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Comment by simlevesque | Hacker News Reader

Why do police officers shoot someone who was never a threat ? Kids will be kids, there will always be kids who do things that are completely irresponsible, by design. The fact that the person who pulled the trigger is not responsible at all for all this is beyond me.

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Because they have received poor training, and bad influence from a community of peers that is very bad at risk assessment and judging priorities.

Nah, they wanna be RAMBO! America police is no longer fine with neatly pressed uniform and polished shoes. They want combat boots and outfit. Machine gun if possible, and all sorts of tactical gear that belongs in a battle field. They can't wait to toss a stun grenade and dive and role play as if they are military. It's really amusing to them, you should see a bunch of officers have their bro talk about a raid even a botched one, there's no ounce of regret that they broke down the wrong door and traumatized a family. It's all fun and giggles so long as no officer was hurt. It's the new police culture.

When the majority of threats are otherwise unknown (pulling over a speeder? You dont know if hes going to quietly accept the ticket or if hes a wanted felon who will open fire in traffic with an assault rifle to avoid capture), it is all too easy to over-respond to a presumably clear threat.

If you're going to "over-respond" by shooting people, you probably shouldn't be a cop. You probably shouldn't have any job that involves holding a gun, in fact. A bad day at work generally shouldn't result in a corpse.

Being a policeman isn’t even in the top 10 most dangerous professions according to the 2016 census.

For example: “Ground maintenance workers” were in 10th place.

http://time.com/5074471/most-dangerous-jobs/

By all means let's also put every officer into 20cm thick rubberized suits, because you never know when you're pulling over a speeder if you'll be hit by another passing car.

Actually that's way more likely than the situation turning otherwise violent...

[/sarcasm]

From my interactions with them in some traffic stops, it does seem like there's a bit of power-tripping going on sometimes.

So basically our cops wanna be TACTICOOL

AKA made fun of by all the actual military types

Because they were told he was a threat.

Also because of our highly militarized police tactics designed to reduce potential harm to officers at the cost of everything else.

> Because they were told he was a threat.

Ok but when they saw him, was he a threat ? Are hearsay enough to pull the trigger ? That seems irresponsible too.

Wait to evaluate if the guy is a threat and he could have already shot you. Safer to shoot him first. This is what people are talking about when they complain about militarized police. Treating unknowns as threats that must be neutralized instead of something you need to observe closer is how you end up throwing grenades on sleeping babies and shooting innocent people. But the converse is that the suburban drug lord pulls out his AR15 and shoots down 3 cops before they have a chance to figure out what is happening.

IMO it is the police's responsibility to die first. They are putting themselves out to protect the public from threats not to kill the public who might be a threat to them or a fellow police officer.

I am aware that currently legally it is the exact opposite and they have no responsibility to save or protect anyone only themselves.

> IMO it is the police's responsibility to die first.

And, pray tell, who in their right mind is going to take _that_ job?

Well most of the time they aren't dying and hopefully they are mostly helping people. Firefighters put their lives at risk in a similar way. The respect and honor earned by protecting your fellow people is a strong motivator.

Hopefully this would change the public's perception of police to some extent and improve public relations to the point that they would walk around being thanked like veterans.

In the military, they are not usually allowed to shoot someone just because the other person has a gun.

I've watched videos of police in other countries handling armed, definitely-a-threat suspects without using deadly force. Our police go to the gun first, period.

> But the converse is that the suburban drug lord pulls out his AR15 and shoots down 3 cops before they have a chance to figure out what is happening.

I've just gone through the information at https://www.odmp.org/ for the last 3 years and I can't find an example of anything like this.

Militarized police tactics work!

You are completely correct that it's largely a fantasy scenario, but who wants to take the chance?

