The article doesn’t say a SWAT team was deployed, just that the police responded to a call. The image of a SWAT team is just a stock photo.
The police also did not “storm” anything. The homeowner went outside with a gun in hand and they de-escalated the situation without “storming” or firing any shots.
I don’t really understand what you want the police to do in these situations where they receive calls about gun crimes in progress. They can’t just assume it’s a prank and wait around to see if anyone dies before they choose to send some police to investigate.
In this case perhaps, but the parents' comment wasn't particular to this instance but generic.
And there are tons of cases where SWATing actually happened, unecessary force was deployed, and so on, sometimes even captured on camera...
>I don’t really understand what you want the police to do in these situations where they receive calls about gun crimes in progress.
The same procedure that is followed in civilized countries would be a good start.
The primary reason this wouldn't happen like this in most other countries is that it's unlikely that the home owner would turn up with a gun - if they did, police would be pointing theirs too. Really the main missed opportunity here seems to be the call of the neighbor, which could have been used to coordinate, but overall it sounds like the one swatting death which really was a dumb accident.
All countries have idiot teenagers…
Maybe we can take the model of other countries that have idiot teenagers but no swatting problem?
I don’t think this is true. I personally know of a case in the UK where due to a false report of a gun, an armed squad was sent to someone’s house.
It may not be discussed as casually as it is in the US, but every country has armed police and they deploy them when they expect guns to be involved.
It’s just false to claim that swatting is a US only phenomenon or a function of police culture.
https://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2015/08/swatting-uk-tr...
The use of armed police there is a big deal though. My friend is a police officer in the UK and has a firearm and riot gear for armed responses, and they very rarely use it. When it is used, there's loads of reporting to ensure its use was justified.
I am an investigative reporter covering US law enforcement and crime. Let me know if you'd like to see some examples of the documentation I am referring to.
America does not have significantly more homicides then other western countries. Most gun homicides are people who know each other shooting each other in dispute. And they are clustered in high violence places making the rest of America safer then average.
That's just the facts. If we want the police to disarm, we need to first disarm the population. We shouldn't be sending police into armed situations with inferior weapons.
Guns are the worst, they need line of sight, overpenetrate, protective measures are ineffective, and they might not take the actual target either.
(Only tasers are worse.)
Only tasers are worse at killing people. They're perfectly adequate for their intended use; allowing an officer to halt a person who presents a real danger to the officer, when alternatives are not available.
Seems like treating every encounter as struggle for dominance instead puts you all in more danger.
So lets take a step back. There's two sides to this encounter. It is common for Americans, when they feel like they're in danger, to approach situations with a gun drawn.
Police, knowing that other Americans will approach them with guns drawn (since criminals see Police as a threat), will also approach with guns drawn.
And guess what? The gun advocate will point out that everyone acted as an adult in this situation. No gunfire was exchanged. The heart attack was unfortunate, but this is actually one of the better situations.
Compare / Contrast instead with say: Breonna Taylor. The Police begin to knock down the door, someone gets confused and shoots at them. The Police shoot back killing Breonna Taylor.
--------
You can't deny that the job that Police do and put themselves in means that Police are expected to get shot at. Changing this expectation will require more than just changing how Police operate, it also means changing America's culture to not have so many freaking guns.
I also find it ridiculous that a country that says it is OK to defend your house with gun, also says it is OK for police to create situation in which people think they are attacked by violent strangers - where those strangers are cops.
Police justify many actionsl/systems/norms based on the fact that their job is dangerous. However they have also, in doing so, created a situation where anything they do to reduce risk to themselves is valid. That hits a limit at some point
You could insist that police behave in a way that actually puts them at some risk…i.e., not presume they will be attacked or to be unarmed. We could decide that that risk is worth it as a society and insist upon it just as we insist that essential workers put themselves at risk during covid to feed us.
If potential risk is always used to justify force, eventually the risk will be gone because force will be the default.
The US has 2-5x the murder rate of peer nations.
US 4.96/100k
Canada 1.76
UK 1.20
Germany 0.95
Japan 0.26
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...
The point is, gang violence as aggregate is not meaningfully different from other violence.
Except for those and more, it's just like any other violence.
This is just false. The reason gang violence is separated out is that gang violence is perpetrated against other gang members.
I.e. the gun violence rate for non-gang members is dramatically lower.
It doesn’t mean gang violence is not a problem. It does mean that unless you are in a gang, the US doesn’t have a high murder rate.
