I don't see police accepting this, and it is hard to not feel kinda hopeless about the situation, since it is linked pretty tightly with the 2nd amendment.
An incredibly difficult - but more possible - response is to raise accountability for police officers and their actions. As it stands now, it is virtually impossible for a police officer to face serious repercussions for shooting someone, no matter how bad it was.
Seven years ago, in Detroit, a SWAT officer threw a flash grenade into the wrong apartment and hit a sleeping seven-year old girl with it, then shot and killed her. He was cleared of any wrongdoing and is still a police officer. In the case of Michael Slager murdering Walter Scott, there was video evidence of him shooting an unarmed man who was running away, then planting evidence on him - jurors refused to convict him, and it wasn't until he pled guilty to other charges that he actually had to serve time.
It feels like these things happen on a weekly basis, and judges and juries are perfectly happy to side with police no matter how egregious the shootings are. We, as a society, have basically said the police can do no wrong when it comes to shooting someone, and the consequence is that a lot of innocent people are getting killed. Until that changes, I don't see how the police will change their practices at all.
Disarm most police:
Even in countries where the police doesn’t carry guns, the equivalent of the Swat will always do.
But Swat teams must be aware that Swatting is a thing, and should have no expectation when they break into a house to find fully rational people. It’s not a crime to be drunk at home, or to have taken sleeping pills and to not respond quickly to a bunch of guys shouting orders at you in the middle of the night.
Policing is also becoming a lot safer, despite the rhetoric that things are getting worse and police are increasingly “under attack.”
Having to prove racial discrimination in jury selection is an absurdly high bar, and usually impossible.
As the thread below noted, it's not fair to have historical conditions that produced winners (white men, countries with colonies, etc) and then make things more equal by saying "That's all over" and failing to recognize the results of previous injustice that are still embedded in our lives.
I could have offered other suggestions. I specifically said 'juries that roughly reflect their communities in racial and sexual senses'. I don't feel that's an unreasonably burdensome ask in pursuit of Justice.
http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D13...
Edit: Or just downvote and move on, that says something too.
At this time, this comment has positive karma. At any rate, complaining about down voting distracts from your very good point.
A more fruitful approach might be to try to make the pools more balanced. Getting more community participation in the justice system seems like a very good thing at multiple levels.
I'm all for throwing people in jail if they don't want to serve on a jury.
1) Do you think this is politically feasible? Being seen as "tough on crime" is almost never a bad thing in any kind of election, and what you are proposing feels decidedly the opposite of that. Further, even if you aren't disarming existing officers, they have unions and a fair amount of political clout.
2) Do you think you could find enough people willing to do this job unarmed?
3) I definitely see how this would lead to less escalation in a lot of situations (escalation seems to be the default behavior of police now), and it could prevent some of the high-profile police shootings that have been in the news lately. But it also seems like a high percentage of them (the one in this SWATting situation, Michael Brown, the 6 year old in Bexar County last week, Aiyana Jones) would be handled by armed officers anyway, so that only solves part of the problem, right?
Having said that:
1. Yes, I think it's feasible. Not in DFW or Maricopa County, but test cases in places like Madison and Columbus? Remember: big cities already have people like this --- parking enforcement, traffic direction --- and most cities are facing pension problems due to the assault forces they already have.
2. Clearly we can find the people to do the work. TSA staffs unarmed people at checkpoints designed to catch armed terrorists. Big cities already put unarmed officials in adversarial contact with citizens.
3. It only solves part of the problem. But I'd hope that by gradually relegating assault officers only to those scenarios where escalation was known to be required going in, we'd eliminate the kinds of snap-judgement mistakes police make in routine confrontations that end up with firearms deployed.
I guess the one part I remain a skeptic about is whether or not people are going to be ok with it, much less demand it. It feels like the underlying attitude towards policing is the sticking point - the same attitude that lets police literally get away with murder would also prevent people from demanding unarmed police.
Perhaps I overestimate how pervasive this attitude is, especially in big cities. It is definitely something I'd love to be wrong about.
As to 3, the UK police do escalate sometimes, and I think some of their behavior is disgusting, but at least it results in non-lethal harm (and hopefully disciplinary action) when there are no armed units involved.
Exactly. Expecting police to go to an active shooter / hostage situation unarmed seems rather flawed. That said, I think many other situations police officers are in don’t warrant being armed.
Like many I watched Die Hard and Die Hard 2 over Christmas, and it struck me how deeply the rogue, trigger-happy cop is embedded as a folk hero in American culture. The real life John McClain is George Zimmerman or Mohamed Noor. You guys have got to stop making these movies if you want to make any progress
Then I remember seeing 24 and thinking the entertainment industry wouldn't make that mistake again.
Also note that Hans Gruber is not exactly an example of average citizen and was shown committing several murders (not to mention a row of other felonies including hostage taking) before McClane has even a chance to encounter him. This is exactly the case where police officer is justified to use lethal force - unlike, say, woman in her pajamas calling the police because she heard a strange noise in her backyard. Constantly confusing these two is exactly the reason why no sensible discussion happens in US public debate about it - it's either "police can do no wrong" or "always blame the police, even if the other side is Hans Gruber".
Come on, one of the main characters in the Fast & Furious franchise is a rule-breaking cop. The archetype is alive and well.
It is actually the entire society that is happy to side with police.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/196610/americans-respect-police-...
Consider many people in the US owns gun, maybe it's because of those officers are fear of death (It's very normal) so they tend to act first to save themselves?
As an outsider, I don't think it's a good thing to allow people to own a gun. Because people are different in general, some easy to anger, some more likely to hurt other. It doesn't mean they are naturally bad, they may just need longer time to cold themselves down. And gun is too quick and lethal, ripped than chance from them.
If people need to protect themselves, maybe allowing them to own a taser instead?
All my friends who have guns own them because they hunt, like shooting them as a hobby, and/or like the feeling of power it affords.
Besides the above, how did that recent uprising in Catalonia work out...
Tweet, hold signs, vigils, hashtag whatever.. Without the blood of sacrifice and guns to make it painful, those people were really just pissing into the wind.
When we look back on these incidents they seem horrible, but if you give someone a gun and give them a reason to believe their life is in danger you're probably going to get deadly consequences. It's obvious to us that the cops life wasn't in danger in the instances you mentioned, but people are fallible and they may have brought past trauma or prejudice to the incident. It's probably extremely rare that a cop actually wants to murder someone and is looking for the right opportunity.