But cops, especially highly trained SWAT officers answering a potentially very dangerous call are never just standing in the open - they were surely prepared for the situation, ducking behind their armored vehicles with automatic weapons drawn. I have trouble believing even the fastest criminal could get his gun out, while walking out the door and surrounded by highly trained SWAT officers in their protective gear, and manage to take one out. Or are you telling me that Hollywood movies are accurate? ;) Besides that, why not train officers to shoot for the legs instead? If they're so unsure of their accuracy, have a few people shoot... I imagine 5 gunshot wounds to the legs gives a slightly higher chance of survival than a head-shot.

Once the SWAT team is there you are heavily into militarized police tactics.

Gun training is if you shoot someone you shoot to kill. Wounding just gives them a chance to shoot you back. This is universal, ask any officer trained to use a gun and they'll tell you that shooting the gun out of someone's hand is Hollywood nonsense. Shooting to wound leads to accidental death (hit the femoral artery) and/or retaliation.

Or lawsuits.

>Ok but when they saw him, was he a threat

Yes (from their point of view). They were told he had a gun, and he lowered his hand to his waistband after being told to keep his hands above his head.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wichita-officer-who-kil...

He was also, of course, standing completely in the open, while a bunch of cops were in perfect cover a distance away. He couldn't hit anything even if he had a gun.

Why are they taking the word of a random, unidentified caller?

Isn't that every police call? As far as I know dispatchers aren't psychics.

There’s a big difference between sending people out to investigate an untrusted report, and going in guns blazing because an anonymous voice on the phone said the situation was dangerous.

You act on the information but you don’t trust it.

That's the real problem.

So you're saying if I tell a cop my neighbor (who I've never met) is a serial killer, they are well within their rights to go kill them?

Only if he does something really bad, such as move his hand.

Because, in the current climate, a cop who shoots first is certainly going home to their family at night and is certainly going to retire in good health. Even though the chances of getting injured by a person are pretty low, the chances of getting injured by a dead person are zero. Cops are humans with concrete human motivations and the risk/reward balance of shooting people is biased heavily towards reward.

This is definitely not correct. You are saying the police are safer if their strategy is "shoot immediately". If that is the case, they've just eliminated any incentive for someone with a gun to not shoot at them or to resist arrest. In many cases, the cops do not have the advantage, and if you know with certainty that you will die if the police get the first shot, you will shoot at the police at the first opportunity. You don't open the door and talk to the police. You find a place where you'll be protected and wait for the police to walk into the room.

I don't know the exact probabilities of each of these events, and it would depend on the situation, but it's dangerous to assume that the police are better off if they open fire just to be sure they kill the bad guy.

> If that is the case, they've just eliminated any incentive for someone with a gun to not shoot at them or to resist arrest.

Yes, I think that's a good point — it is a vicious cycle and sort of self-perpetuates.

> Cops are humans with concrete human motivations and the risk/reward balance of shooting people is biased heavily towards reward.

There is demonstrably little risk in the US for police who shoot people, absent specific evidence of bad faith. There's also no "reward" for shooting people, unless they're actually murdering people opportunistically under cover of their badges.

Then again, consider the case in Baltimore of a ring of officers carrying toy guns to plant on people after shooting them, and how the cooperating member of the ring was found dead of an apparent suicide just before he was going to testify. [0] Or that it's only the happenstance of a bystander with a camera phone recording a cop shooting someone in the back, then planting his taser on the body, and reporting the victim had taken it. [1] Or the car chase that ended in a death, during which the sheriff's deputy's body cam recorded him saying, "I love this shit. God, I tell you what, I thrive on it. If they don’t think I’ll give the damn order to kill that motherfucker they’re full of shit." [2] Those are just what we've found.

I get that being a law enforcement officer is a dangerous job, and that they're risking their lives every time they respond to an unknown situation. The thing is, they signed up for that. It's not like cops getting shot was a surprise sprung upon them only after they were sworn in.

