Just the other day a woman programmer told me of some of the threats and abuse she'd suffered essentially because she's a programmer, a woman and has a public profile.
I find this so depressing.
(If I go out and try to hire a hit-man to kill someone, that's how the prosecuting authorities would deal with me. If I try and trick someone else who is armed into killing someone for me? That's a very short step from paying an assassin -- there's just less money involved. That the armed someone in question is a SWAT team doesn't clearly change the nature of the interaction. QED: attempted murder.)
That in turn would result in no trial, and circumvent the complicated question of whether SWAT team operations disproportionately increase the risk of death or serious injury.
> At the very least, pursuing some of these charges would build leverage, which may result in the defendant pleading to a lesser charge.
That's a really ugly part of the American justice system (e.g. scare the accused with over-inflated penalties to get them to plead guilty with no trial). That should be abandoned.
The real solution will be 1) removing SWAT teams from communities that have no real need for them and 2) training police to only use SWAT tactics once they've confirmed they're appropriate for the situation.
SWATing pranks are only just one symptom of the overuse of military tactics by police.
But to be less negative about it, the vast majority of swatting don't result in accidental police killings, probably for a variety of reasons including the higher concentration of well-trained, veteran officers as SWAT team members than in the police population at large, and the fact that the SWAT team almost certainly outnumbers their targets and all the cognitive effects that can have on the participants.
What?
Quod erat demonstrandum: attempted murder?
Thus it is proven: attempted murder?
You probably meant "Summarizing", "In summary", "All in all", or a similar expression.
Though I still think proven prosecutorial misconduct in capital cases should be charged as conspiracy to commit murder (since I'm pretty sure that all states actually classify executions as homicides for cause of death).
What I found most disturbing there is the pattern of a fragile and weak person being abused and returning all that abuse into others that are weaker than him.
It reminds me an Israeli writer (Amos Oz, if I remember correctly) saying that many times the mind of the opressed is an mirrored inverted version of the mind of opressor.
I believe it starts with 4Chan's "tits or GTFO" whenever a woman identifies as such. In the end, guys like this one try to extort as much nudes, porn or ultimately sex as they possibly can.
This doesn't add much to your comment, other than offering a potential explanation as to why women in technology can have a hard time. Unfortunately I don't see a solution to the problem either.
We know men engage in risk-seeking behaviors more-so than women, in aggregate. Couple that with teenage men/boys being more likely to be socially isolated and all the other factors associated with the adolescent/pubescent lifestage (hormones raging, identity issues, etc) - again, in aggregate - it's easy to see why you'd get more males than females engaging in this kind of behavior.
We're talking about sexual harassment, not just jerks or any old "bad behavior". There is not an even distribution of sexual harassment.
http://news.msu.edu/media/documents/2011/03/1205ff7b-5b6c-40...