Federal prosecutors have filed new charges against swatter Tyler Barriss | Hacker News Reader

Federal prosecutors have filed new charges against swatter Tyler Barriss

wired.com

This article really hits me as the sort of “propaganda” writers create through blindly accepting the story of their culture rather than thinking about things critically.

By that I mean the real story here is that the police dispatched a sniper to execute someone without a trial. Blew them away as soon as he opened the door.

That shit is still the news! The facts of what happened here do not make sense in our idea of America.

Yet Wired doesnt even make a passing reference to it.

Feels similar to the way the media reports on “identity theft” as if your identity was the thing that was stolen, not that the bank had a security breach and they're forcing you to pay for it- completely looking at the situation backwards

> Blew them away as soon as they opened the door.

Source?

My point was that "as soon as they opened the door" and "seconds later" are not the same thing. Go watch the body cam or do some research. There were 7-10 seconds with commands being issued to Andrew and he did not comply. Absolutely not his fault, I'm sure it was a very confusing situation. I'm simply pointing out that if we are going to talk about it, let's face the facts and not make bullshit up.

From literally the second paragraph in the article:

> When the cops showed up in force, 28-year-old Andrew Finch opened his front door to see what the commotion was about; seconds later he was dead, shot by a police sniper across the street

...it’s in the linked article, fairly obviously.

"When the cops showed up in force, 28-year-old Andrew Finch opened his front door to see what the commotion was about; seconds later he was dead, shot by a police sniper across the street."

From the article.

Here's a description of the events, including bodycam footage. Interpret as you will. But he was shot within seconds of opening the door, that is not disputed.

https://www.kansas.com/news/local/article208812519.html

EDIT: I will add that I am not endorsing the comment that he was "blown away" as soon as he opened the door, which has a very specific connotation.

I just watched the body cam footage. There is no effort on the part of the police to be judicious. I think the phrasing "blew them away as soon as they opened the door" is a fairly accurate description of what happened.

I am a pretty pro-police person. I gladly support law enforcement, because they have a tough tough job.

I am in complete agreement here, and I see agreement with this kind of libertarian sentiment even in the conservative circles I sometimes travel in. The police in the United States are over-militarized, under-trained, and way way too eager to engage in gun fire. SWAT 'deployment' (even that is a military term) should be a last resort, not the immediate reaction, especially to an unverified phone call.

That's not a tough job at all. Actual "enforcement" part in "law enforcement" does not constitute even 1% of their work even in so called "warzone" cities. No way to dismiss this argument. Even in an armed to the teeth nation of America, there is no real need for an ordinary patrol officers to be armed at all.

They can call the job taught when they would be doing policing in actual war zones.

Even with "below the sea level" standards of police professionalism you have in US, there are no way to deny that it doesn't meet even that. No matter how you evaluate the performance of American police, it is simply terrible. I have no idea how anybody can spin that in any other way than this.

> By that I mean the real story here is that the police dispatched a sniper to execute someone without a trial. Blew them away as soon as they opened the door.

This isn't even propaganda, it's just wrong.

The victim opened the door and was told to freeze. He started to reach for his pants (presumably to adjust the waist or pull them up) was told to stop, and didn't.

So I don't know if you're intentionally lying about the facts or just ignorant to them, but regardless your description of events is 100% wrong.

I find it disgusting that anyone would consider not obeying a cop’s orders to be a justification for an execution.

To be fair he's just pointing out a fact. If we're going to talk about this then let's get the facts straight.

I do not think he was justified in shooting but I also don't think the cop should face jail time or anything. We need to change our process in handling dangerous events due to swatting. It's the reality we live in.

> “just pointing out a fact”

No he’s not, it’s an authoritarian dog whistle. Stop supporting this crap.

In the context of conversations and the reasons people have them, "just" pointing out a fact (i.e. identifying an objective untruth for no other reason than to eliminate untruths from the domain of conversation) is vanishingly rare. In this case, the GP was offering another perspective an a subjective event by way of criticising the curt nature of the GGP's description - he was not just correcting an untruth.

