Man seeks millions after being shot by police in game-related swatting incident
tucsonsentinel.com
tucsonsentinel.com
cuts to 6 cops beating a guy with clubs
https://www.policemag.com/articles/to-serve-and-protect-v2
> In February 1955, the Los Angeles Police Department, through the pages of the internally produced BEAT magazine, conducted a contest for a motto for the police academy. The conditions of the contest stated that: “The motto should be one that in a few words would express some or all the ideals to which the Los Angeles police service is dedicated. It is possible that the winning motto might someday be adopted as the official motto of the Department.”
> The winning entry was the motto, “To Protect and to Serve” submitted by Officer Joseph S. Dorobek.
> On November 4, 1963, the Los Angeles City Council passed the necessary ordinance and the credo has now been placed alongside the City Seal on the Department’s patrol cars.
https://www.lapdonline.org/lapd-motto/
I don't know what film you're referring to, but it's been a motto since the 50's, and made official since the 60's.
Special note: that includes cases where protective orders like restraining orders are concerned. The Castle Rock v. Gonzales ruling specifically states that police have no obligation to enforce them.
Maybe a little blood and puss.
Don’t be a wuss![1]
[1] This rhyme only works in certain dialects of British English. For most English speakers, it won’t. It’s a bit like that Nickelback song Never Made It As A Wise Man when he rhymes “story” with “sorry”. Nickelback didn’t realize he developed a moat, an uncompetitive advantage, and nobody would be able to sing his wonderful songs. Nobody, except him.
To anyone unfamiliar with the concept of warrior cops, it may behoove you to start with the following Harvard Law Review article: https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-128/law-enforcements-...
So while Pima PD should be held responsible, and those cops should face criminal charges, it's logically non-nonsensical for this to make you terrified of police (or the other 5-10 similar stories annually). I mean cars are genocidal military dictators by comparison.
The downstream effect of this is people doing incredibly rash and stupid things because they think the cops are just going to start blasting them during a traffic stop ("I need to shot them/run away because I am dead anyway").
1. Come up with a beautiful story about how they need to have guns to defend themselves.
2. Come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who improperly uses violence in such encounters.
Encountering a cop is one of the most dangerous 'mundane' things that can happen to you. ~One in 50,000 encounters ends with someone dead.
Going on 50,000 drives is unlikely to send you to the morgue.
It's something like 1000 people killed by police annually, but it's childishly dishonest (or ignorant) to ignore that ~995 of those are people actively trying to kill the police.
I wouldn't call shooting out your back window because you're getting pulled over "mundane".
Also, if each drive is ~20 miles, you have around a 1% chance of dying. That's 500x greater than even the dishonest 1 in 50k stat. Just further driving my point home for me, thanks.
Unless you live in a community where the median income is $200K+, the primary funding for cops is through charging people with the easy crimes that they can't afford lawyers to fight, often drugs because they have massively inflated fines and fees. And the next best source of funding they have is special grants and programs which are often doles out based on how "dangerous" an area is, and killing "criminals" makes an area seem more dangerous and deserving of special funds and recognition and fancy armaments and killing toys.
These are the kind of people who shoud be strongly filtered out from jobs that require carrying firearms. They could enlist as infantry in whatever invasion USA is doing that year, but they're actually scared of guns if they can fire back.
The irony is that soldiers in the US military are usually better trained than the cops, and aren't going to magdump when an acorn hits their patrol car.
The best police force is a mixed bag of talents and skills.
Honestly, having been on a jury, police seem super intellectually uncurious and I suspect that is true at all levels. Since they mostly end up with not being responsible legally, they really don't care.
my whole life police done nothing else than harassed me by their various actions instead of improving my life and making it safer
so I would love some protection from the police, but all I am getting is harassment
Right. The real justice comes from treating this incident like you would if there were no municipal coffers at play, and simply punish criminals for criminal action.
Sure, the person making the bogus call to police should suffer some consequences vis a vis jail time.
However, swatting only works because police regularly take a shoot first and ask questions later stance. They go from an anonymous tip about an ongoing crime at an address to shooting up said address in short order without any effort to verify a crime is actually taking place, perhaps in no small part due to the fact that qualified immunity ensures they'll never see any consequences for any property damage and/or casualties which occur as a result.
I'd liken it to initiating a gang hit, except at least in the gang hit, the gang members responsible for carrying it out have a chance at facing some accountability.
Cops need to face the possibility of (at minimum) termination and even jail time for recklessly endangering civilians, and cop training needs to be fundamentally changed to eliminate this "us vs. them" mentality seen in so many of those in blue.
Now, if I were to answer your question, I would say it first depends on circumstances. I have encountered many people with guns. But if I was and active officer and encountered someone with a gun, I would do my best so that the encounter was arranged in a manner that gave me some advantage and at least a second or two to think before acting. Sometimes, mistakes are made though, and they always will be made. But the fact someone had a gun is no excuse.
Police in many jurisdictions will just walk onto your property in pursuit of a suspect and get mad at you if you open a window or door to see what the hell is going on outside your home.
They were at the right house and the bodycam footage shows that they did announce themselves at the front door.
Reportedly the victim was using noise cancelling headphones and was not aware of the police's presence until they broke into his bedroom window.
Notice that swatting is problem almost exclusively to USA. In Europe cops will just check what is going on first before bringing the big guns.
Come to think of it, this is America dammit. Cops should be licensed, bonded and insured, and if their training or records aren't up to standards they don't get covered. We have higher standards for plumbers and pest control than we do police.
If it's one cops fault, charge the cop. If it's multiple cops fault, charge them AND the department. This makes it fiscally prudent to make sure cops in the department are well trained and educated on enforcing the laws and respecting rights.
