The fact that it's possible for a child to trigger a "swat" where people can and have died highlights a significant vulnerability in the procedures currently used by police.
Why isn't more effort being put into making these processes safer for civilians?
I think the initial presumption, was that no one would be such a douchebag as to make such crank calls. In today's world, this is obviously a bad assumption. In today's world, we should presume that people are going to make such false assertions, and if there's a way someone can exploit an unconfirmed assertion, someone, somewhere will.
This is also why trials in the media are bad, and why due process is important.
As I suggested elsewhere, what if a plainclothes android could walk up, knock on the door, and calmly ask questions? (While SWAT are out of sight and not yet aiming their guns.) I think this isn't too far outside of our current abilities. Uncanny valley would be reduced in this context. All you'd need is a stone faced, but calm and pleasant demeanor. We already have walking robots, but the walks would have to be humanized. (The Uncanny Valley would be in full force for the body language part.)
EDIT: Actually, you could completely avoid the Uncanny Valley and even eliminate the need for AI. Just make the bottom part from a Segway. The top could be a literal teleoperated Muppet.
Unless you get “caught” Living While Black.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/us/living-while-black-police-...
It's always been a bad assumption; deliberate harm up to and including murder by deliberate false report to legal authorities is probably as old as legal authorities, and if your jurisdiction has a crime of false reporting (and it's pretty much guaranteed that it does) it's because the government is very much aware that this is a thing.
If police response procedures don't account for that, it's not because they've assumed it doesn't happen, it's because they've assumed that that when it happens they will have someone else ready at hand to blame for ant adverse effects, so that they have no need to mitigate them.
Do we only hear about it more now due to more reporting, or is it actually a recent trend?
I don't know if you're being serious or not, but some things are time sensitive, and a slow or underpowered response can be fatal.
It's not like the police force gets a kick out of deploying SWAT. Yes, obviously the response needs to be more precise, but hopefully not at the expense of quick response to real emergencies.
And so can a hasty, under-/mis-informed, and/or overpowered response.
I'm actually not quite sure about this, unfortunately....
An overpowered response at the expense of innocent lives are not in any way better. It's actually worse, since the people responsible for the killings don't face the consequences like everyone else.
If a ‘swatter’ called the police and said “Hey there’s a domestic disturbance going on next door”, then the response is basically sending a nearby squad car to check it out. That’s a pretty boring “prank” for a swatter if 2 cops just ring the doorbell and ask questions.
Thus the police have to be told something so serious sounding they would need to send SWAT. Something like “my neighbor is on drugs with a knife against his daughter’s throat threatening to kill his family, hurry!”.
These swatters are intentionally targeting people, so they can also BS enough personal details to make it sound plausible.
Human decency to not abuse this highly-serious system is not enough of a barrier to keep swatting douchebags from exploiting the system, so while the system needs adjusting, from an enforcement side this case is also a public reminder that swatting is not a cool prank that has serious consequences.
I'm assuming that local PDs probably treat people calling them and saying “I’m totally not a criminal but people are likely to falsely claim I'm not only a criminal but one engaged in the kind of dangerous crimes that would justify a SWAT response”, without any supporting evidence that there are particular people likely to falsely target the particular person with that kind of action as an indication that the person is more likely than average to be a dangerous criminal.
If an officer should choose between "low risk to self, high risk to civilians" and "high risk to self, low risk to civilians", which choice is appropriate?
SWATting works because American police have decided, for whatever reasons, that "low risk to self, high risk to civilians" is the appropriate path to take.
Should the police send an unarmed officer, an armed officer, or an armed SWAT team to respond to a phoned-in report of an armed hostage situation?
If they send an unarmed officer, the officer could die, but civilians won't (by the officer's hand).
If they send an armed officer, the officer could die, and civilians could too (by the officer's hand).
If they send a no-knock SWAT team, the officers won't die, but civilians probably will (by the SWAT team's hand).
And so this ties back to police militarization and a question that you will be hard-pressed to see police and police unions confronting openly: Should officers put the lives of citizens above their own lives — even if that means they occasionally die while responding to a call without a SWAT team, when it turns out to be real rather than fake?
I believe that, yes, police officers should select a "higher risk to self, lower risk to civilians" path than they do today, increasing the risk of police deaths in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths at the hands of police officers. I make this statement even though I have former police officers as family and friends, because I'm tired of American police killing more American citizens each year than terrorists do [1]. Your view may vary. Those of police certainly do.
The core issue, where officers must either accept a higher risk of death or a higher risk of killing civilians, remains unsolved — and undiscussed — in America today.
[1]
https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2018/mar/16/cops-kill...
https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938170/us-police-...
https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths...
You're wrong in one respect, though. They're not killing carelessly. They're killing intentionally, and are trained to do so when they feel it necessary. That their training seems to encourage them to feel it necessary is a side effect of our failure as a society to confront the philosophical problem.
As of 2006: https://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/12118906/police-training-mediat...
> police academies spend about 110 hours training their recruits on firearms skills and self-defense — but just 8 hours on conflict management and mediation
So, as of 2006, they're assigned 14x as many hours of training at reflexively shooting attackers before they get shot in return as they are in determining when to risk being shot to defuse a conflict. Of course they're prone to shooting — they never learn when it's not appropriate to!
I am not a police officer. If you're a police officer and your local department has better a training ratio of violence:deescalation than the nationwide 13.75:1 ratio from 2006, hooray! But you're probably an outlier.
EDIT — Random current news example:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/29/willie-mccoy...
Officer finds person asleep in car with gun in lap. Officer summons more officers. They study the sleeping person and prepare their weapons, determining that the gun has either 0 or 1 bullets left. The person twitches as they wake up. All six officers fire.
The police are trained to fire when someone's muscles twitch. It's hammered into them over a hundred hours of training to kill before they are killed. They exercised their weapons training competently.
Was it appropriate for the officers to draw their weapons and take aim for kill shots?
Answers vary, because that's the same philosophical problem. Either the officers take a less violent approach that puts them more at risk of being shot and killed, or the officers take a more violent approach that puts them less at risk of being shot and killed.
(In this specific example, it's clear that the officers were behaving inappropriately for quite some time prior to the shooting; I do not attribute all of their actions to this problem, and focused on highlighting the philosophical issue rather than analyzing other factors such as racism etc.)
I also say this as someone with family members who have served as law enforcement officers.