It wasn’t a dumb accident, and law enforcement isn’t to blame in this case.
The police response was deliberately incited by a group of malicious individuals.
How can minors, who typically are given lighter sentences, be discouraged from “swatting”?
All countries have idiot teenagers…
Maybe we can take the model of other countries that have idiot teenagers but no swatting problem?
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.
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.
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?
Except for those and more, it's just like any other violence.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
[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?
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
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]
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).