If they don't want to foot the bills for police misconduct, maybe the taxpayers should elect someone who actually holds the police accountable and doesn't just blindly approve any policing budget and look the other way when the police wrongfully harms someone?
The man is 24 years old.
The studies that found that your brain develops until you're 25 didn't study anyone older than 25.
More recent studies have found that your brain continues developing over your whole life. Different parts improve and decay at different rates at different times in your life.
There is no one age where you're ontologically perfect; it's all spectra all the time.
The public would probably be served by the shooters not carrying a badge anymore, but it doesn't take jail to accomplish that.
A: It’s actual justice, and
B: Otherwise it just becomes another way for insurance companies to make money - in this case by charging swingeing fees that will come out of public coffers.
I believe doctors pay out of pocket (At least the ones that setup their own private practice do), so it would incentivize them to keep costs low so they can pocket the money.
https://cthrupayroll.mass.gov/#!/year/2022/full_time_employe...
Could also just give the death penalty for any attempted or successful swats (though finding the perpetrator might be difficult). And maybe improve legislation and technology related to it.
VPN service providers might be thrilled if using a VPN for gaming became mandated by law. Game developers less so if P2P becomes outlawed.
Nope, because innocent people would then inevitably get framed for it.
Just fix the real problem which is the out-of-control police response
For reference for anyone who hadn’t heard of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_County_Police_Departmen...
Per the article, one of the officers was evidently particularly stupid—he failed police academy once and was disciplined for entering a women's restroom because of crimes he imagined could be happening in there. No one wanted to say "you're too stupid to be making high-stakes judgment calls", so they let him keep trying until he was running into an alleged emergency "with no plan," where he shot an innocent person eight times...and then handcuffed him...
I think actuaries have a way of employing statistical realities that would, in a legislative context, precipitate too much defensiveness and bickering to ever be the basis of a rule. Like I think it was quite a while before neuroscience could fully explain why insurance companies wouldn't cover rental car drivers under 25, instead of 16 or 18.
An insurance company would give departments a reason to say "anyone who has ever failed police academy gets pepper spray and that's it." Departments can decide how to deploy that person.
(Ideally that person wouldn't be a cop at all, but departments will probably always be pushing to hire. This way the argument is between departments and the comparatively highly-informed insurance market, and not voters)
The other thing that would help immensely would be to revisit qualified immunity. Conceptually its perfectly understandable -- failures can happen that are not their fault and they should not be on the hook for that.
But in these times, it's just full immunity. They can do whatever they want and only in the most heinous crimes where they didn't have the opportunity to destroy the evidence they only then do time.
One last thing should be noted: the War on Drugs is designed to create crime and is weaponized against the citizenry. "Dangerous" drugs aren't illegal to protect you, they're there so they can fuck you over.
If police are doing this without a warrant or hard evidence, then that's part of the problem.
The insurance I’m talking about is like malpractice insurance doctors are forced to carry, not health insurance. Individual police and departments pay for it, and insurance pays out (instead of the city) when the cops get sued.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-dev-swatte...
It's horrible what happened to this boy, and the police should be sued/charged, but this is (yet another) reason why you're better off _not_ having a gun in your house. (You're statistically more likely to die from a gun in your own household than someone else's.)
Take the call seriously, but be prepared it's not what you think it is, especially if you see a shocked gamer sitting at their computer monitor with no apparent hostages
The whole point of swatting is to make up a dangerous scenario where the threat to life is so high and immediate that the police are allowed to forgo many procedures and processes that would prevent accidental injury or death.
Feel mad if this is a pattern and the citizens don’t do anything about it.
Just fix the real problem which is the disproportionate police response.
The Thin Blue Line is real. I’ve moved on with my life. Mostly because there’s no way to hold them accountable so why try?
Additionally consider what would have happened if this had been an active shooting and they simply disregarded the phone call.
> Melendez did grab a "legal, registered" gun once he heard the glass shatter, Sethi said, but he ducked behind a partially closed door.
> He believed someone connected to the hackers was breaking in, Sethi added.
A gun that he legally owned and had every right to have on his person as an unknown individual was breaking into his home. If police don't identify themselves they should expect an armed population to meet them with guns in hand. It's their responsibility to assess the situation, understand who the occupants are, and respond appropriately. Smashing a bedroom window with a shovel and then "indiscriminately" firing into it is not a reasonable response.
If you’re going to mention the gun fact, why not provide the whole context?
You must be new to The Internet. :-)
> I fail to see what additional that context that adds
You may not have intended it sound like that, but your comment felt like classic victim blaming, which is all too common in the cases of police incompetence.
Yes, you already mentioned that?
And please, stop blaming the victim.
Surplus arms after World War 2 led to the creation of the gun industry in the US, and thanks to the Second Amendment and the power of the gun lobby, its relationship with the Republican Party, and decades of popular media making them cool, that's a guaranteed untouchable industry.
> Why did they enter the house, instead of waiting for a specially trained team?
What "specially trained team?" That was the specially trained team. They're specially trained to break down doors and shoot people.
Americans get the policing they vote for, and they consistently vote for tacticool cowboys with Punisher tattoos and against... anything less than more of that.
There is probably a relationship between this and the first question.
>Why did the victim have a gun?
Self defense, presumably, as is his Constitutional right.
Weren’t they some local cops? In my country there is a handful of police teams specialised in hostage situations and the like. In case of an "active shooting", local cops would typically establish a perimeter until these guys come and handle the situation (without deaths if possible, although they are sharp shooters).
But if it had been... the result still would have been the same. American police aren't trained to de-escalate, SWAT less so.
I believe that the person you are responding to is arguing wisdom, not legality.