As for the subject of the conversation, I think (not without years of pains of consideration for the two-sided complexities of the problem) that the officer's behavior, whether a result only of his personal decisions or of standard training, and the lack of repercussions for that behavior, is outside the boundaries of scenarios that are excusable by the danger of the profession, and is emblematic of one of the most devastating humiliations of human rights that the citizens of the United States continue to suffer.

Thank you for providing a full explanation; I really should put more effort into explaining the harm I see.

Have you ever listened to the Serial podcast? There is an interesting episode in season 3 where they touch on this. He reached for his pants is police speak for "I used violence against a person and I need an excuse".

Reaching for your pants isn't a crime worthy of an immediate death sentence.

The scenario is such that someone minding his own business, not committing any crimes, nor reason to suspect HE is the suspect of an alleged crime, reached for his pants (which may have been falling down, who knows, what would you do in that situation?) and was shot dead for that.

The fact that police were ordering him to do this really doesn't matter – we have a system where seemingly normal actions are suddenly immediate death sentences due to a rapidly changing context.

And if people jump on me and think I am saying you should not obey police orders, then you were not reading what I actually said and completely missed the point.

I bet if we had AI police robots shoot someone after classifying their pose as "reaching for pants" people would freak. Yet we have the best computer doing this and some people say it's a feature not a bug!

>and was told to freeze.

He was being shouted at by police from across the street who were issuing several conflicting demands.

The Wichita police showed up with the intention to kill him based on the false call and are hyper-prosecuting the swatter to make up for obviously murdering someone.

> The Wichita police showed up with the intention to kill him based on the false call and are hyper-prosecuting the swatter to make up for obviously murdering someone

1. You've got your jurisdictions mixed up. These charges are not from Wichita. These are Federal charges in California.

2. Hyper-prosecuting?

What in your opinion would be the correct level of prosecution for a couple dozen or so bomb threats all around the country to a variety of schools, shopping centers, apartments, and other public places plus a few swattings?

Please read the comment I was replying to so you can understand the context of mine.

I have no intention of defending a swatter. My intention is to point out the diversion taking place by prosecuting him, without looking at what law enforcement did wrong.

came here to post more or less exactly this reply. How many charges are the police being charged with for murder?

From https://www.kansas.com/news/local/article208812519.html

District Attorney Marc Bennett said the Wichita police officer who fired the shot that killed Andrew Finch after a swatting call will not face charges.

I am really surprised by not a single known case of vigilante retaliation on confirmed Police murderers.

it would be veeeeryyy upsetting if this comment gave someone any ideas

They do make somewhat of a reference at the end of the article by mentioning the victim's mother who is suing the Police Department

The news has a running meme along the lines of "absurd white person calls police on black person". Many of these phone calls allege the victim is acting violent, has a gun, etc.

Is it possible to bring "swatting" charges against these people? It seems the only reason they don't end badly is because the caller is so obviously defective that the police show up irritated and bored instead of ready to do some hero stuff.

I get that the usual response is "We don't want to discourage people from calling the police" but when you're trying to elicit a violent police response against your victim, it seems it's in society's best interest to bring charges.

It's the police's job to not shoot innocent people. The presence of a police officer should never be a bad thing.

I think it has to do with laws being based off of belief and intent. Doing it based on false intentions or recognized frivolity is required and eyewitnesses are unreliable enough to have vast degrees of plausible deniability. See someone in black trying the door heavily when they try to housesit the wrong house and you could reasonably believe them a possibility armed burglar. Similarly calling 911 on a "cougar" which is simply a big stray cat isn't a crime even if it turns out to be a total waste of time. I think they would basically have to get caught conspiring to make false calls for it to remotely stick - just being a racist asshole isn't enough.