Where do you think I comment on the ease of opting out of gangs?
Covid deaths in last 15 months: 625,000 (500k/year)
So 30 times more likely to be killed by covid than by murder.
Most people who die in covid are old. I'd think most people who get shot, are younger
As another commentor noted:
> However, if you arbitrarily throw away the number one cause of violence in other countries, surprisingly enough, their numbers are also way lower.
Fall accidents are also dangerous once you're old, doesn't mean it makes sense to compare that with gun violence or swatting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...
That said, I wouldn't consider those countries directly comparable as far as their position in the world, and how their culture is affected by that position. Russia is probably it's most direct peer, and is comparably closer when looking at wealth inequality and homicide rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
However, what is happening is that most of those homicides are criminals killing other criminals and aren't very relevant to non-criminals. This greatly changes the balance of value vs risk to the average American.
The typical self-defense use of a gun is simply showing it and making some scumbag run away.
[citation needed]
This would be a case where you're asking me to prove the negative...can you find instances of Swatting occurring with similar resulting violence in, lets say, Japan or Western Europe?
People will call the cops with BS accusations and fake threats (e.g. bomb threats, etc) all over the world, including calling them on people.
SWATing however only (or 99%) happens in the US, where the police charges like bulls, is trigger happy, puts their own "safety" over anything else in comical degree, gets military surplus equipment in bulk, and has the impression they are in an action movie...
But the Police needs to pay for overreacting, not for showing up like in this case. The Police showed up and "admirably" defused the situation, probably only because the target was white. But if you incriminate showing up in force the initial response will be to stop showing up, and much later to do it in a more peaceful fashion, like with 1-2 people at the door and the rest of the platoon in military gear being hidden.
Why assume the scare? And how did the rest of my comment imply it? Absent any reason to infer that particular meaning how do you support your decision to take the least charitable interpretation?
That, and because you were not actually quoting anyone or anything specific.
When quotation marks are used in a questioning context and the text being quoted is not an actual quote, the assumption is scare quotes. The writer is trying to draw attention to the language rather than actually quote someone's words.
[citation needed]
If a system can be easily manipulated from the outside to produce negative results, the outsider is easily to blame the first time it happens.
Swatting has been a problem for over a decade[0]. If the system remains vulnerable to the same attack for that long, the system administrator is at fault for failing to resolve the issue.
[0] I was lazy so just looked up what UD thinks, the second definition is dated 2007, so that seems like a reasonable date to consider "over a decade" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=swatting
Sometimes these events are like getting struck by lightning, and all we can do is install lightning rods to lessen the statistics.
In this case that might look like further anonymity or public service announcements explaining to people that if you share your address some crazy person may end up killing you (somehow).
Flamebait language beyond, US cops deploy SWAT teams on regular warrants and non-violent crimes. US cops seem to love their swat teams.
> The primary reason this wouldn't happen like this in most other countries is that it's unlikely that the home owner would turn up with a gun - if they did, police would be pointing theirs too.
Like, it is legal to own the gun, but if you have one cops are free to shoot you?
Anyway, I suspect this leads to SWAT teams wanting to justify their existence by responding to as many situations as possible.
It is a complicated issue, though. In a country where many people own assault rifles that massively outgun a cop’s pistol, SWAT teams are kind of a necessity.
That's in no way what I said, and not what happened here for once?
(2) Police checks and verifies first, as opposed to kicking doors in shooting because a 13 year old made a call.
(3) Police is taught not to be trigger happy, even if there are reports - or actual sighting - of the suspect carrying a gun, knife, etc.
(4) Police doesn't get military surplus equipment fit for war, nor does it use it in civillian cases.
(5) Police doesn't equate a report of someone selling/doing drugs, with a chance to storm the place guns a blazing.
(6) Traffic police doesn't get to shoot you if they stopped your car and you had the audacity to walk out towards them. That's not even a thing.
(7) The police is taught to discern low-risk and high-risk situations, and not e.g. treat a guy with a knife 30 feet away, or a small black boy playing in a park as a threat.
(8) The police is taught to be an aid to the citizen, not to see everybody as a threat.
Some pointers:
https://www.amazon.com/SWAT-Madness-Militarization-American-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/police-militarization-f...
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/06/poisoning-our-police-h...
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/885942130/militarization-of-p...
I'm sorry but it seems to be the main factor though. When the probability of the suspect carrying a gun is very low, you are not that motivated to use yours.