They're also given the authority to use deadly force, and — ideally — the trust that they will do so judiciously. Not only do they sometimes abjectly fail to do that, the system fails to penalize egregious abuses of that trust. We've somehow chosen as a society to lionize the police, and give them incredibly wide latitude and presumption of good faith. Most cops are good cops, and probably can be trusted with substantial latitude. A permissive attitude invites abuse, however, and not only are there bad cops, but the good ones, and the system itself, abet them (which, I submit, severely mitigates their good cop-ness).

[0] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gun...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-officer...

[2] https://www.salon.com/2018/02/08/tennessee-sheriff-recorded-...

Because they've been falsely informed that there is such a threat. That doesn't make it right but it at least explains a part of what happened.

Low burden of proof isn't it.

That's not how that works. If you are a police officer in the United States and you've been told you are going into a situation where your opposition is armed and has already killed at least one person you will be very nervous.

"Barriss allegedly then called the emergency 911 operators in Wichita and said he was at the address provided by Viner, that he’d just shot his father in the head, was holding his mom and sister at gunpoint, and was thinking about burning down the home with everyone inside."

That's a situation where if it is true somebody is likely going to end up hurt and I suspect the police officers tried very hard to make sure that wasn't them.

And so innocent people paid the price for a bunch of idiots duking it out over a $1.50 bet.

The part that makes no sense to me is that swatting is even possible, there are enough indicators that the call is not originating from the location indicated by the caller.

I still think this should not have happened but there is at least a little bit of leeway on seeing how this could have happened. Keep in mind that the swatters had a lot of experience in tuning their story for maximum effect on LE. This or something like it was their intention all along.

And "somehow", only people that are swatted in the US wind up dead...

even though 'gamer culture' is larger in Europe and Asia. ( and in many countries in both, swatting has been attempted ).

The number of guns floating around in the US has a whole pile of effects that are active in this case: more guns increases the chance of a gun really being present, it increases the number of dead LE officers the ones in the SWAT team are familiar with and it increases the chance of the officer not making it home. Add poor training, the SWAT team already being only called in into situations that are supposedly dangers and you're a stupid mistake away from one or more people being killed.

USA police always struck me as super insecure in the few interactions I had with them compared to Canadian and European police. Even in Latin America the police in general was a lot more relaxed.

Incidentally, in the military there were similar issues with something called 'force protection'.

In this case it was an irresponsible prank, but it seems perfectly possible that someone could mistakenly give an incorrect address for a real situation, or the 911 operator could copy it down wrong, or whatever. There are simply too many possibilities that could lead to a false alarm that shooting first and asking questions later when showing up at a house without in any way ascertaining whether there is a real threat is, in my mind, a completely unreasonable procedure.

I don't think this was a prank. This was a calculated effort to cause someone bodily harm by weaponizing the police services.

I thought it was a calculated effort to scare the shit out of someone, not actually getting people shot. (I'm admittedly not very experienced in this art, but my assumption would not be that if I called the cops on someone they would just gun them down.)

Read the article and how the situation is described. They are not asking for 'the cops' they know the result of the call is that a heavily armed SWAT team is going to go in with the intent of disabling the hostage taker.

That's way beyond just scaring someone.

> That's not how that works. If you are a police officer in the United States and you've been told you are going into a situation where your opposition is armed and has already killed at least one person you will be very nervous.

I have been told many times that police officers are very likely to shoot unarmed innocent people. Should I shoot police officers with the same levity?

> If you are a police officer in the United States and you've been told you are going into a situation where your opposition is armed and has already killed at least one person you will be very nervous.

If your trigger finger is itching because you're nervous, then you have absolutely zero business being a police officer in the field - much less a SWAT member.

By that standard you could disqualify all of the human race. Going into an active shooter situation would definitely cause almost anybody except for those that are totally apathetic to experience some degree of nervousness.

It's not ideal but it's human nature. I agree that the degree to which US police is 'trigger happy' is super problematic but in the case of a SWAT team called in on someone that has (1) already killed and (2) indicated he wants to kill more people in his environment some degree of apprehension is understandable.

