The FBI has formed a national database to track swatting incidents

Either way, I never have to use Jira again!

You guys now have things like “mass stabbings” and truck attacks. I don’t know how the numbers were effected, but the underlying issues still seem to exist. After all, it is not the guns that convince people to commit mass murders.

Is cowardice a crime?

> Militarized police would have no excuse

They'd have the same excuse they have now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...

Then again, if they did change that and use military-style regulations, complete with desertion and cowardice rules, maybe the equivalent of military police (police police?) can stamp out corruption and violence against the public, in the same way that a soldier stealing supplies or deliberately harming civilians would be (should be) punished harshly by a military court.

So as usual, more guns. Brilliant, decades of school shootings and your solution is to throw more guns at the problem.

Honestly if you like guns, you should really hope you don't get what you're asking for. Because once the inevitable happens and it becomes clear that more guns isn't helping there's only one direction that can go - gun control.

I am pretty sure the Supreme Court has held up that cops have no inherent need "to protect" citizens and you can't sue them for that. Qualified immunity covers this. Castle Rock v. Gonzalez. Essentially the only thing that gets them in trouble is flat out breaking the law. (Robbery, gross assault, laundering, etc)

Lol they will find some excuse like “the officers feared for their lives and acted in the best interests of the community” or something regardless of how many guns they have. Militarization of the police has nothing to do with it

I feel like many people would hear his words and not really process them. To you or I Craighead is saying something quite sensible - "you need to be ready and prepared to actually do this, and you probably aren't and won't be". But I've seen a lot of guys just parroting things like "be ready to use lethal force if you have to" to sound tough and as a sort of self-motivation, without really thinking about what they're saying.

I've no idea who is mentally prepared or adequately trained to pull out a gun and tackle a mass shooter, but I'd be very surprised if the overwhelming majority of gun enthusiasts didn't just do something like this in that situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saQ72NZtrS0

"Make an anonymous phone call if you would like the state to murder someone!"

Of course totalitarians want to solve it by making sure no one can make an anonymous phone call.

The expectation that an emergency can be signaled from a single phone call is reasonable (barely one step up from shouting "help"). Objecting the resulting behavior of the emergency response is not relevant to the predictably effective practice.

Create account is a 40 item form with unknown input validation.

Oauth to google is broken.

Facebook requires full posting permissions.

Welcome to hell.

Solve the Captcha to prove you're a real person

Who's that? Obviously the Hostage Rescue Team exists, but most hostage situations don't last for days and getting a specific group of people across the country to the scene is harder than getting a team there that's already in the city.

What's the difference?

Why are the police synonymous with "hitmen" ?

Rocks are inanimate objects, the police are people

Would be smart. And of course bring the video cameras and make a spectacle of dragging a pimply 18 year-old out of his moms basement. Throw the book at him and make it very high profile. Sucks the kid has to waste away 10 years in the clink but someone has to be the example.

I'm sorry but the mental image looking out your front door as a firefighter kicks it down, an ignored building happily in flames over their shoulder, is way too funny.

I called 911 when I found my ex after a suicide attempt.

One of the cops that responded tried to blame me.

> Police don't just go in guns blazing with their eyes closed

In the Breonna Taylor incident [0], their eyes weren't closed, but they may as well have been:

> Police then fired 32 rounds into the apartment... Cosgrove fired 16 shots from the doorway area... Hankison fired 10 times from outside through a sliding glass door and bedroom window, both of which were covered by blinds or curtains... The officers' shots hit objects in the living room, dining room, kitchen, hallway, bathroom, and both bedrooms.

Now, granted that situation was out of the norm because an occupant of the apartment fired a shot first, since he thought they were being burgled and the police neglected to announce their presence. But that's exactly the kind of situation that could happen in a SWAT raid. Most victims of SWATTing don't expect police to show up to their door, so if they're someone who owns a firearm and they hear a loud bang at the door, they may quite rightfully fire a shot at it in self defense, just like happened in the Taylor residence.

The main lesson there is that it's up to police to properly announce themselves (no-knock raids should never be used in response to an emergency distress call such as the kind that triggers a SWATTing). But even if they announce themselves and receive fire in return, I'd argue they should at least make sure they've sighted a target before they pull the trigger, rather than indiscriminately shooting a volley of bullets through a window like they're some kind of gangster doing a drive by.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor#Shoo...

"likely jumpy because they expect to be shot dead if they aren't the first to pull the trigger."

Their job has risks, they can't just starting shooting first and asking questions because of fear.

How many police die on the job vs how many people they kill on the job?

> Police have to be super alert and are likely jumpy because they expect to be shot dead if they aren't the first to pull the trigger.

they are not even in the top 20 most dangerous jobs in america.

Funny because I would assume most times they are not warranted

so do we have enough information to determine? or do we need to push for that first.