> (many countries have heavy hunting population, and people will use shotguns, close themselves in their house if they're accused, etc).
That's completely different. You can't really hide your hunting weapon in your jacket. People don't walk around with their weapons in the town. The culture is completely different. Even in a country where many people do own weapons (Switzerland) it's very rare that someone would use them for crime.
Yes, but we already covered that - that it's not specifically about this case.
We very recently had country-wide protests on the topic of police brutality with very minimal consequnce.
Those surrounding circumstances almost certainly informed this man's decision to own a firearm and his decision to brandish that firearm while figuring out what was happening on his property.
The assumption here is that the stress of the situation was the cause of his heart attack, and ultimately his death.
What ever happened to giving someone a phone call to assess the situation?
Bad accidents happen in Europe, too. Mostly it's because of bad int and armed forces breaking in to innocent people's homes, with children having trauma for life. Sometimes they don't even apologize.
EDIT: Sometimes it's not even by mistake but on purpose. In 2014 after islamist extremists killed journalists over publications of images offending them, some young people expressed their approval for the killing, including a 10-year old girl. Armed police stormed her apartment in the morning while she was sleeping and detained her for 11 hours:
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/france-4-children-terrorized...
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
If they assumed it was a prank, there's a chance nobody would die, unlike in this case where they did make sure somebody would.
Is that the point you're making?
"De-escalated it" to the point where the homeowner had a heart attack and died. Without the video, this just looks like poor police work, and of course a heinous crime by the original caller.
> Unable to disengage a lock on his back fence, Herring was instructed to somehow climb over the fence with his hands up.
> “He was starting to get more upset,” Billings recalled. “He said, ‘I’m a 60-year-old fat man and I can’t do that.'”
> Billings said Mr. Herring then offered to crawl under a gap in the fence, but when he did so and stood up, he collapsed of a heart attack. Herring died at a nearby hospital soon after.
So, I don't think it would be a good idea to set "assume it's a swatting" as the default response to 911 calls for service in response to violent crime. At least for Chicago.
You can see the use of force incidents that resulted in complaints here, on the Civilian Office of Police Accountability case portal [0] (although not all of these involve tac officers). You can also see the statistics on rates of use of force in this dashboard [1], and see what counts as use of force (as well as when use of deadly force is authorized) here [2].
It's important that people actually check up on their police departments. Police serve a vital and life-saving role in society, but they have to be actually monitored. Just assuming they're all bad gives cover to the bad ones and discourages good ones from signing up, and as someone who checks, I can tell you that the people most abused by America disproportionately call the police for help, and many of their emergencies are truly harrowing.
[0] https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/
[1] https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboar...
[2] https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G0...
what does this mean?
It’s MUCH more interesting to get a job with the dept as they let you run wild on all their data from fleets to police locations, investigations, digital stuff like facial rec etc. most depts need good analysts too in beleaguered cities so go against the grain and join up, you’ll love it. Not to mention the security and benefits. Lot of my work revolves around holding cops more accountable that to me is the most interesting stuff, not crime analysis.
Just had a meeting yesterday where the majors were asking me how our team can figure out what aspects of a detectives investigation leads to the maximum likelihood of case closures and identifying the largest factors for example. As much as Twitter/nonprofit/outsider crime analysts have access to open data, some stuff you gotta be on the inside to access let alone move the needle vs. just reporting analysis to followers. Highly encourage anyone reading to consider…
I've largely been focused on implementing recommendations from a PERF report on Chicago homicide investigations [0] after years of attrition in the Bureau of Detectives collided with a massive spike in violent crime (in 2016, following the Laquan McDonald murder). My main projects have centered on developing CPD's capacity for recovering video evidence (mainly CCTV) in homicide and shooting cases, as well as teaching a special detail of detectives how to convert footage from proprietary codecs to standard codecs in a forensically sounds way (so that the footage can actually be viewed by less technologically savvy detectives and assistant state's attorney's). You can view seeking-to-identify focused samples of collected footage on CPD's YouTube channel [1] (although these are not representative of the breadth of footage now collected on each homicide). It's not as polished as LAPD's productions [2], but that's to be expected considering the well developed entertainment and digital media workforce in LA.
