Serial Swatter Bragged He Hit 100 Schools, 10 Homes

Punishing the caller after all won't do anything to save more people - police killings are happening at alarming rate with swatters or without. It'll just satisfy your lust for revenge which doesn't really do anything. Just consider the rising amount of jailed people in US and comparatively low change in crime rate. Use brain to solve problems, not your first emotional response.

SWAT was originally intended to be used for "special" situations, and increasingly (over the past few decades) has been the go-to tool for many police-citizen interactions.

If I were playing video games, and my front door exploded and the entryway were flashbanged, my first response would probably be relatively instinctive (get up, maybe to see WTF is happening in my house), and it's _very probable_ that such responses would make the breaching officers fearful enough that they'd shoot me. I don't have any weapons in my house, have no intention of resisting any police action, but the fact that I might stand up out of my chair, or move, or who-knows-what could easily be misconstrued.

In the article, they said that the man had "reached for his waist" -- I literally do that every time I get up from my computer chair.

I'd much rather that the police did some kind of surveillance first ("oh, hey, looks like a dude playing video games ..."), and verified that the situation matched the emergency described in their dispatch.

This isn't intended to detract from the badness of the SWAT-ter's actions: I hope that (if he indeed caused this) there's some serious consequences. However, it would have been a lot more difficult to cause such mayhem if the police were less trigger-happy.

...except that's exactly what happened. Regardless of whether you think the changes are effective, just compare airport security before and after.

This stuff automatically disqualified you from a content-based response in my mind. I'm an adult with substantial experience in these matters.

In principle, I certainly agree. But in the reality of contemporary American politics, I think that sometimes we need to make decisions about which path to take.

Is it a problem that anybody that knows an address can summon a heavily armed, often poorly trained, sometimes mentally ill group of people to break into a home at that address?

Or is it a problem that, given the above, people are actually doing it?

I want to suggest that we do actually need to choose one or the other in this situation, and that the answer is flatly the former.

Swatting is an abhorrent practice but if a society does execute people (and I don't think that they ever should) you absolutely do not execute them for swatting.

You certainly don't low-ball your punishment desires.

By calling the swatter a murderer, you're only bringing into sharper focus the grotesque failure of American police to respond to allegations in a lawful and proportionate way. If a swatter is a murderer, then by definition the swat team has ceased to be part of a police department and has become an extrajudicial death squad. A functioning police department is not expected to kill law-abiding citizens on a regular basis.

The law says "innocent until proven guilty", not "innocent until proven guilty, unless the police get nervous, in which case we'll kill you on sight".

Charles Kinsey, a mental health therapist from Miami, was shot by police in 2016. He was lying on his back with his hands raised, begging the police not to shoot the autistic man he was caring for. After he was shot, he was handcuffed and given no first aid until an ambulance arrived 20 minutes later. There is clear evidence that the swat team knew that neither Kinsey nor his patient were armed prior to the shooting. Through pure luck, Kinsey survived the incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey

We are beyond the point of rationalization, we are beyond excuses. Whether by accident or design, we have created a system where police officers can kill with impunity, where law-abiding citizens live in real fear of killed by the police simply because they live in the wrong neighbourhood, have the wrong skin color or stream video games online. The only humane and rational response is root-and-branch reform of police training, supervision and accountability.

However, the divergence of the interests of the state from those of the planet and its people are quickly becoming more visible.

My sense is that, in order to do away with warfare generally (and SWAT teams specifically), we'll need to deprecate the state in favor of more compassionate approaches to, inter alia, emergency response.

According to the post, it already seems pretty regular --- this one only made the news because someone was killed.

> I certainly don't encourage it

Why not? This seems like a very reasonable, sober approach to testing this problem. If SWAT teams can't pass this test, they need to be put on pause until they can be repaired.

I mean, we do this sort of pentesting for things as trivial (at least by comparison) as bank accounts and health records. We're talking about people being murdered in cold blood here. I damn well think that a SWAT team needs to be able to demonstrate that it can survive a falsified report without murdering somebody.

This would not be possible if the police were to turn up unarmed, as would be the case in the UK where they would have tasers and body armour.

The UK police do make big mistakes with firearms - sometimes politically motivated mistakes to give a bigger impression of terror than there actually is. The Brazilian guy that got shot on the underground was a notorious incident, plus there were the London Riots in 2011, sparked off by a police and guns problem that went wrong.

In the UK there are firearms officers only a few minutes away in places like London, most of the police force know as much about guns as they know about Scandinavian poetry. Which is good. If the police need to get the guns out they can, there is no need for every officer to be armed. In many ways it is better, not least because only a small amount of officers have to use guns and they can dedicate the time required to be good at what they do, or the best they can be. Meanwhile, in America where every policeman, woman and dog is armed to the teeth, there is not the same level of specialisation, the whole force have to be trained to some standard that is not likely to be as good as the sharp shooters of London's police.

This also applies to equipment, in America the police force needs more guns that Europe's armies need. So are those millions of guns going to be as good as the small handful of guns owned by London's police? Say you wanted to add video recording to every gun, so it recorded black box style, to not miss anything. You could update a few hundred guns with that capability a lot easier than you could if updating a few million guns. It is not hard.

In the UK when Tony Blair was around then if you swatted someone as 'al-qaeda' then - if they had the beards right to be stereotyped - then the police would go in guns blazing. The credible threat would be bomb making, but even then it would rely on the fear of those times to be taken credibly. Plus the dark politics of the time.

The police in the UK do drugs raids at dawn - or other times of day - where there is no polite entry. You could get someone swatted for that but only if they were known to the police and actually dealing drugs on the premises could you get the full raid. Here there are no guns, they cover the exits to the premises and then use the 'big key' to break down the front door. The goal is to then make sure they can get the drugs before they are hidden/disposed. Guns are not needed for this even though guns definitely exist in the world of class 'A' drugs. The police do have their riot gear on and this is partially bulletproof. Also very heavy so not operationally that convenient.

Would an American police officer have the 'bravery' to burst down a house and go in unarmed, i.e. not gun first? There is a thought.

Person came out of house and made a lot of hand movements. Got shot.

[777] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UKp05HDXCU

* From what I understand, the call was ongoing with the caller continuing to make threats. It wasn't a report and hangup (they called him back at the number he left on the non emergency line.)

* The cop put himself into a position where the innocent man's actions on the doorstep could be perceived as a threat and hypothetically actually be a threat. Why? Why is the cop in a vulnerable position at that time?

Both issues need to be addressed.