There was one case I heard about a senile old woman who was just functional enough to retain independence legally. She called the police many times over every little thing but couldn't be charged with abuse of 911 because she was sincere and thought there really was a threat from say the landscapper showing up at a neighbor's house. One case was someone trying to get her out of her house and institutionalized - the police showed up and asked the guy to leave and let him know the situation - yes she isn't the best but there is nothing we can do about it legally.

They don't end violently probably because they are inherently much less dangerous than swatting situations.

In a swatting situation, the person calling it in: (1) often claims to be the criminal and includes threats, (2) reports that the crime is in progress, often with people already harmed, (3) places the crime somewhere that will make it hard for arriving officers to access the situation safely if it turns out the report is real, (4) if it is real there is a good chance lethal force will need to be used to save multiple innocent lives and there is a good chance that decision will have to be made quickly.

In a "stranger with a gun is in the neighborhood situation", even one reported as acting aggressive, (1) the caller is not claiming to be the person, (2) they are not claiming anything criminal has happened yet, (3) they are usually reporting the person outside where arriving police will be able to get a good look at the situation quickly, (4) even if it is real and the person is there to commit some crime, it's probably just an economic crime (break into a car, at worst a mugging) and the person is not going to turn violent on the police--the person almost certainly knows that the police won't have enough to arrest him and so he will just have to answer a few questions and leave.

So, wait, the guy who made a phone call is going to prison, but the guy who murdered an innocent person has not faced any consequences?

Swatting is obviously wrong and there should be consequences, but it's not as harmful as actually killing someone.

Intent matters - in this case I’d argue the guy who made the call is more responsible for the death than the guy who pulled the trigger.

No, intent doesn't matter at all.

The long held "legal tradition" of establishing intent in US legal process is completely absurd.

You think that the SWAT pointed a gun on a man and presses the trigger completely unintentionally?

No, even with an accidental manslaughter nobody simply walks away from the charge.

All the legal traditions I know consider intent in the legal process and e.g. have multiple categories of homicide differentiated mostly by intent (and secondarily by planning & emotional context).

This. IANAL but the eroding of taking mens rea (intent/knowledge) into account does not bode well for justice in the long-term.

Intent to kill with no reasonable evidence that would justify any nontrivial use of force is morally bankrupt. If that’s the new normal in the US, I don’t know what to say. A prank call is a prank call, but the one given the power to project lethal force is fully morally responsible for their decision to pull the trigger. And if that was somehow within their standard rules of engagement, so are their superiors.

A prank call to summon emergency help is still a call to summon emergency help. The intent to prank, the fact that you were "just kidding", has no bearing on the outcome.

Yes, the fault ultimately lies with the person who pulls the trigger, but there's a reason mob bosses are considered murderers when they may have never physically killed someone. It's totally foreseeable that you are throwing an innocent person into a hostile situation; in fact, that's the whole point.

Yeah, I didn’t mean to absolve the swatter. It’s clear that there should be heavy deterrence for such behavior. But I’m not sure he intended to have his targets killed either.

> But I’m not sure he intended to have his targets killed either.

Even assuming they did not, they still knowingly involved their target in a potentially lethal situation. It might carry a lighter sentence than literally going to their target and killing them, but it should carry a significantly higher sentence than e.g. putting flaming shit under their target's doormat.

Yep, involuntary manslaughter, which was indeed among the charges.

Playing chicken on the road doesn't mean you _intended_ for anyone to get hurt, but it does mean you are unfit to remain in society.

Intent is not necessary for murder under common law (and statutory schemes in the US tend to be strongly influenced by the common law); malice aforethought is required, but that can be either intent to kill or depraved indifference; SWATting would seem to fall well within the latter mental state in most cases.

Do you think the policeman who shot him didn't intend to kill him?

It's the context - the sniper thinks they're going to a dangerous hostage situation with somebody who has already killed some people, they're trying to stop someone who is killing people and threatening to kill people.