Although I do want to praise Chicago for it's willingness to make data available publicly. I had been pushing for years to get shooting data posted publicly and we just got that added to the data portal in May [3]. Additionally, the Cook County State's Attorneys Office puts a lot of their case data on the CCSAO data portal [4]. These are only a tiny fraction of the tables in CPD's or CCSAO's respective data warehouses, but as far as public data ecosystems go, Chicago's is the least bad I've worked with of major US cities. Working with LAPD's or NYPD's open data is a real pain.
[0] https://home.chicagopolice.org/homicideclearancereport2019/
[1] https://youtube.com/c/ChicagoPoliceNews
[2] https://youtube.com/c/LAPDONLINE1
[3] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Violence-Reduct...
[4] https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/browse?tags=state%27s+a...
I'm not saying police shouldn't respond if the call comes from an IP gateway or a different state - but dispatch should tell them confidence is low and in that case police could approach the scene much more skeptically.
That obviously won't work, because you can't expect people in legitimate emergencies to do something like that. Say they don't even have one of those apps installed, is the 911 dispatcher supposed to talk them through installing Zoom before they send help? That's literally a Kafkaesque nightmare (or straight out of a political attack ad).
Honestly, I think the most realistic way to solve this is my making investigations into SWATing really high priority (e.g. dedicated FBI people investigating these crimes), and then handing out heavy, punitive sentences as a deterrent. The only reason anyone does this is they think they can get away with it (and often do). I think it'd stop once that impression is changed.
It's just a terrible idea. I'm guessing it took less than a minute to come up with it, and you spent that time thinking of reasons to support it and almost no time thinking about the problems with it. It's just that bad.
Some obvious problems:
1. You didn't consider the most popular smartphone OS at all.
2. Not everyone has a smartphone.
3. Not everyone who has a smartphone knows how to use all the apps on it, or can figure a new one out in a stressful situation.
4. How exactly do you think someone who's actually being threatened would prove it to the police over a video call (reveal their hiding place to take video of the perp with the gun)?
5. Don't you think the SWATter (or whatever you call them) could fake a video call using some accepted service, like they already fake phone calls?
6. What if there's no data at their location, or the signal is too poor for video but good enough for voice (like my parents' basement)?
7. Etc. (I could go on, but I think I proved my point)
Most of them are dealbreakers. A few even show that your solution won't even properly address the SWATting problem it's ostensibly meant to solve, even ignoring the bad tradeoffs.
I'll grant you it's a step, just not a step forward.
"Great, let me send you a calendar invite for a Microsoft Teams meeting. Can you do 13:30? Oh no wait, my supervisor has a clash then... how about 14:45?"
There was a report of an armed gunman who had already killed someone on this guy’s property, so cops went to search for him. What exactly would you have them do differently?
If not a SWAT team, a large armed response.
By all accounts, the police responded appropriately and de-escalating the situation when the man came outside with a gun.
I don’t understand what people want to be different about this situation, other than for the police to become clairvoyant so they can know when reports are false before they get there.
From the police that regularly chokes people, shots unarmed men, women, and even kids, and likes to play with military gear, and are trigger happy?
Probably one can't expect much of them, anyway.
A competent police would have set up some kind of barricade to stand behind, call for the person to come out, try to watch the house from afar to see what's going on, and in any case, not have several people stand with drawn weapons aiming at a person...
After all if "a gunman has already shot someone", the police can obviously bring that person back to life by charging into the scene guns ablazing...
And, as many SWATing cases have shown us, "when there's a report that a gunman has already shot someone" it's necessarily true!
/s
Send the drones ahead. Flying, walking, tracked, wheeling.
Does that even happen in the USA? I'm in the UK, and I can't remember the last time I saw a solitary cop - they patrol in pairs here.
In general, cuts to the police have made single crewing a lot more common.
*With the exception of dog handlers, British police aren't allowed to drive home in their patrol cars.
Whose accounts would those be of? Is there a video available for review?
The original Minneapolis PD's report on George Floyd was the only official account of the events prior to the medical examiner's report, and was specifically written to be as detail-free as legally possible.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36179698/minneapolis-...
But I would think - depending on whether prank reports like this are relatively common, as a % of all SWAT calls made legitimate or illegitimate - it’d be better to check out the scene, maybe even knock first if the situation allows it, as a default, to determine any chance that they were just being sent on a wild goose chase by some bored gamers. I guess cases with quote-unquote hostages would preclude that kind of luxury though, dunno
The only people responsible for this were the people who called the police with a false report. That is the crime.
I think cops do a lot of bad shit and need to be held accountable, but this sounds like they did the right thing.
