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.
As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder.
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.
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 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.
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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."
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?
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/the-10-sa...
Five states with lowest rates of gun death: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_Uni...)
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...)
May as well tie it into most popular music if we're using sample sizes that small.
Vermont = lots of guns and safe
Louisiana = lots of guns and unsafe
Hawaii = not so many guns and safe
Illinois = not so many guns and unsafe...
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.
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).
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/u...
1. The compare gun deaths. This includes suicides and excludes all other murders. So it is a totally biased metric.
They even admit most gun deaths are suicides.
2. Ignore by far the most salient variables for predicting murders.
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.
Are you arguing that the police are more likely to kill people at random in areas with higher amounts of gun ownership?
I'm not sure I follow you.
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.
This is precisely why the USA needs to reform its approach to police use of deadly force.
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.
Wrong, police in e.g. UK or Japan do not customarily carry guns. And SHOCKER these countries have fewer police-related homicides.
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.
It's a bit 'noisy' because there are a lot of 3rd world places that are simply quite violent. The US has a lot more than, say, a lot of Europe.
Also, don't discount suicide: guns make that easier too. Some will find a way without, but some would be prevented if it's 'too much effort'.
Do a graph of legal gun ownership versus murder rate (comparing US states, or countries). No relationship, in fact slightly negative.
Do a graph of other demographic factors against murder rates. Bingo!
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.
Even if it wasn’t a prank, imagine them getting the wrong address. Or the caller being in good faith but mistaken.
People killed on false grounds shouldn’t be summarized in “those officers did nothing wrong”
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.
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.
[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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 single caller claiming shots have been fired really isn't the same thing as information that shots have been fired.
I mean, your reasoning process hands a pretty huge victory to malicious pranksters that want the cops to shoot at someone.