The caller is intentionally putting an innocent person in a lethal situation basically because the caller is an ass and thinks they're not responsible for what happens afterwards.

I'm not arguing about whether or not excessive force was used or if the police response was wrong in addition to being tragic (very well could have been) since that requires knowing a lot more about the case.

I'm arguing that a lot less nuance is needed to say the caller is responsible. I'd argue they intended to cause harm for bad reasons - maybe not death, but that would have been a known possible outcome.

But the shooter knew that death was a possible outcome as well. He isn't resolved of culpability just because he didn't bother to work out whether shooting was appropriate.

I'm not saying that he is (though he might be), but the situation is different and the intent given the context of what the person is trying to do is different. These things matter in law.

If you're going to presume to take another person's life, you better be completely sure that you're doing the right thing.

It's easy to take a 100% position when you don't have to actually make any decisions. In practice you can rarely be completely sure of anything.

In complicated areas people do the best they can and we try and have systems in place to lead to the outcomes we want. That's why there's complexity around these things in law and the context is important.

the shooter has assumed the responsibility of wielding that power, so the context doesn't absolve them

The officer who pulled the trigger was across the street and shot an unarmed man within seconds of him opening the door to see what was happening. That officer decided he was going to kill whoever opened that door before they even arrived. It's laughable to suggest the prank caller is more responsible for the victim's death. I am amazed that more people are not extremely disturbed by law enforcement being able to commit murder without consequences.

if you are going to judge by their intent then the intent of the prank caller was most likely to give someone a scare, the intent of someone that pulls the trigger is to kill another person

There is a casual relationship between swatting someone and them dying. What's the crime for ordering a hit on someone? This is exactly equivalent.

The hitman always gets off scot-free, right? Because someone else told them to do it

That is not what I'm at all. I'm only responding to the GGP's characterization of the swatter as "just making a phone call".

Who is the hit man here in this metaphor...

It is as harmful as paying someone else to assault and possibly kill someone.

I agree. Which you'll note is less harmful than actually assaulting or possibly killing someone.

I'm not saying the guy who made the phone call is innocent! Just that he's less guilty than the guy who pulled the trigger.

I'm not sure your point. It's extremely harmful as it caused the death of an individual. The investigation concluded the officer was not in the wrong.

I disagree with the GP's characterization of the swatter as "just making a phone call", but agree with the point that there should be consequences for the shooter. The investigation into the officer was clearly a farce, given that he shot a man dead without any sign of danger.

I disagree with your characterisation of my characterisation. He didn't just make a phone call.

I was just trying to point out that the person who murdered someone has clearly done more harm than the person who did the Swatting.

That's not at all clear to me. If you put someone into a situation in which there's a reasonable expectation they'll die, and they do, you murdered them. That doesn't absolve another person who may have actually carried out the murder. Responsibility is not zero-sum.

What the call caused was police to show up at the door. That is where the responsibility of the caller ends and it should be punished accordingly.

The police caused this man's death. Citing the investigation as proof the officer was not in the wrong is being obtuse. Look at the body cam video - what you'll see is the victim being shot without any effort to confirm what they were told, and no effort to try to subdue with nonlethal means.

> So, wait, the guy who made a phone call is going to prison

As he should

> but the guy who murdered an innocent person has not faced any consequences?

The guy who sent the SWAT team at all, as a first response to a single phone call, should be facing consequences.

And the police in general in the US seem to need to calm the fuck down. Whether the guy that pulled the trigger should be culpable is definitely something that should be examined in court.

Seems like a whole series of bad actors.

There should be a lot of people going to jail over this. There doesn't have to be just one person to take the fall.

He made that phone call with the intention of causing harm. He is responsible in some part for what happened. I can live with him going to jail.

I always wonder what proportion of uncorroborated calls that trigger SWAT raids are actually genuine. I'd have thought that live hostage taking is extremely rare - even in the US. To the point where SWAT calls ought to require corroboration or be presumed to be fake (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that...).