That said, if cops had better non-lethal alternatives to guns, we could save lives. Something that is more effective than tasers and works immediately at a distance. The cops objective in a potentially deadly situation should be to immediately incapacitate rather than kill.
"Standard overreaction" by the police is to my mind a bigger problem than the homicidal intent of the fraudulent calls. That kind of overreaction is a force multiplier for anyone with ill intent towards the US, never mind immature, violent and mentally ill people within the US.
I don't disagree with the idea that there is culpable homicidal intent for the prank caller, of course.
Police violence does seem like the "bigger" problem --- not that the difference tells us anything about how we should handle the ostensibly "smaller" problem. But I'll suggest that there's a "big" problem behind SWAT-ing, too: the way technology intermediates between agents and consequences, abstracts away externalities, reinforces the rationalizing techniques our brains use to salve themselves when violating fundamental inhibitions. In some circumstances, we even celebrate these effects, which seem to me far more menacing than a lot of mind-altering drugs.
At this point, I am not sure the people who go all the way to make the phone call to SWAT someone are somewhat detached from the consequences. I would put it on the same scale as loosening the bolts of someone’s ladder.
The intentions and consequences are clear, even if the “accident” might or might not happen and there is some indirection. The very fact they have to choose specific channels to make the call, or spoof caller id makes them explicitely cross the boundary of the “joke”.
Also I believe a sizeable fraction of Us is not beyond wishing someone’s actual death during a long enough period to act at least partially on it. I see it as human nature. But up until now we didn’t have a button in our hand to press it to kill any random person within some probability.
all of which are regulated, unlike calls to SWAT..
In what sense is a call to SWAT regulated?
Guns, cars explosives etc are things, and it is possible to regulate their possession wrt individuals that may misuse them.
A call to the police is a service, and is not the same kind of thing since anyone might witness a crime and need to call the police, even unreliable individuals; whereas few people need explosives (esp without a demonstrable need or credentials), and depriving an unreliable individual of e.g guns or a car, is unlikely to be as harmful to third-parties as limiting access to the services of the police.
The gang mentality that gets trained into police is problematic. They are told they are "warriors", they're told to use lethal force quickly, they're told that the sex they'll have after killing a human being will be the "best sex of their lives". It's sick:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/09/30/...
You've conflated employing fraud with direct use of force.
Fortunately, the law draws a fine line between the two. You must prove that swatting somebody presents the same probability of death as detonating a pipe bomb. The truth is there is far more successful SWAT operations that doesn't result in death of innocent lives. Out of the SWAT pranks, only a few results in death. Therefore, it does not pose the same direct harm and high probability of death that a pipe bomb would.
He's conflating employing fraud to harm others with direct use of force. Put another way, should it matter whether you caused harm (and I'm assuming that means physical harm for this argument) using fraud or whether you paid someone to inflict it?
I think perhaps you interpreted the harm from fraud he was referring to as financial harm, but this specific issue is all about fraud that caused bodily harm.
I think it does matter, for the simple reason that people who are willing to commit violence, up close, with their own hands, have a very different psychology than people who are willing to do harm but still (presumably) have the normal human instincts that make them not want to do it personally.
It's one thing to kill; it's quite another thing to be willing to (or take pleasure in) literally get your hands bloody. The latter is the mark of an dangerous psychopath.
The manner in which a crime is committed affects all stages of the legal process, including sentencing, jury deliberation, and those considerations will certainly also affect how a prosecutor decides to charge someone.
If you're saying that someone hiring a hitman has the exact same probability distribution of getting charged (let's say, given airtight evidence in both cases) compared to someone who pulls the trigger, that seems like a very strong and surprising claim.
If you're saying that 'in theory' both crimes would rate a certain type of murder charge, that sounds reasonable. Even then though, the prosecutor would certainly be able to tack on other charges (e.g. assault with a deadly weapon) that tangibly affect the outcome, from plea bargaining onwards.
And that seems correct? One of the goals of the criminal justice system is to prevent future crime, so to the extent that the manner a crime is committed reveals information about the future threat level of a criminal, society (and by extension, the legal system) should take that into account.
> The cops didn't shoot soon as he opened the door. They commanded Andrew Finch to put his hands in the air, he did then put his hands down. They tell him to put his hands up again. Then he drops his hands by his side again. The cop that shot him thought he was going for a gun. Andrew Finch wasn't following directions of the police and the officer made a mistake and Andrew died, but he would be alive today if wasn't for those two morons on the internet that started the whole thing. The Cops legit thought a dangerous situation was happening and I believe they had good intentions. The amount of time to react to someone pulling a gun and killing you is milliseconds. It's bad that they shot him but the weight of all this falls on the people the winded up the machine and sent it to an innocent family.
If it was indeed homocide, the prosecutor needs to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the guy who called SWAT would be able to predict the course of events. The fact that he swatted others before and walked away will point to the fact that this was indeed a prank gone horribly wrong.
I'm just looking at the facts and the more they come out, I get that you are emotional but I'm not defending the guy, but that it's a stretch to say the person swatting was trying to get him killed, rather than say using pipe bombs or hiring hitman which show intent to kill.
It's clear there was no malice aforethought here which you repeatedly claimed without any examples or arguments to back it up.
I'm sorry but this is just how the law works in America or any developed country anyways. We can't have populism and mob mentality run the courts because they are not based on logic, evidence and impossible to separate bias from the truth. Am I happy that these guys will probably walk away? Absolutely not, but I am speaking from a place of clarity and reasoning, not turning to angry blood lust.
In the case of SWATting, the fraud is obviously meant to jeopardize the liberty of the targeted subject, and the jeopardy of their life at the same time is highly predictable, even that doesn't let the police officers off the hook.
How would "being a lot more sure" help here? If you mean the police should verify information more thoroughly before responding, then that comes at a direct tradeoff in response times. If instead you mean police should respond swiftly but not bring out the SWAT teams without more verification, then that could pose a (different kind of) safety issue for responders and potential hostages.
The issue here is more one of militarized police tactics. When you're trained to respond to any threat, any sudden move, with overwhelming deadly force, then deadly outcomes will happen.
