Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8note | Hacker News Reader

Stopping the swatter doesn't do much, and still allows for people to be swatted.

The thing that needs an overhaul is the decision making on when to actually send out the swat team. It's lazy, expensive, and dangerous to send them out for every opportunity without any investigation

View on HN

It doesn't mean a literal SWAT team any more. Many departments have truly gone overkill with their everyday gear and tactics, and many of those that don't still seem SWAT-like. I would argue that the SFPD are usually relatively low key, but they now carry around night sticks which seem pretty bad ass, but are really meant to be an alternative to deadlier force.

We can do both: hold false reporters accountable while also demanding investigations into police recklessness.

That won't happen because cops love any excuse they can get to dress up, play with their shiny toys/weapons and crack some skulls while accruing overtime pay. We can't trust them to regulate themselves.

The overhaul we need is community oversight, community decision making and community policing.

> Stopping the swatter doesn't do much, and still allows for people to be swatted.

A record of high profile cases where swatters get caught and incarcerated would be a great deterrent.

Sure but the ultimate perpetrator of the violence in these cases is the police. We can solve the swatting problem and other serious problems simultaneously by stopping the police from bursting in to peoples homes with guns blazing and other unnecessary behaviors.

Specifically police need to learn about time, distance, and cover. Arrive on the scene and take cover a safe distance away from the perceived threat. Take time to identify the perceived threat and confirm they are really a danger. Only then should they attempt to deal with the threat if it actually proves to be one. This would have saved the life of Tamir Rice, a harmless child who was shot by a police officer who had not even finished stopping his car when he shot and killed the unarmed 12 year old. This would have saved the life of 22 year old John Crawford III who was shot by a police officer at WalMart. Crawford had picked up an un-packaged BB gun and then continued shopping. Someone misunderstood the situation and called the police. When officers arrived they ignored the lack of distress among other customers which should have been present, and fired shots at Crawford almost immediately upon entering the store.

There are many accounts like this. Police behavior leads to many unnecessary deaths and swatting is only a threat because of police failing to assess a situation firsthand.

If I call the cops because some armed gunman is breaking into my house, I don’t want them to send some unarmed patrolman to politely knock on my door and check whether everything is okay.

By the time you make that call, regardless of who responds, you'll be dead OR the gunman will have what they want. Home invasions rarely result in hostage situations.

You haven't seen US houses. They call them McMansions for a reason. The intruders will still be searching the third hallway to nowhere while I'm comfortably calling the police from my summertime reading nook.

If the authorities are too slow to respond they get crucified (extreme case: Uvalde, Texas school shooting earlier this year where the cops sat paralyzed while children were actively being murdered by a gunman).

I don't like the five-oh but going the route you're proposing will make some instances much worse with avoidable loss of life.

I don't think that's a good comparison. That was 100+ cops standing around while kids were being shot. How often do swat type all out assaults from cops into buildings save people? They are rare. The cops add risk more than they save risk from attackers.

In this case, there is a demonstrated and repeated danger from these swatting attacks. They don't have proper risk management in the police forces of the us, as demonstrated by swatting killing people. The authorities being too slow is not a demonstrated problem, it's the opposite.

This is an extremely poor example that further illustrates the murderous recklessness of swat teams. The fact that there was a shooter at Uvalde was obvious upon arriving at the scene. Meanwhile, a traditional swat involves a completely innocuous house with no apparent hostiles, because there aren't any hostiles, and yet deaths still occur because of the recklessness of the swat teams. Imagine if you had a school with no shooter and a false report; would the swat teams burst through the windows and start mowing down students at random? Unthinkable, yes?

Are you proposing a mechanism by which this decision can reliably be made? If not I'm not sure you're asking for something reasonable. The first person who dies because the police were too slow or too weak to respond will cause as much outrage as what you express here.

Every officer on the scene at Uvalde knew there was a shooter in the classroom. Gunshots had been heard by people on the scene. Eyewitnesses on the scene had seen a shooter entering with weapons. Children in the classroom were calling in from their phones.

If the only information police had was a phone call from an anonymous VOIP number, then they'd be comparable.

The police were following a shooter as he entered the school. The police knew there was a shooter in the school the second the shooter walked through the door.

Well yes, if there are gunshots or similar sounds indicating urgent entry is needed then do so, otherwise maybe knock on the door. People die all the time because police don't intervene, there was even a Supreme Court ruling that found that police have no duty to intervene to save your life. The least they can do is not rashly toss an incendiary device through your window or into your child's crib[1].

[1]https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Uvalde probably would have gone down better without a swat team because the beat cops actually would have gone in when they got there if they knew they didn't have backup to wait for.

It's not like those instances had a single random person phoning it in. This comparison doesn't work.

Especially the one where cops were already there.

This isn't a giant dial that says "cops go fast" <-> "cops go slow"

There is a middle ground between, for example the shooting of Tamir Rice, where the officer shot and killed this innocent 12 year old boy before his police car had even come to a stop, and Uvalde where police stood around for an hour. Police should take time to observe the situation (this could be 30 seconds), take cover a safe distance away (this was not done with Tamir Rice), confirm the threat is real, attempt to de-escalate, and shoot only if necessary. We see in many cases police burst on to the scene and shoot almost immediately, and this leads to unnecessary death.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com