Hacker News Reader

Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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...

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.

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.

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"

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com