To begin, talk of swatting someone ought not be sanctioned on these communication channels. Mod down the comments or suspend their privileges/account.
We agree, use of force is far to casual in the US, especially with the reduced rate of violent crimes.
In the time being, we could also start dealing with the false positives directly. For example, while SWAT is gearing up, the operator could ask who is calling and how they learned of the issue. Without that information, the odds of a false report go up and the trigger bias should be going down.
How exactly would that help? Swatting is by definition fraudulent callers claiming to have firsthand knowledge of an issue -- in this case, he pretended to be a hostage taker.[1]
Better hoax detection training is a fine idea but swatters are determined adversaries. It's going to take more than just asking a couple basic questions. And since real emergencies are often signaled by imperfect and limited inbound information, there is only so much that can be done to filter out false positives. I agree with Krebs that this is primarily a matter of police use-of-force training and stronger action against swatters.[2]
[1] 911 recording starts at 10 minutes: https://www.pscp.tv/LJSNicholeManna/1lPKqponlzQxb?t=9m10s
[2] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/12/kansas-man-killed-in-swa...
I think you're getting close to someone people don't like to talk about; we (as a society) seem to value the lives of police officers far higher than we value the lives of innocent "civilians". This seems entirely backwards to me - I'd strongly prefer that police officers effectively never fire first. Let the SWAT teams be very highly armoured and lightly (or non-lethally) armed.
And are they actually taking great personal risk? Police killed a bit under 1000 people in the US in 2016 and had around 150 officers die (with lots of this vehicle related). Seems like it's riskier for people interacting with cops than the cops themselves.
It's not applicable to what the swat has to deal with: hostage situations, armed fights, bombings, etc... they can't hold on the phone forever and do nothing.
The sanctity of saving innocent lives from state abuses is a hard fought lesson of history that we should not take lightly. Any time the state abuses this there should be serious consequences. Not a civil lawsuit paid out by taxpayer money.
That's a bit extreme.
First, because illegitimate aggression isn't just accepted by quite a lot of people, there is vocal debate and public outcry over it. Which is good.
Second, confirmation bias may be amplifying your fears here. According to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...), there were about 1100 people killed by police in 2016, and almost 1200 in 2015. And some portion of those were likely justifiable (and maybe even saved lives).
To get killed by police is not quite as unlucky as getting struck by lightning, but the odds are about 1/295,000 for the former.
It's hard to overstate how completely alone the United States stands when the stats are compacted: [0]
Australia had 94 fatal police shootings between 1992 and 2011. The U.S. had 97 in March of 2015.
England and Wales had 55 fatal police shootings in the last 24 years. The U.S. had 59 in the first 24 days of 2015.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
Illegitimate violence from the state (the police) is actually common enough that I have seen it many times in my life; and I am a White, law-abiding person who makes a point to stay out of trouble.
I feel extremely safe and have always had friendly encounters with police in both Europe and East Asia.
Note the official stats don't include scenarios such as the ones around Gary Webb or Ian Murdock. We won't ever know what really happened, but they're extremely suspicious.
How we calibrate our personal fears and existential anxieties in light of all these bad things, is a different matter.
The context of a World War - even more so than that of any other war - makes it much easier for any government to do what it likes. Which most often means to kill lots and lots of people.
What I argue is that such context is very different from a time of peace. It's not really fair to include WW2 atrocities when talking about the number of deaths caused by guns in a peace-time.
The GP tried to do exactly that, which I disagree with in itself, and moreover forgot to include any other "government [that] murdered millions of unarmed civilians" in their argument. I don't have a strong opinion on whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a good or bad idea, I just pointed out that, in that single operation, the US government effectively "murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians". Again, that's nothing surprising, nuclear weapons are designed to do just that.
So, again, it was war. People die in wars. That's what the wars are for, basically. Now, since then, we're at peace (here in Europe, at least). The number (and rate) of deaths caused by guns during this peaceful time is overwhelmingly higher in the US than in Germany. That's it, I don't mean anything else, just that this is a fact and that mentioning Auschwitz is not a valid counter-argument for this.
Germany also had economic warfare waged against them and this should not even be controversial--even mainstream "modern-day priests" like the hugely influential economist Keynes had said this.
That said the Japanese empire was an evil one, like most empires, but when the bombs were dropped on civilians the war was already over--that is why Eisenhower said "there was no reason to use those things."
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-an...
Police violence is an issue but way overblown for most people -- violence from other citizens far outweighs the police risk.
Compare to third world countries where you can easily be murdered in broad daylight surrounded by people, over a few hundred bucks, and the murderers face very little chance of being caught, let alone convicted.
Of course the best solution is to move to a country with great demographics equalling no crime or police violence, but those are becoming hard to find.
1: Turns out if you report (online with no followup) one of your licence plates as having fallen off your $300 car, cops might do a "felony takedown" on you, your 100 lbs wife, and 1 year old daughter. This apparently includes aiming handguns at your head while giving instructions like "lift your shirt up from the top".
Canada, The UK, Australia, New Zealand - those are the english speaking ones that meet your criteria. After that, most countries in the EU, Nordic countries, most countries in Asia would also be considered to have less crime and police violence than the US, while having comparable or superior social services and demographics (most but not all, countries in Asia - Duterte isn't making any friends recently).
Wait, what? That's the kind of statement that just begs for a followup. Did they say what they thought was going on to justify that response?
I got new plates soon after that, I never found out what happened to mine.
But if so you would think the criminals would learn to swap plates instead, as who looks at their plates that closely?
Telling the police someone has murdered several people and is armed and has taken hostages is likely to result in SWAT responding with potentially deadly force, because that's what they're supposed to do.
That's not at all equivalent to a proof that "calling the police on someone is likely to result in them getting killed."
I understand the anti-police contingent in these threads tends to be strong, and the feeling is often justifiable, but let's not pretend what happened here is a typical police response, even in the US.
I'm British and the words you just wrote sound insane to me.
The key point here is that the threshold for the use of lethal force by the state should be much, much higher than merely an anonymous call. If that makes me "anti-police" then I'm very happy not to live in your great nation.
That's what makes this crime so evil: the people doing it are deliberately trying to put the police in the worst possible scenario. Police need more training and better procedures and they are certainly abusive, but it's this exact situation --- when it's really occurring, and isn't just some troll --- that drives most of those abuses.
