Hacker News Reader

Comment by Memosyne | Hacker News Reader

According to a police statement regarding the 2017 Wichita Swatting event:

"Officers gave [the victim] several verbal commands to put his hands up and walk towards them. The male complied for a very short time and then put his hands back down to his waist. The officers continued to give him verbal commands to put his hands up, and he lowered them again." [1]

I'm not well informed on the subject, but wouldn't equipping tactical teams with non-lethal weapons have prevented tragedies like this? The moment a team feels uneasy, they should feel free to stun the suspect. I know electroshock weapons have their own risks, but surely they aren't greater than firing a dude acting suspiciously with a live round from a Colt AR-15?

1. https://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article192244734.htm...

View on HN

They shot him from across the street, with poor visibility, from a semi concealed position for pulling up his pants. There are no non-lethal tools that would have worked at the distance they were at and the man would have had to have been a fantastic shot to pose a risk to the officers based on the distance.

In the video the officer who fires is to the left of the speaker. Caution you will see someone getting shot to death.

https://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article192111974.htm...

This is just the audio of the swatter though, right?

I don't think there's any video of the actual incident is there?

Maybe the dude didn't understand what the big deal was and kept dropping his hands? Someone probably jumped the gun?

I wonder if that team had non-lethal weapons and just didn't get them out. If he didn't have a firearm, a beanbag rifle could have ended this much differently.

Also remember the case of Oscar Grant, killed by a BART cop who had a taser but used his pistol instead. One of the arguments in court was that he grabbed the wrong weapon in the heat of the moment.

That would have been a possible explanation except that Grant was subdued and still by that point; there was no justifiable use for the Taser, either.

The first section is just the swatter audio, but if you scroll down you'll see the police reporting on the aftermath.

Yep, there’s video. A Google search will turn it up.

Raising you hand for a untrained person can become quite exhausting quite fast

We have to get into the mindset that police reports are fundamentally untrustworthy sources of information.

We have enough evidence accumulated over the years to make it abundantly clear that police reports are primarily about constructing a narrative that absolves police of culpability and secondarily about describing the true nature of an event.

Police reports read individually all sound individually reasonable but read as a collective describe a world that is fantastical. For example, the number of young black men who were "reaching towards their waistbands" at the moment they get shot even though they were carrying no weapons simply beggars any rational explanation. Similarly, "put his hands back down to his waist" is another police magic phrase that is conveniently unfalsifiable and also absolves the shooting officer of any liability.

No, I disagree.

We need to change society back to the point where people are decent and don't fool around with public resources like cops.

First responders are life-saving. Mis-using them is seriously anti-social behavior. That's what needs to be changed.

A bunch of trigger happy folks with guns are not "first responders". Big difference between paramedics and folks who just want an excuse to shoot people.

>Maybe the dude didn't understand what the big deal was and kept dropping his hands? Someone probably jumped the gun?

or the cops lied about what happened. Wouldn't be the first time that has happened when a cop murdered an unarmed civilian.

There is a Use of Force Contiuuum, but reaching for one’s waistband can be a short circuit directly to the top. Police usually say it is too dangerous to wait until they’re sure you’re actually retrieving a gun. This comes up pretty frequently when police kill people (typically young black men) who turn out to have been unarmed.

In this particular case, however, the police were already in a safe position across the street and behind their vehicles. The decedent was standing in the doorway and posed no obvious, immediate threat to anyone at the time he was shot.

There is indeed a continuum, but this particular case was at the low end of the band.

At the end of the day, it seems to be that police killed an innocent person. There has to be a better way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com