If you're so ice-cold that you would not be nervous under those circumstances then maybe you should join a SWAT team?

> Going into an active shooter situation would definitely cause almost anybody except for those that are totally apathetic to experience some degree of nervousness.

But you've just equivocated on "an active shooter situation" and "a reported active shooter situation." Swatting has been well-known for long enough that there needs to be more evidence than an anonymous untracked phone call before police approach a home under the assumption that there is in fact an active shooter on the premises.

given that the person who died had nothing to do with anything, it's almost certainly the case that there was ZERO corroborating on-site evidence that a highly dangerous situation was actually unfolding.

Yes, this is absolutely true, right up to the point where the SWAT team showed up and then it was a highly dangerous situation anyway.

> By that standard you could disqualify all of the human race.

This obviously isn't the case given that most of these incidents don't result in gunfire.

>The part that makes no sense to me is that swatting is even possible, there are enough indicators that the call is not originating from the location indicated by the caller.

Google search SS7.

https://securityintelligence.com/ss7-vulnerability-isnt-a-fl...

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/fix-ss7-two-factor-authenticat...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/03/hackers_fire_up_ss7...

TLDR; the SS7 protocol (which cell phones operate on) is extremely unsafe and vulnerable.

It seems to be accurate enough for McDonalds to tell cell phone owners in front of their stores that they have this great offer.

That's not the same system, and if you're McDonalds and fuck it up, you've just accidentally offered someone discounted fries.

Things are a little different when a location error might mean 911 doesn't send emergency responders to you.

Sure, but that would be one more input into your system. And if enough of those inputs are conflicting then that would be a very good reason to dig a little deeper while the squad is en-route, or to alert them to a possible hoax. If all the bits of evidence align then that can be taken as confirmation that it is not a hoax.

>"Barriss allegedly then called the emergency 911 operators in Wichita and said he was at the address provided by Viner, that he’d just shot his father in

Ok, and there was no skepticism on the part of the officer taking the call?

Shouldn't you ask for some confirming information? Come on.

> That's a situation where if it is true somebody is likely going to end up hurt and I suspect the police officers tried very hard to make sure that wasn't them.

They also try very hard to make sure it isn't the mom and sister.

> They also try very hard to make sure it isn't the mom and sister.

did they all come out together?

I don't know, and I wasn't specifically referring to this incident. I was replying to jaquesm's point, which I took to be saying that officers are worried about self-preservation going into a situation where they believe there is an armed hostage-taker. They almost certainly are worried about their own life, but that's not all they're worried about. They also are worried about the lives of the (alleged) hostages. The life of the (alleged) hostage-taker? That's a lower priority.

And also because the victim lowered his hands to his waistband, and the officer thought he had a gun:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wichita-officer-who-kil...

Additionally, consider how disorienting it would be to wake up, hear a commotion outside, walk out your front door, and suddenly you're blinded by lights and a bunch of different voices are yelling at you to do stuff.

It is completely unreasonable to expect an ordinary person to have perfect comprehension and self control in such a situation. Which is why the procedures police follow need to anticipate this very problem.

the officer also fired partially behind cover using a rifle at a distance of over 100 feet (http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/v70e0w/picture1932940...)

if there had been a concealed weapon in the victims waistband, it could only have been a handgun or something less lethal.

Ever try and hit a target at 100 feet with a pistol? It can be done if you concentrate, have steady hands, and aim slowly; with practice. My point is that the officer should have waited long enough to confirm the threat. The element of surprise plus the advantage of distance, hardware, cover, armor, and backup afforded him at least 1 second of better judgement.

Your tone suggest that these were a couple of irresponsible 8 year olds playing a prank. There were 17/18 yo and the person that called in the swat was 25. They all are plenty old enough to know what our LE system is all about. As far as the 25 yo serial swatter, it was just a matter of time before something like this happened.

> Kids will be kids

Both persons are over 18 years old.

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