Especially if the call is anonymous with few concrete details -- the police should consider why does this caller know the info they know? Why is the call anonymous or otherwise untraceable?
How many times have lives been saved by SWAT entering after a call like this vs an innocent person getting injured or killed? How many anonymous, untraceable calls to 911 have even turned out to be legitimate?
Of course "going in" does not mean shooting indiscriminately.
Apart from call tracing, I'd expect simple things like whether the caller stays on the line and cooperates with the dispatcher (vs hanging up immediately) to be quite predictive.
Actually going inside seems like it should be the last resort
I don't know how often hostage scenarios as extreme as you describe actually occur in the USA, but I read about instances of 'swatting' constantly. Given the false-positive rate of such reports, it's no surprise that sending military-style squads to 'shoot on sight' ends in tragedy again and again.
Often. Mostly domestic violence barricading scenarios, which are usually handled by front-line officers with sidearms and negotiation. SWAT deployment is usually discretionary at such a scene, predicated on an active shooter, and anticipates forced entry. In an active shooter scenario, front-line officers will typically defer to SWAT to force entry, given the risk.
But yes, it does happen. A lot of domestic violence ends badly.
I'm no fan of wife-beaters, but somehow every other nation on earth has figured out less violent ways of dealing with them. Yes, in many cases "the way" is to simply accept that wives will get beaten. Admitting this is no more an acceptance of police violence than admitting that not all nations are governed with perfect justice would be an acceptance of all of our damned wars. This is a "won't somebody please think of the children?!" level of argument.
People can obviously do plenty of damage beating each-other with objects, slashing with kitchen knives, or whatever, but guns seem to lead especially often to escalation from shoving to instant death.
When police show up, if someone has a gun everything is a lot more difficult/dangerous.
Collect some evidence? Absolutely.
I get the point about guns being important to protect against a fascist government, but then I literally see a p protest march by Nazis armed with assault rifles...
So should we take away rights so the government feels less threatened? That seems like the wrong reason.
"The government" - that's supposed to be the way we organize ourselves and stand up together to above things we believe in as a nation. While that's not always working well talking about it as if its given that it's a malevolent, suppressive regime is only going to make things worse. The US finally needs to do its wild West mentality and arrive on the 21st century with the rest of the civilized world.
Asking the most armed government in the world to eliminate gun violence, by using their guns?
The cost:benefit of the second amendment is way out of proportion, IMO.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/06/antifa-movement-...
I don't actually disagree with you. The use of lethal force was the mistake here, but the presence of force was justifiable. The problem is how easily one seems to lead to the other. What should have happened is the police realizing their force was unnecessary and then standing down.
Also, if someone were to call in, say, a terrorist threat or a bomb threat in Britain, someone would show up with guns there as well. You know, because Britain also has their equivalent to SWAT teams. With guns. That they shoot people with.
Not that 'shot dead from across the street as soon as his hand twitched' is justifiable.
[0]http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article192111974.html
“A male came to the front door,” Livingston said. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.”
Perhaps it previously had some other claim about the circumstances, but if so it has since been revised to remove it.
"They're trained to properly identify targets before shooting, knowing that they will be required to justify their actions in court."
Obviously, they neither properly identified their target nor did they have to justify their actions in court.
I think the balance is about right and nothing like the USA. More importantly the jury of peers, in the coroners court, thought the Met Police failed on Health and Safety grounds but not the individual shooters.
The big difference is, there are fewer opportunities for armed police to screw this up. There are far fewer of them (heavily armed police are the exception, rather than the default) and they are not nearly needed as often (the citizenry is not as heavily armed). The policy that largely prevents the mistakes is what really helps, rather than having better armed police or better post-cockup inquiries (both of which, to me, seem fairly debatable).
We're not going to get anywhere with such silly caricatures, and they are dangerous in themselves -- just ask Dallas. May be something to keep in mind while we're on the subject of indirect culpability.
I'm not sure where you thought I was being nationalistic. I stated my nationality to make the context clearer. My country is an odious cesspool in many ways. We're just lucky not to have a fully militarised police force.
The *use* of lethal force was the mistake here, but the *presence* of force was justifiable.
That isn't the problem (at least primarily). Claiming that there is a serious hostage situation with the possibility of serious violence (perhaps even a potential murder) seriously escalates the risk and hostility of the situation. I didn't say potential hostility; the claim itself directly increases the perceived threat level of the situation, even if it isn't credible. A team of people responding en masse with weapons[1] at the ready further escalates the tension of the situation and the hostility of the room, even if their weapons are never used.
The end result is a very tense situation with everyone - on all sides - ready to jump at anything that might be a threat. Fortunately there is at least some evidence[2] that in "most" swattings, cooler heads eventually prevail and nobody gets shot. However, evaluating potential threats is always going to use the faster but less accurate "System 1"[3][4]. The higher the tension level, the greater chance that someone's mind will make a serious mistake, which can easily result in a cascade of everyone recursively responding in ways that probably compound the mistake, which is when people tend to get shot/stabbed/beaten/whatever.
The solution is that there needs to respond to situations that are less likely to escalate the situation to greater levels of hostility. Once it turns into a "charlie foxtrot"[5], it's too late. However, if a streamer's prior notification to the police that, should any threat be called in regarding their address, if the police pound on the door, they can expect the stream to walk outside peacefully to talk, maybe the dangerous escalation where they breaking down the door and pointing guns at everyone can be avoided. They can always fall back to that strategy if nobody comes out to talk.
edit: added [2]'s missing footnote and URL
[1] of any type - a bunch of people storming a room armed only with batons is still an escalation of violence.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiW-BVPCbZk
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_sy...
Should this not be responded to with lethal force available? You're going to get a lot more people killed that way. Obviously the error rate should be reduced as much as possible, but a naive approach of ignoring calls without a lot of validation would be a disaster.
I imagine it would be really easy to fake some verification anyways, and coordinate a SWAT with two callers.
The way your police acts is retarded. No other country would respond with such backwards way to a simple single call.
calling this homicide
OTOH, some codes specifically address false reports of emergencies producing death, avoiding any need to address indirect homicide.
There's a pretty good description of how that works here - http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1320
This case, a repeated offender (he did many calls like that) who made highly specific buggy claims (armed hostage taking with already dead hostages) with the intend to arm or kill the target (see his message) and a trace of everything (see twitter messages and recordings).