I hear about unnecessary use of force while detaining someone, a few standoffs against armed opponents, a few car chases but nothing like swatting.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Belgium/Un...
Here you can see we have more crime per 1000 then America. But we have significant less gun crimes and/or violent crimes then US. Also violent crime with murder and murder crime. 1 more trivia item is that we actually have more police officers per capita then America.
Not sure what to conclude. Gun restrictions seem not to curb crime but seems to curb violent crimes and murders. Or maybe we are just less violent :) I'm not sure.
But what I can conclude is that our Police doesn't have to go many times to violent crime scenes and when they go the chance someone is armed with a gun even less likely....
Norway is mostly hunting rifles for example. Very few handguns.
Policing is also different. Police is usually not carrying guns, but the moment a gun is reported it causes a massive response. As a criminal, bringing a gun massively increases your risk, as without one you're unlikely to run into anyone with a lethal weapon. It also causes a risk of a far longer sentence.
That's exactly the same in the US, btw. Bringing a gun causes the tactical team to come in rather than the normal cops, and it aggravates the criminal's sentence.
Missing the point, which is that this is a meaningful escalation in Norway where regular cops do not carry guns in most instances. It's a far less meaningful escalation when you're facing armed police either way.
The point both with that and the sentencing is that it creates a sharp escalation from a low risk base.
Escalation only works as a deterrence from negative behaviours if the lowest risk alternative is actually seen as low risk.
If the answer to all of those questions is "yes", then congratulations, you have exactly the same situation as this case in Tennessee. (If the answer to any is "no", ...?)
"1 more trivia item is that we actually have more police officers per capita then America."
50% more. I'm impressed.
OTOH, that site shows The Netherlands as having ~155 police officers total. I guess they're not counting the 24,000 "peace officers".
New Zealand has 5 total (0.1 / 100,000).
So they definitely didn't storm in. And he did have a gun.
> ... they definitely didn't storm in.
Yes. There were a lot of them for absolutely no reason but for a completely baseless claim.
> And he did have a gun.
This is irrelevant. He was on his own property and did nothing wrong. The authorities didn't know he had a gun before sending so many cops.
How would they know its baseless? If someone broke into your house with a gun do you want the police to show up assuming you're lying?
This man also didn’t die because he was shot btw. The way you reduce these incidents is through severe punishments for reporting false crimes.
But when all you have is a hammer, every citizen looks like a nail.
You read about a few false positives and decide the police need to start assuming by default that every call is a false positive. You have no data on the number of calls where sending a SWAT team is the correct response (true positives), the number of calls where the responder correctly decides not to send SWAT (true negatives) or where the responder incorrectly decides not to send SWAT (false negatives).
No, you have no data, just a handful of anecdotes and on that basis you want to completely change how first responders work. You talk about “Bayesian” but you couldn’t possibly calculate how many lives could be saved or lost by this change.
Please, let’s stop acting like we’re experts at everything because we know a bit about software. Maybe other people are competent too. Maybe they know shit we don’t.
Oh and by the way, like someone else pointed out, the article doesn’t even say SWAT was deployed or that any law enforcement entered his home.
> regularly get the wrong house
Citation needed, with data? Or do you, like GP, also want us to assume that your anecdotes are data? And getting the exact address isn’t the same thing as deciding the legitimacy of a call.
> “it’s probably correct so we should ignore the problem” isn’t a sane perspective
You’ve mischaracterised my comment and called me insane. That was uncalled for. I did not say this wasn’t a problem. I merely questioned whether a person with 0 data and 0 experience was qualified to call for upending the current system. More data is needed before we can hold such strong opinions.
I would request that in future you don’t call people’s opinions insane without even understanding what they’re saying. You’re currently in violation of HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Depends if you count a minimum of 10% "regularly"?
From 2003: "After the New York City raid that killed Alberta Spruill, Police Chief Raymond Kelly estimated that at least 10 percent of the city’s 450+ monthly no-knock drug raids were served on the wrong address, under bad information, or otherwise didn’t produce enough evidence for an arrest. Kelly conceded, however, that NYPD didn’t keep careful track of botched raids, leading one city council member to speculate the problem could be even worse."
There's a whole bunch documented here (where I got the quote) - https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/balko_whi...
Although I think it speaks to the general competence of the US police that they can't get the right address even when they've spent days/weeks organising a raid - I wouldn't necessarily trust them to get it right on a fast rollout on a SWAT call.
