Comment by wwalser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wwalser | Hacker News Reader

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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.)

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