It's a perfect school case. It makes perfect sense to charge him for murder. Everything is the worst it could possibly be with the worst possibly aggravating circumstances.
Can't wait to see the proceedings. Won't be surprised if they make an example out of him.
Justified police shootings are not homicide by any definition.
Yes, they are; they are pretty much the textbook example of justifiable homicide.
They aren't criminal homicides, but not all homicides are criminal.
> the deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another; murder.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homicide https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/homicide http://www.dictionary.com/browse/homicide
from definitions.uslegal.com
If you're just charging the officer and not the entire swat squad, then you're admitting that that officer stepped out of line of what the swat call should have done. In that case, there's no homicide case against the caller.
In this case, ONLY the officer should be charged with homicide.
> the deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another; murder.
Two people can be equally and severally responsible for something.
But what about the Muhammad cartoonists in Europe? Drawing a caricature of Muhammad is not a crime in Europe, however it will result in angry reactions in the Muslim world, and people (often Christians) getting killed there. The cartoonists know that but proceed nevertheless. Are they in some way responsible for those killings? I’d argue not but many disagreed then. But drawing the line of where responsibility stops being shared is non trivial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5wjHeUS1ZE
A CoD player who isn't mentally impaired or something specifically sending in a SWAT team on a target who is shot by the team should be charged first degree at the start. Similarly for anyone else that clearly knew what a SWAT team does from games, movies, or other media. Prosecution might act mercifully from there depending on the circumstances. They better know they can do first-degree, though, with enough locked up to hopefully be a deterrent.
I do fully agree about the person who made the call also being culpable, but it's dangerous to buy into the idea that cops don't have any moral agency when they're on a call.
If you're going to send a group of people armed with guns into a harmless but tense situation there's at least a chance that something really bad is going to happen.
And for sure it shouldn't be like that, where cops can and will shoot you given any justification. But "swatting" isn't a funny prank at all and it's sickening that it's even a thing.
The question is why are American cops so much more likely to find themselves in these situations?
I think first and foremost Americans are just a more wild and criminal people. Our murder rate is much higher in general. So there are going to be many more situations that really do justify the use of force. You can't change this easily.
But the police take the real threat and hype it up. American cops do have to fear someone shooting them. But the police take that fear and train as if they are going to be under fire at any moment.
I've seen a police training simulator made by a major weapons company. The simulator had a scenario where the office spoke to a homeless man with his hand in a bag. You were supposed to make him show his hands. At the end the man points the bag at the office and shoots a gun hidden in the bag. It's a ridiculous scenario and it is designed to teach the office to fire his weapon because someone MIGHT have a weapon.
The cops are basically taught to shoot first and ask questions later.
The public isn't outraged because most of the people who get killed where already playing with fire. It is taking the publicizing of these instances were innocent people die to get people to notice.
The reason that cops are so nasty in the us is because there are so many guns. It's a different environment than other Western countries, and calls for different police tactics.
Unless guns are removed from the equation somebody is going to die. Either use a heavy handed police force, and civilians will die, or use a police force with a lighter touch and police will die.
1. use expendable police materiel to scout out the situation of a dispatch in advance of sending in any actual police bodies (e.g. police drones with fancy optics.)
2. send people in heavily armored rather than heavily armed. If you can make your SWAT team immune to bullets (such as by, say, encasing them in an Armoured Personnel Carrier), then they're not going to be feeling threatened and shooting anyone.
#1 is pretty universally useful. You can figure out who has guns and who doesn't.
#2 is more situational, because our best solution for heavy armor right now—APCs—have no good way of entering your tenth-floor apartment. This is why I'm constantly checking up on the progress of military robots and powered armor: the more invincible you can make something, the less it needs to actually kill anybody to do its job. The ideal here is a combination of robot-police and human-in-exosuit police that don't even need guns, because nothing they are sent to deal with is ever really that dangerous to them.
It's way easier to figure out ways to pierce armor than it is to develop it. Green-tipped ammunition is more than good enough to pierce all common and easily-worn body armor today.
Besides, if you send people in heavily armored, they are going to feel threatened by nature and will be more trigger happy.
The motorcyclist has a gun in his pocket, and shoots the cop without warning.
How will your proposed solutions are going to do anything in that situation?
Sorry to rant, but this attitude of an amateur thinking they know better than all the professionals who have been doing their job for many years, and can propose quick fixes that will solve everything, is ridiculous.
Is being a cop scary? Hell yeah and I feel bad for those folks, but if you don't want to constantly be in fear of your life, get another job.
Put cops who murder innocent civilians in jail. End of story. This shouldn't even be a debate in the U.S.
EDIT: Since I had the goal posts moved on me, I want to make it explicitly clear that a cop should be allowed to kill in self-defense, just like any other lawful citizen.
Consider two civilians. If A shoots at B, and B shot back and killed A, should B go to jail for murder?
Now just because B happens to be a cop, does he lose all his rights?
You've just created a pure strawman. Cops should never lose their rights! I am not making such an argument, and I don't see how you got there from my points. I would never argue such a claim.
The cases I'm talking about are not self-defense. They are like the story above. If A murders B, and A is a cop, then A should go to jail regardless of the fear A had in that situation. But this is not what happens in the United States. Cops don't go to jail for shooting perfectly innocent people because the cop can claim they were afraid for their life and thought that B had a gun.
If I'm a civilian, that defense doesn't fly. But if you're a cop, then it does work. That is a flaw in our justice system that needs to be corrected because a perfectly innocent man can be killed by the state and no repercussions are felt.
The state should never be able to kill an innocent man. If they are shooting at you, they aren't innocent. But if you think they have a gun (especially in an open-carry state like Kansas or Texas) then they are innocent and should not be killed.
EDIT: I am saddened by the downvotes. Does the state have the right to kill innocent people if those people own a gun? Doesn't the second amendment protect against this? I simply do not see the legitimate argument for allowing such behavior. This just seems like rabid tribalism for police.
If you're talking a cop straight-up murdering someone, and it getting covered up, then, of course, that's wrong.
I think there is a lot of gray area between these two scenarios, however. I also think if there was a ban on guns that would solve most of it.
My point was that your video seemed out of place since the actual issue is that cops in the U.S. are held to a different standard for murder. If cops were held to the same standard, then they could be held accountable for their crimes and some of the public outrage would be alleviated.