Nor did your flamebaiting, uncharitable response to said comment (see 'In Comments' guidelines).
I am surprised if it’s possible for someone in the U.K. to call 911 and get “911 stateside” and not redirected to 999 in the U.K.?
If this is a prank, we WILL find you. Please enter the last four digits of your social security number followed by the pound key to receive an automatic 90% discount on your sentence.
How about we punish the hell out of anyone who does these stupid prank calls instead.
How can you know this. My guess would be it's like hacking any other system. You hear about the few times they succeed. Especially if turns into a horrible incident the news media can use to fit one of their favorite narratives.
Really people have been doing this for a long time, the “boy who cried wolf” is part of Aesop's Fables dating to ~600 BCE. Swatting is significant because it’s harder for cops to filter based on internet famous than actually famous.
If US police focused more on containment and de-escalation this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
No idea why you would send an intervention team in blind, much less on an unconfirmed tip. It's a recipe for all kinds of disasters and expensive one too.
Institution that reacts without care and with sever overreaction so often, will have more of them simply because they are super easy to make attack.
This is true, and I think people today have a very warped view of policing. However, there are plenty of legitimate areas of improvement:
- No knock raids
- Violent arrests of non-violent offenders
- Eminent domain
- etc.
No knock raids are particularly troubling because (among many other reasons) they can result in a legal shootout between police and civilians: A civilian who has been violently woken up in the middle of the night is disoriented and scared, and legitimately believes he is subject to a life-threatening home invasion. He opens fire on the police, who he believes to be the home invaders. The police, being fired on, have a legitimate right to defend themselves. It's not airtight, but this scenario can lead to a legal shootout where both parties have valid legal arguments.
I realize this is mostly oblique to the topic at hand, but our policing can and should be improved, even if it gives ammunition to the folks who want to demonize the police unjustly.
What do you think isn't airtight in that scenario?
There is no law of nature requiring that police departments react that way. It is up to us as a society to decide what behavior we desire.
If, for instance, I were to learn that 90% of all calls for SWAT teams are from "swatting" (baseless prank calls performed to create the reaction) while 10% were actual life-or-death situations it would affect my opinion of the right way for police to handle it.
So I think knowing the actual statistics is important.
It’s a really hard job where you have to walk the correct route through a protocol in an emergency, often while being in danger yourself
The "protocol" for police is also dictated by their unions and the way laws around police use of force are interpreted. In general they know they are safe if they simply kill a person as soon as they perceive a threat. They will be legally covered and physically out of harm's way. This therefore incentivizes them to use lethal force, because they have no incentive not to use lethal force.
Yes, police have a hard job. But it could be a lot less hard (for them) if laws and policies are reformed.
From my reading, mcherm is giving a hypothetical scenario in which the automatic response of sending a SWAT team would be unreasonable. The conclusion isn't that we exist in that hypothetical scenario, but that more information is needed in order to determine whether and how close we may be to it.
I'm not arguing for 90%, just against assumptions.
"Someone else told me XYZ" doesn't absolve you of responsibility for your actions. The people who called in with a false report certainly share in that responsibility, but it's not solely theirs.
What are you proposing they should have done? Just waited it out from a distance?
To take this further if someone malicious caused me to do something catastrophic at work should I be absolved of all accountability? Sure, I am not the person who did the malicious thing because I had no intent, but I did still do it. Maybe I shouldn’t be fired but the security policies and procedures should be changed for the entire company to prevent this from happening again.
What do the police in those countries do differently?
If you want to discuss a topic in a productive manner, the first thing to do is to honestly say something about what you believe and why.
What actual observations of the world led you to your generalizations?
To stop a shooter? Yes it is.
https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/223855.pdf
I don't think that most SWAT responses are actually saving lives with bullets. Also included in that paper is a table showing that most frequently, SWAT is used to serve warrants.
If a warrant serving situation seems dangerous enough to use SWAT, I hope they use them and no rounds are fired. That’s a good warrant service, not a failure, in my book.
"After receiving a phone call concerning an active shooter situation, the force sent round a single officer, just to double-check. The officer was among the 7 killed by the gunman."
Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? The sheep were slaughtered because the town stopped trusting him. I'd rather the police scare a few unlucky people and waste some resources than learn to distrust our cries for help. Of course it's a tragedy that someone lost their life, but how many lives would be lost through not mobilising enough police?
This is basically the same as blaming the first-day developer that wipes the production database. It's more on the police to change their behavior than to expect kids to stop being imbeciles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...