That depends entirely on how many "my husband is going crazy with a shotgun" calls they get, doesn't it?

Normally it would be, but unfortunately in a country where small portion of the population literally stockpile powerful guns permitted by law, I would, as a responding LEO, want to be prepared for the worst..

SWAT are the police. They're just normal officers with squad-based training that get mobilized when particularly-nasty situations are called in. A task force of sorts, kinda like the Power Rangers-- just normal kids until the supervillains show up, then they do a costume change and show up to assume their specific role in the response.

"The police" don't show up to calls with reinforced vehicles, ballistic helmets, vests, and shields, and an arsenal of assault weapons to deal with extensive threats. At best, beat cops have an anti-stab vest, a 9mm, a flashlight, and their choice of a shotgun or AR-15 in the car. It takes nothing to gun down a pair of cops.

We expect too much of law enforcement in these situations IMO. The military has intelligence units and recon teams to provide actionable advice. The cops are working with an anonymous call, unknown entities and unknown locations; they have to figure everything out ad-hoc in an urban warfare scenario. It's chaos. Imagine being told you have 5 minutes to introduce a change to a production distributed environment you've never even seen, and either you or an innocent civilian are summarily executed at random for each error you make. Those are the stakes they're working with, and they're nowhere near as smart as you.

Mistakes get made, which is on them, but calling them in as a prank is monstrous for everybody involved. It's just fucking evil.

Uvalde shooting comes to mind.

We just saw this with the recent court case decision from the cop that did nothing at the Parkland shooting.

Feeding the municipal/county/state coffers with the proceeds of civil forfeiture?

Maintaining the social and economic status quo by any means necessary, legal or otherwise.

There's a disruption? They show up and un-disrupt it.

To protect capital.

Exactly! I almost added that to my reply above.

To make the above situation even trickier, let's say the homeowners had a landline for years, but just recently switched to a VoIP gateway. Their VoIP gateway operator advertised a feature that their outgoing caller ID will make it look like they're calling from their old number. This is a real and desirable feature for lots of people. I'd rather not have police disregard all calls from VoIP gateways.

But to GP's point, of course what we really need is a genuine verifiable caller ID. Or at least some sort of verification that's instantly available to 911 operators. In this case, the VoIP provider should be able to assert that the call really is coming from that address in a way no one else can spoof.

This is kind of a nitpick but caller ID, ANI, E911, and now STIR/SHAKEN are different protocols AFAIK and spoofing them takes different amounts of effort. Unfortunately capitalism turned SS7 into swiss cheese so the effort probably varies from trivial to easy.

It was not clear what the OP meant, ‘liable’ has a distinct meaning with regards to legal liability.

A little condescending is OK when someone is posting authoritatively and they’re totally incorrect.

I don't see what that's relevant. If the UK police respond to reports of a person with a gun without being armed themselves that's clearly braver that American police who respond to literally any report with enough military hardware as if they fear for their lives.

With this logic: The US police is way braver, they have to be adrenaline fueled jackasses to dare do their job of killing citizens.

With normal logic: If not everyone is at the mercy of eachother not popping heads for lolz we don't need to arm the police as heavily, and we can hire people that are good at deescalation rather than shooting back.

Not just fewer, a couple of orders of magnitude fewer guns (maybe more). Also a populous with more mental care for those who are in dangerous mental states.

> They have to treat every situation as violent. On average, every American owns a gun. There is no encounter with the police that doesn't run a genuine risk of becoming deadly in seconds.

No they don’t, the vast majority (99%?) of police interactions with the public are non-violent. I spoke with a cop in my city who told me that was at a new officer training where 13 out of 15 training scenarios were ‘violent encounters’. The man was a career officer with 25+ years and he said almost every interaction he has with the public is non-violent, and that training cops to expect every encounter to go sideways is creating expectations that don’t match reality. Violent encounters happen, but cops are trained like every interaction is going to turn violent.

Re: on average every American owns a gun

Something like 50% of the guns are owned by 3% of Americans or some ridiculous number. Roughly 1 in 3 adult Americans own guns.

Personally I agree with you that we would be better off without having more guns than people in this country, but reality is reality.

This is a hysterical take when every interaction with a cop involves interacting with someone who has a gun, but clearly that’s okay…? Because cops are always peaceful and judicious?

> On average, every American owns a gun.

That is factually incorrect. 4 in 10 Americans (at most) own guns. Few of them carry them around.

It is true that when you dig deep into the fundamental beliefs of people, that they hold many things in common. I actually don't believe the political divide we experience today is something organic, as in being part of the human condition, rather it is artificially managed by the aforementioned mainstream media, et al, and to a good extent once they've stoked the fires well enough, we keep it up on our own. But the flames would die down if they just left it alone to be handled by people.