If (for the sake of argument) the amount of guns in this country were significantly decreased via a ban and the police still held to a different standard, police would still be able to kill an innocent person out of fear for their life. Racial biases could also cause a cop to be more fearful in a situation and still kill an innocent person without consequence.
I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).
That video was part of a specific response refuting the idea that if the cops just used drones and body armor, there wouldn't be a problem anymore. I did in no way intend to imply it was a counterpoint to the main story. I don't know why it's being perceived in that way.
> I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).
Yes, but that runs into the trade-off I was talking about. Either you have a heavy handed, "shoot first, ask questions later" style police force, or one with a lighter touch. In the first scenario, more civilians are killed. In the second, more cops.
Only by banning guns can you reduce casualties on both sides.
If you just want a gun for self defense or murder, they are cheap. Buy a Hi-Point or a Ruger LCP for $175 and a box of 50 9mm and now you can kill more people than you'd ever have a reason to.
Do different us states invoke SWAT teams with different rates, so it's known how many policeman are hurt?
Unless you can remove the guns from criminals, the cops will need guns.
It doesn't seem like the choice for most American cities is between armed cops and unarmed cops. It's between armed cops and no cops. Why would anyone sign up and expose themselves to that level of risk?
In 2015:
Killings by officers in US: 1140 Killings by officers in England: 3
Deaths of police by shootings in US: 41 Deaths of police by shootings in England: 0 (about 1 every other year)
Population of England: 54 million Population of USA: 325 million
England has 7% of the deaths per capita compared to the USA. I couldn't find data on Germany, but I suspect it's similar.
In general, I think the idea of having people being able to defend themselves against the government is a good idea, and people having the right to have guns was a way to achieve that. But with the amount of power the government has nowadays, I don't think it's a justification anymore.
References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc... https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
Overall, in Central Europe the differences in fatal police action per capita is essentially noise.
Just because there's a temporary lull doesn't mean that the problem has gone away permanently, yo.
Once your country has been around for a bit longer, you will also have a long history with plenty of atrocities to point back at. How many native Americans were killed during the "colonization" of the American continent? Or do these not count because they hadn't been US citizens back then?
With the sole exception of the U.K., our government has been around longer than every other representative democracy on the face of the earth. Note that France is on its fifth attempt at a republic. We won't even mention Germany here.
> Or do these not count because they hadn't been US citizens back then?
They were mostly killed by European colonists operating under European rules, just like the atrocities that the European governments perpetrated on every other continent of the world.
I was talking about countries, not governments, these two are not the same, even tho the parent comment would like to pretend they are.
In that regard, it's still very dishonest to compare Europe, with its often centuries-old animosities between countries in a very small space, to the short history of the USA being a thing, in which it had mostly only had to deal with Mexico and Cannada in terms of "neighbor conflicts".
> They were mostly killed by European colonists operating under European rules
That's even more dishonest, it's not like all that changed and native Americans were recognized as such, as soon as the US got founded, and everything was perfect after that.
The US has the luxury of being rather isolated, thus the vast majority of conflicts can easily be externalized, usually to a completely different continent, with barely any real consequences for the US population. It's for that very same reason that the US been involved in some kind of "war" [0] pretty much constantly in its 200+ years of existence.
It's for exactly that reason that so many US Americans have been a-okay with these armed conflicts, as the vast majority of them never hit close to home. No US American alive today does know what it's like to have militarized conflict in, or at, their countries borders. Which probably also explains, in part, the massive overreaction to 9/11.
Now you can argue not all of them are "real wars" but rather "interventions" or "anti-terror missions" or whatnot, but let's be real here: That's simply schematics to keep on selling this state of affairs to a US population which is starting to be pretty fed up with sending their kids overseas to die for often very questionable reasons.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
So what's the point of still letting citizens keep them?
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/polizist-erschiesst-mann-e...
https://www.innsalzach24.de/innsalzach/region-burghausen/bur...
Don't run away from German cops, they can legally shoot you!
My German isn’t very good so there’s a good chance I might be missing something.
It doesn't matter whether they care about the law or not, it's about making it harder for them to get a gun regardless, and being able to confiscate them if we catch them. It worked in Australia.
And it didn't work in Mexico, Honduras, or Nicaragua, all of which have more in common with the United States than Australia does, and all of which have a) strict gun control laws and b) breathtakingly high murder rates.
...The things some people say to justify guns...
However gun culture and the prevalence of gun manufacturers in the US may make it practically impossible in the near term, but it definitely is possible.
Guns are not the issue. The issue is badly trained people and the idiotic mentality.
"Whether you can say we're 20 per cent better off, 80 per cent better off, is subject to debate... But the bottom line is, if [the reforms] had the effect of reducing the number of guns that are available to Australians, it is strongly correlated with the gun homicide and suicide deaths on the wane."
"Data from the Australian Institute of Criminology shows the rate of homicide victims dying from a gunshot wound has dropped since the reforms came into force, but not consistently in every year."
"ABS data indicates the rate of assault by firearm causing death has also declined since the reforms, but not in every year."
The only credible argument against gun reform that article gives is that correlation doesn't imply causation, which is of course true. However, that's not an argument against the common sense position that gun reform decreases gun deaths, but an argument against this specific type of study (which OP didn't mention at all).
In this case there’s a clear case of premeditation and targeting of an individual, which is genuinely different from the depraved heart statute. At the same time however, it’s going to be hard to prove intent without relying on something like the statute in question. This really does feel more like murder one, albeit with a very unreliable weapon.
TWO things went wrong here. Not one. The criminal who made the fake call was to blame and the police officer who shot an innocent and unarmed occupant is also to blame.
There will be always crazy pranksters. We have laws to prosecute them but they can be out of country, so we really cannot fix that.
But we can fix the second thing that went wrong. We can ensure that police is trained not to kill wrong person in hostage situations (i.e., it could be that there was some hostage situation but person going out was the actual hostage).
In the history of media, there have always been a small fraction of maladjusted people who cannot distinguish the fantasy of the medium from reality. ( Here's an example from 1774. Search for "suicides" http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Storm_and_Stress ) These instances are rare, in the same way that instances of "swatting" are rare. There are multiple reports of such accounts, the damage each such instance produces is outsized for the planning and effort to pull it off, and the details are quite lurid. However, as a fraction of the general populace, the affected population is tiny.