It is not nearly the same situation.
"Hang on... While we do due diligence!"
What due diligence would or could the police do? Maybe they could tell if the caller location was far away or overseas, but beyond that...
My intuition, without seeing the relevant data, is that rapid police response is worth the cost of occasional swatting.
I sometimes look at the Citizen app (though I don't have notifications on) and there seem to be multiple instances that would benefit from a rapid response daily - theft, threats, domestic violence, shots fired, etc. I myself recently witnessed a fight and another passerby called the police. The police arrived within minutes and settled what might've escalated into a worse situation. I'm not aware of any swattings in my location, let alone fatal ones.
I'd be curious to see data on this problem.
Swatting destroys peoples house, traumatize people, injures people pretty much on the regular. And no one will pay you back for what was destroyed.
Just because no one died does not mean no damage was done.
So if that means that when SWAT shows up, they walk in unarmed and get shot..so be it. That is acceptable. Having a potentially innocent person be killed is not.
Again, the question is really which option is worse. On the one hand we have a zealous police response that will sometimes kill innocent people as a result of things like swatting, being unintentionally misinformed, or even just tragic accidents. On the other hand we have a cautious police response which might minimize the people injured or killed by the causes just discussed but increase the injuries or deaths that result from delays in police response. Which of the two causes the most harm?
As I've said before, my intuition is that a rapid response is the least harmful. I think the policing experts in charge of current policing strategy share that opinion based on current protocols. I understand that you prefer the cautious strategy, but I haven't seen you explain why you think there will be less harm from that strategy.
Many non-US countries manage this just fine. It seems to be mainly the US where "warrior cop" is a thing.
The question was "more passive [than the US]" and not "passively" - that would cover, e.g., the UK, who generally don't roll up to active shooter situations with a squadron of heavily armed trigger happy warrior cops like the US does.
How about doing that instead of going to whatever address anyone gives them like a pizza delivery but with blazing guns instead of pizza?
But in case of domestic disputes it's not that clear cut. Police arrives in minutes, in the heat of the moment, escalate further and they shoot someone, usually the best armed one among people arguing or just the one that has most trouble with calming immediately in the middle of a quarrel. In many cases if they caught a flat tire along the way and arrived 10 minutes later, situation might deescalate till then.
There must be some optimal reaction time for the police otherwise if faster is always better then the best thing would be to each of us having a policemen with loaded gun pointed at the back of our head all the time, half-asleep, ready to be woken up to shoot immediately in reaction to whatever crime we seem to be trying to commit.
This is not just stupidity, it is malicious stupidity.
What alternative behavior do you suggest?
(FWIW, I've been swatted before, and live in constant anxiety every since. I don't feel safe.)
If you shoot someone, we don't say that technically the bullet killed them not the person who fired the shot.
"Dr. Wittstein and his research team found that some people may respond to sudden, overwhelming emotional stress by releasing large amounts of adrenalin and other chemicals into the blood stream. These chemicals can be temporarily toxic to the heart, effectively stunning the muscle and producing symptoms similar to those of a typical heart attack: chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure. However, there are no further similarities between "broken heart" syndrome and cardiac arrest. Closer inspection using blood tests and magnetic resonance imaging scans failed to show the typical heart attack signs, such as irreversible muscle damage and elevated levels of certain enzymes."
If that happened, it would have been avoidable; it doesn't necessarily mean he was sickly and this was the straw that broke the camel's back.
(Aside: I wonder if anyone here would think comparable things of the organizers of a surprise party, 16 years after it's published in a medical journal that they can be fatal? What if the birthay person was known to hate surprise parties? Anyone calling for a death penalty or years in prison?)
[1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2005/03/sudden-shock-c...
Swatting has a predictable risk of mortality thus the criminals don't get off morally because their victim died a different way than expected.
I haven't seen a claim that the perpetrators expected the man to die - didn't they want to harass and scare him until he gave up his Twitter handle? If he was dead they'd have no chance of getting access to it, therefore they likely were not planning for him to die, right?
If Barney Fife showed up to kindly ask you if you were ok you would have been swatted just not very effectively.
The article uses this picture: https://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2019/03/20...
Google reverse image search for that suggests a search term of "fbi swat team" and first result is a wikipedia link to "FBI Special Weapons and Tactics Teams". The picture is from the Wikipedia page on swatting which says it is "an FBI SWAT team during training". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting