that. Cops walks up to the door, knocks, and shoots the person who opens the door. Just like that.
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From someone in a country with proper gun control:
Looks like an assassination.
The guy is SO FAR from everything, he has no clue you're referring to him. He's opened his door, there's a bunch of bright lights all down the streets hundreds of yards away. People are yelling and shouting, he can't tell what's being said. Nobody is close enough to do anything BUT snipe him from a distance, so they can't judge what he's doing anyway.
Hint: Innocent people do things that you might not want them to do. "HEY YOU!
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