I say this as someone who counts himself in the gamer camp. I have seen firsthand, adults who are gamers transfer the morality they learned in their online community -- where the consequences are only in the context of games -- to the running of real world organizations. People can be treated as fungible/disposable. Truth and morality doesn't matter -- if the system allows it, then it's all fair game. This is quite different from the false and long debunked notion that the fantasy violence in media can lead to real violence -- precisely because of the demarcation between fantasy game-world objects and real people and the real world. When you shoot a soldier in-game, people know full well it's not something real that just happened, and the object of such treatment is objectively not real. When someone "kills" a prostitute in a Grand Theft Auto game, there is literally no victim. However, when someone sh#t-talks another player, the human mind on the other end is quite real, and the emotional impact is intended to be every bit as real as if the event happened in person. The game is fantasy, but your fellow players are real human beings, and the moral experience gained through the interaction between fellow human beings is also real. So too, the moral experience gained through the running of an online organization of real human beings is also real.
It's widely acknowledged all over the internet, that the reality of the humanity of people on the other end of communication is somehow often forgotten. The real emotional toxicity of such behavior is widely acknowledged in the gaming community and over the general internet as well. These things aren't in question. The things that are in question are 1) what it means and 2) what we should do about it. Without question, the toxicity of online interactions is due to an online disconnect between communications and consequences. It is a failure of the mechanisms which regulate the social animal Homo sapiens. There are entire libraries of novels and nonfiction books about how the breakdown of aspects of the social fabric reduce human interactions to might-makes-right brutality. Perhaps it's progress that all of human nastiness moves onto the digital realm and away from the world of flesh and atoms. Certainly, the immorality and nastiness of even attempts to regulate/counter the general toxicity seem to devolve down to the same level as the general toxicity itself. Perhaps the existence of walled gardens is akin to the building of town walls and the rise of feudal lords. People in the real-world 1st world adhere to the rule of law and generally live by principles. People in the virtual 0th and 1st worlds are still in a feudal world of rule by force and of personal/tribal loyalties taking the place of principle. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the nascent moralism of today's online world often resembles medieval moralism in its acerbic irrationality and absolutism.
A couple years back, some vulnerability researcher friends found a series of horrible security flaws in a very popular pacemaker brand. Does anyone here really doubt whether, if fully weaponized exploit scripts for those flaws made it to the wrong IRC channel, some depraved asshole would kill a stranger for "lulz"? I don't. Technology is amplifying something truly bad inside of us. Maybe it's worse than we think; see: the Fermi Paradox.
I think you probably underestimate how common SWAT-ing is. I have relatives with no unusual connections to the grimier communities on the Internet who have been SWAT-ed after disputes in video games.
It's easy to underestimate unless you've listened to it happen tens of times in a single hour.
The calls take two minutes or less, individuals have literally been competing on how many they could do within a single day.
"I'm at 725 5th Ave, I've shot a bunch of people and will shoot any police that come" Takes only seconds to say and would almost guarantee a heavily armed police response.
There must be thousands, possibly over ten thousand of these incidents every year.
It's a shame we can't have any reliable statistics based insight into exactly how often it happens because of the widespread policy amongst US police departments of not collecting and/or publicizing such data. The Obama DOJ was attempting to correct this trend (in a collaborative manner, which was the only available avenue) with many such departments, but cancelling that policy initiative was literally Jeff Sessions's first policy action as AG.
Me too. I often wonder how much worse the results of a modern-day Milgram experiment might be.
This is one of those things that keeps me up at night. I've instructed my wife and children that if police ever come banging on the door, get on the floor, face away from any entry points, call 911 immediately and negotiate compliance over the phone.
I'm with you until that part. For one thing, many SWATings result in no-knock entries - even if you're prostate and facing away, holding and manipulating a phone, and/or continuing to talk through a phone instead of responding to the verbal commands of the assault officers are both Bad Ideas imo.
In any case, my advice does not preclude obeying orders if an officer is pointing an MP5 at you and telling you to put your hands on your head-- it's too late then, so just comply and hope for the best.
Perhaps I need to look into that more. However, also note that not all instances of SWAT-ing are equal. How often do they result in fatalities? I'm sure that Sturm und Drang novel readings resulted in quite a few more family arguments and morose journal entries than resulted in suicides. Maybe I should rephrase that to fatal SWAT-ings.
No disagreement here.
This seems to be the first publicized incident. Pets have had worse luck in the past though.
I think this applies to that theory only if we assume an evolution of strong small group tribal mentality of species in all cases. For all we know, that could be a requirement for intelligent high-technology using life, but there's not a lot of facts about that to my knowledge.
> Perhaps the existence of walled gardens is akin to the building of town walls and the rise of feudal lords.
> People in the virtual 0th and 1st worlds are still in a feudal world of rule by force and of personal/tribal loyalties taking the place of principle.
I think those are the money quotes right there. It's important to remember that there are many people that can remember life before the internet, and had to learn as they went, and those are the people that the younger ones that grew up with the internet saw as elders and the people who set norms. It will probably be a few generations until we get to a normal cyclical situation where the pendulum swings back and forth between online behavior, privacy, etc. We're not even close to knowing where there center/average is on these issues yet.
As someone who has been using the internet since before the existence of the World Wide Web, the younger generations who came along happily ignored many of the preexisting norms and groupthinked/made up their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
What's more, this sort of thing happened again and again in smaller, less global contexts. Programming is termed "half a field" by Alan Kay because it forgets its own history. There is a tremendous tendency for human society online to re-invent its own body of knowledge whole cloth, ignoring what has come before in a way that further propagates ignorance.
Well, nothing happened in a vacuum. It may have appeared they ignored it, but some behavior may have been specifically in rebellion of existing norms.
It's chaos currently, but I think we'll be able to identify trends in future decades.
> What's more, this sort of thing happened again and again in smaller, less global contexts. Programming is termed "half a field" by Alan Kay because it forgets its own history. There is a tremendous tendency for human society online to re-invent its own body of knowledge whole cloth, ignoring what has come before in a way that further propagates ignorance.
