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Comment by watty | Hacker News Reader

What's with all the anti-law enforcement? They thought they were dealing with a highly dangerous situation and individual. It's pretty easy to say they should of handled it better as I sit here in the top floor of my corporate office sipping La Croix but let's not forget that the caller was intentionally putting others in dangerous situations.

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>They thought they were dealing with a highly dangerous situation and individual.

Are you saying hearsay from a random citizen is probable cause to go kill someone? If that's the case than the police may as well advertise themselves as the cheapest and easiest to use hitmen in the country.

I am in no way excusing the kansas officers here. However this does bring up an interesting point. To properly answer the question about "hearsay" you would need to find out what percentage of 911 calls with details indicating a need for a SWAT team are hoaxes. If the percentage is sufficiently low then the officer may well have been primed by previous experience to expect specific things during the call.

When someone is used to working with accurate information and is then fed inaccurate information from that same source then you can predict the results pretty accurately.

It is probably a combination of a man being killed as he walked out of his mother's house for adjusting his belt and a string of similar, high-profile cases of excessive police force killing people.

Well for one even if the swatter had told the one hundred percent truth the police would have been damn negligent. Imagine a hostage taker instructing one to head out and leave as a diversion or just to open the door while he is in cover with a rifle readied so he can take potshots at them or something. Then the police would have shot the hostage for no reason without even a crossfire as an excuse.

Also the fact they are so trigger happy that they can be used as a free dial-a-hitman is in itself a huge problem. Sure the callers are dirtbags but the fact they are so readily exploitable is on them.

It is not anti-law-enforcement to point out the incredibly negligent independent assessment of the situation, required because the report was totally unsupported by any facts, the incredibly bad risk assessment training that US police use, and the incredibly bad escalation guidelines that virtually guarantee that many innocent people will be killed.

In fact, I would say it's quite pro-law-enforcement to insist that all these things be improved.

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