Is there any data available?

The problem comes from a real situation potentially not getting acted upon.

EDIT: To clarify, there are potential short timeline concerns involved when people are in immediate danger. How do you corroborate that people are definitely being held inside a house without going to the house? How do you verify that without notifying a potentially armed suspect that you are on the way?

Just as an example, the recent tragedy in Florence, SC where 6 officers were shot and 2 died. That happened because the man at the house was notified that a search warrant was going to be served. He took the heads up and prepared an ambused for the officers he knew were coming.

There are a lot of complicating factors involved in corroborating a story before sending out the team immediately.

The choice isn't "send SWAT" or "don't respond". There are a range of actions that could be taken prior to SWAT being involved.

Neither am I suggesting that "don't respond" is the right thing to do here. However SWAT teams must know that uncorroborated calls are almost certainly fake, and they should act accordingly.

Arguably regular police could check the situation out first?

If a brain cancer test had a high false positive rate we wouldn’t irradiate people’s heads just in case it was a “real situation”. The same thinking should be applied here.

What corroborating phone calls would you expect from an armed hostage-taking inside a private residence? Can you imagine the public backlash had this been legitimate, the police did nothing, and the hostages were injured or executed?

I wouldn't at all be surprised if it's far more common for police getting jumpy to result in physical harm to hostages than police being cautious and prudent does.

The whole point of taking hostages is to try and slow the cops down, and get yourself some leverage in negotiation. If the police are acting in a way that makes it seem like that's not going to work, then the hostage-taker will stop seeing those people as being useful as hostages, and start making decisions accordingly.

The problem is that we can't help the extreme case. We need to be realistic. If we really wanted to prevent every hostage situation we could have a police car parked on every intersection in the country 24/7 so that they are never more than 15 seconds away from a call. Clearly this is ridiculous. We accept that sometimes police take a few minutes to reach an emergency.

Equally we as a society need to be grown up and accept that sending a specialist armed team to respond to an event that has been shown to happen less often that people win the lottery is clearly unrealistic. Claims like this can be handled by regular policing forces who can call upon backup if necessary.

Life is filled with situations like this. The proper thing to do is called a cost benefit analysis.

Are kansas city police regularly defusing hostage execution situations in private homes? Have they EVER done that?

Why are they optimizing for that situation? Arent prank phone calls the more frequent situation?

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_in_the_United_Sta... (although the numbers are not super clear), the kidnapping is almost nonexistent outside of parents kidnapping their kids. It seems other cases are at ~100 a year.

I'm ignoring the kidnapping by parents in this case, because they don't seem swat-worthy. Children are likely kidnapped by parents that want them, rather than with intention to hurt them / get ransom. (Yes, it can be also an unstable person who lost rights for a good reason. I don't have stats on that though :-( )

Swatters are just mean trolls who exploit the paranoia of how the police reacts to emergency calls. It's exactly like terrorism, you just scare people about a non existent threat and expect to have forces and security applied where it doesn't matter.

Blaming swatters is one thing, but questioning how swat teams respond to calls should be put on the table.

You cannot only blame swatters.

Good. Although I'd also very strongly question the extreme overreaction to unverified allegations that make this kind of thing possible.

The news here is just how prolific this guy was. He was calling in a bomb threat or swatting every two or three days for months!

What about Swat officers that shot without any investigation?

Component works as designed.

Status: -OPEN +NOTABUG +WONTFIX

SERVICE NOTES: DISPATCH TECH DECLINED FIX, PART WORKING

There was an investigation. It was concluded that the victim reached for his waist (maybe to pull up pants) after being told not to. Very very difficult situation for sure.

no it isn't.

There are quite a few stories about officers shooting someone when they were at the wrong house. In this case they were called to this house, but why are our police so quick to pull the trigger anyway? Can they never disengage and reassess?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com