Being the change you want to see in the world is always a good start. But I think it is wishful the point of naivety to claim that it is enough to just be the change you want to see in the world. I can do a great job of not littering by the beach, but as long as the oceans keep getting polluted by plastics from a few certain nations, it really is a fruitless endeavor in the long term.

I don't think being toxic in a political way to your peers is good for any reason at all, it's harmful to you and others around you in every way, but I also don't have any hopes that just because I try to hold a better tone, that the world would actually change. The control that mainstream media holds over democracy is huge, and arguably cannot be overstated.

The true divide as I see it doesn't lie between people left or right leaning, but between people and an international clique of wealthy and influential people that permeate all western nations.

And while there are many issues which people will agree are just different flavors of fruit, some issues are fundamental. You say that:

>It doesn't matter how you bin your enemies: religion, race, political ideologies; it is all painting with a wide brush that divides people that could get along.

And to that I say: We don't ge along. At this point it is a matter of fact statement rather than one of prejudice. The result of the current trajectory in the west is one towards civil war, because we do not get along. It is a fundamental belief among some that all cultures, races, and even ideologies can get along. That some kind of transcendent centrism can bridge all gaps and make everyone happy. I do not subscribe to that belief on a moral or philosophical level, let alone see any evidence of it actually being real in historical terms.

I think it could be possible to get along, if perhaps only one or two of these "religion, race, political ideologies" were present and divergent in the general population. But the current mix of all three, no way.

> Do you ever read stories about good police officers?

I could do 10 really nice things a day for you all week long, but if on Saturday I rape your whole family you're not going be happy with me. This isn't about keeping score, it's about making sure that things that should never happen don't, and that when things do go wrong the police are held accountable for their actions, and meaningful steps are taken to prevent situations like that from happening again. Cops don't get to save up enough "nice points" that they still get our support after they murder one of us and get away with it again, and again, and again.

Once the problems that allow the abuses by police to persist start to be addressed trust between the police and the people they've been abusing will improve, but until that happens, the "good cops" who are sitting in a barrel full of rotten apples will just have be patient with us when we're embittered and skeptical after seeing example after example, week after week, of what the "bad cops" have been doing.

If you’re not asking as a gotcha, “good police” stories are a dime a dozen. You can routinely catch them on the evening news, and they frequently rise to national news as well.

Practically no other profession gets such exceedingly positive and prolific press for doing the most charitable version of their job description. You never see stories like “trash collector relieves neighborhood of unwanted refuse without crushing anyone in the compactor”, even though their job is more dangerous and much less controversially beneficial to society.

The reason there’s even an appetite for “stories about good police officers” is specifically as a counterpoint to the continuous story of cops behaving badly, either by their direct action or pointed inaction, or by their collective activity to protect other cops from scrutiny when they directly do harm.

If cops want a better rep, they could be more deserving by not doing bad things and protecting other cops who do the same. If they don’t want to do that professionally (understandably! actually good cops are afraid of retaliation, or become afraid when they exercise their principles and find out what the consequences entail), they are always welcome to leave the profession.

Admittedly there should be a better support system for cops who want to change careers for these reasons. But there isn’t a lot of demand for that so

I get the point that you're making: that there is a perception bias. You're absolutely right that there is. But also consider the old clique "a rotten apple spoils the barrel." The takes here would probably be a lot different if there was good evidence that these "bad apples" are being removed or adequately punished. I don't have a problem with a policy of paid leave during an investigation. Investigations need to happen and removing them would be going too far in the other direction. BUT we frequently see these people stay on their jobs, be let go and join another neighboring force, or at best be let go. That's a big issue. Yes, we should believe that police have to act quickly and make quick judgements BUT they are supposed to be trained for exactly that kind of thing. They shouldn't be held to the same standard as an average citizen because they aren't. They are a trained expert and thus should be held to a _higher_ standard. People have every right to feel like the system is corrupt, there's tons of evidence that it is. I mean just look how easy it is to become someone who has some of the most power that a normal citizen can expect. Compare that to other countries. I'd say it is one of the many issues.

We can both have a perception bias AND have the system be corrupt. I'm pretty confident that this is the situation we're on. If you want to get nuanced, let's. But comments like these are swinging too far in the opposite direction, hand waving away objectively terrible things. If it is bad, it is bad. Doesn't matter if 1% of officers or 100%, the incidents are still bad and should be dealt with accordingly.

Too much reddit spillage here

Why? Not even the US calls SWAT for robberies, that would be truly idiotic. You call your insurance office so the you can try to fight your way through the people that are trying to prevent you from filling out all the paperwork necessary to get your coverage. Very different fight.

Mississippi requires only 10 weeks. Many states are around 20.

Soldiers aren’t armed in the normal course of a day on base.

Massive difference.

Fact is American police are under-trained and over-armed.

> What would a college degree bring to the table for a regular beat cop/patrolman?

Because Reasons, it's become expected that anyone capable of getting a college degree will get one. Which in turn means that not having one gets used as a signal of not being able to get one.

The push to stop listing a degree in job postings that don't actually use one is partly intended to correct this.

> That's an odd take. What would a college degree bring to the table for a regular beat cop/patrolman?

Cops are expected to be able to descalate situations, identify suspicious situations, in theory behave in accordancd with the rule of law and limitations on police force, and much more. These all seem like things that could be in a degree program.

In Greece it is 3 years of studies to become a patrol police officer. To be a ranking officer it is 4 years and counts as a bachelor. There is also a 2 year special force which supposedly catches up to the same standard, that's a different discussion.

And all that to get on the street without a gun. To get a gun you need another half to one year of on the street training.

But the problem is the gun ho culture. Here are some on the news examples.

a) there is an armed robbery with an ak-47: US go in and start a gun fight, EU/Greece: tell everyone to let the robbers go and note the license plate, catching them a few hours later with no shots fired;

b) person wants to commit suicide by cop, everyone else has left the building: U.S. cops rush in blind, get shot and kill the guy; Greece: there is nothing really equivalent, cops just try to get a psychologist and stay away;

And if the cops shoot someone the public disagrees with, expect weeks of lynching and rioting.

c) mental I'll person with a gun: U.S.: full escalation and long gunfight; Greece: in front of the parliament: chat de-escalation no shot fired by anyone.

Comments are yours.

P.S. (And gun ownership has nothing to do with it. Where I am from there is practically WWII weaponry -- minus the tanks -- everywhere. People learn to shoot really young and keep it up.)

For one it would prove that they have at least -some- self control and self discipline. Also the military basically keeps 19 year olds in tight reign with an clean line of command and a lot of training to do what you're told with relatively very rare combat situtations and when they get in those situations they are surrounded by others doing exactly the same thing, rather than alone (or at most a partner) in a community that hates cops.

For 'Basic Bobby' it reads more like a three year trade apprenticeship:

    You can choose to undertake a three-year Level 6 degree apprenticeship, which involves both on and off-the-job training. As with other apprenticeships, you'll earn while you learn and upon successful completion of the programme, you'll have finished your probation as a police constable and will have achieved the BSc Professional Policing Practice.

Undergrad degrees don't have on the job training + probationary.

Looks appopriate though.

Basic Constable here is two years - six month coursework, 18 month probie.

https://www.jobsandskills.wa.gov.au/jobs-and-careers/occupat...

UK cops are somehow completely useless but super authoritarian at the same time tho

so? where's the deterrence?

I'm not your paid researcher. Google "racial disparities in sentencing" and "racial disparities in criminal justice" for a start and then spend a few months reading.

You can start with the genesis of the war on drugs (hint: the Nixon administration wanted to lock up hippies and blacks, so they criminalized weed and heroin with insane sentencing guidelines).

Follow up with disparities in prosecution and sentencing by race.

Why? CBDCs despite the fancy window dressing are yet another attempt by the government to surveil and control us. Sure there are some nice features that would be very convenient for us all, but the real end goal is to replace physical currency.

Cash allows for anonymous, nearly untraceable financial transactions. CBDCs keep a record of all transactions and like cameras in our houses, they allow the government to spy into our personal lives for "the greater good", "stopping terrorists", or "think of the children".

did i get woosh

Guns are legal in many countries, so that argument doesn't really hole much water.

But at the same time, I don't have a good reason why (but then again it's never been my field of study).

Also and importantly the police gets lots of hands-me-down from the military, grants for high power devices, bills themselves warriors (with seminars like Grossman’s Killology), and trains in fearing everything and considering the civilian population their enemy. US cops are basically trained in thinking they work in occupied territory, but not in trigger discipline.

Every podunk town has set up a “SWAT” team armed to the teeth moving around in mrap, chomping at the bit to use their toys (as long as there’s no obvious danger on the scene, flashbanging a crib at dawn is A-ok, rushing a mass shooter in a school in broad daylight is, you know, maybe later).

Guns are legal in many countries. Hell, I can just go out and buy one (after applying for a license).

And people starting shooting is kind of expected when you break down their doors without announcing. For all they know, their lives are being threatened and they have a right to self defence. But if a cop wants to shoot me here, there is a very clear procedure they must follow (verbal warning+warning shot).

What is wrong with knocking on doors before trying to tear them down?

If that happened, then that’s a huge point against the anti-2A argument, and huge point towards the cowardly cops argument.

> Doesn't change that the cops in my county are 100% college educated

You misunderstand, what I’m saying is that US police forces generally consider college education to be over-qualification outside of high-ranking officers.

It’s not (just) that they’re expensive, departments literally don’t want them.