I think there are explanations for this. The main one being that Computer Science is much too large a field for areas people are expected to use it later. It's like not having Engineering as a Major, much less the subcategories such as Mechanical, Civil and Aeronautical engineering, and just expecting people to have a Physics or Mathematics degree.
Of course that results in a lot of people reinventing the wheel, because so much of what you actually were exposed to relevant to what you're doing comes from employees who happened to have interests in that area or your own research of whatever material you can find, of which it's all pretty new (relative to most other fields), and a lot of it may have been kept as trade secrets (or seen limited exposure which is why it's hard to find).
Of course this is all exacerbated by ungodly amounts of money being thrown at these people to develop something quick and get it out and iterate on it before someone else can.
Computer Science isn't half a field, it's the spoiled child of the sciences, where money smooths away all the problems and mistakes are never learned from. That doesn't paint a good picture for the future (and now I'm depressed, but at least feel I have some job security :/)
From the wiki page you linked:
>defendants commit an act even though they know their act runs an unusually high risk of causing death or serious bodily harm to a person.
That definition could apply to manufacturers and vendors of firearms and weapons.
Police (and soldiers) operate on unreliable information all the time. They should be held equally responsible. I've heard plenty of veterans deployed in actual warzones show more consideration for human life. Whoever makes the call to pull the trigger needs to accept the consequences. Being a police officer is extremely difficult and dangerous, and is compensated accordingly.
Of course, the police are not here to keep you safe but to ensure society keeps functioning for those who control their payroll. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
Worth a read, the excellent book: The Rise of the Warrior Cop, that goes at length to explain why we have reached this point and how bad it gets.
Here's an article from the author as well: https://www.wsj.com/articles/rise-of-the-warrior-cop-1375908...
From the video seen online, it appears that the victim made a sudden movement when blinded by the lights after being confronted by SWAT. I think it was too trigger happy, but we have the benefit of hindsight. I feel terrible for the victim.
Agreed. People with agendas seem to try to twist this into an either-or situation. But both the "swatter" and the cops who shot are in the wrong here.
> and that calling in a false report with the hope that it will provoke an armed response is effectively an attempt at homicide.
Since the guy was killed, I'd say it was homicide rather than attempted homicide. But I think both the swatter and the cops should be tried for homicide and both should be found guilty or neither should.
I disagree. I am not a US citizen but where I live there are two things to take into account before qualifying a crime: the consequences and the intent.
I am pretty sure US laws have something like that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law)
>> Depraved-heart murder is the form of murder that establishes that the willful doing of a dangerous and reckless act with wanton indifference to the consequences and perils involved, is just as blameworthy, and just as worthy of punishment, when the harmful result ensues, as is the express intent to kill itself.
So prosecutors will have to find out about the intent.
The concept of felony murder originates in the rule of transferred intent, which is older than the limit of legal memory. In its original form, the malicious intent inherent in the commission of any crime, however trivial, was considered to apply to any consequences of that crime, however unintended. ”””
Swatting involves sending anxious humans with military grade weapons to an innocent person's house. Those anxious humans are trained to kill. If you Swat someone, and that person ends up dead, you're the reason they died -- and I fully agree it should be treated as a homicide, manslaughter at a minimum.
In your scenario, you are a hostage taker. You've taken both me and the other person hostage with the threat of murder...
Ensuring there are consequences for people who act immorally may help address the systemic issues, of course.
Not an American here - what is the controversy?
That seems difficult to prove. I used to spend a shitload of time on WoW where I wouldn't watch what was going on with the world. Some people lose touch by immersing in games, and Trump has taken over the news anyway within the last year. Not that I'm defending the dude, but wouldn't bringing up something that's difficult to prove hurt your case overall (IANAL obviously)?
There should be more than enough to simply get the guy on calling in a fake hostage situation, or hopefully homicide.
Clearly, he's well aware of what happens.
that requires malice aforethought which must meet the following criteria in some jurisdictions in US:
> Intent to kill
Just because they called SWAT doesn't show intent to kill. Hard to prove even if the accused has threatened to kill the gamer because calling SWAT is not like calling a hit squad.
> Intent to inflict grievous bodily harm short of death, Reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (sometimes described as an "abandoned and malignant heart"), or Intent to commit a dangerous felony (the "felony murder" doctrine).
So this is where the problem lies with your argument. The accused did not call or hire assassins which would suggest intent to kill. The accused could not physically hurt or threaten the life of the deceased by calling SWAT because that would mean its common knowledge SWAT are hired guns.
At best involuntary manslaughter makes sense. If there was a law in place before this event, specifically aimed at protecting people from getting SWATTED, then there's a small chance in escalating the charges.
I'm equally frustrated at the lack of laws and punishment to deter SWATing, but this is a side effect of the militrilization of local security apparatuses.
But like other tragedies in America, it will do little to deter the trend, as it is clearly divided on excessive force. Proponents will claim guns will keep the government in check....against a suite of surplus military hardware used to invade a few countries.
This is a systematic problem, charging one man will not fix the situation. Of course, after this case, people stupid enough to swat each other are going to find an increasingly less sympathetic jury. But it will happen and SWAT is not suddenly going to stop and ask if it's legit or not.
It's incredibly cowardly and shortsighted to traumatize using security apparatuses meant for true emergencies, over some ruffled egos, in a virtual, ephemeral electronic world.
Maybe they'll get manslaughter on a plea.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2014/07/23/new-yorks-top-court-e...
The level of culpability, not least the causal connection here is hundred fold weaker. Casual reading of the law rarely lines up with established case precedence.
At the precinct, defendant admitted that he stole the minivan, exceeded the speed limit, and swerved into oncoming traffic as he fled the police. In explaining his driving, defendant said he tried to avoid hitting cars and pedestrians, and that he did not know the neighborhood well and drove down the one-way streets by mistake. Defendant said he was lost when he ended up on Manhattan Avenue, and that he was avoiding cars as he evaded the police. According to defendant, he was going against traffic and looking in his rearview mirror for the police immediately before he struck the victim. When he looked forward again, defendant said he saw the victim and that he thought he "hit the girl in the hand or something." When he saw more people and traffic two blocks later, defendant decided to crash into the parked car to avoid hurting anyone else. He also expressed remorse for his actions.
It's easy to make the argument that SWAT-ers do the opposite of what this person did and are in fact more culpable: they deliberately, competitively, and with care create circumstances optimized to put lives at risk. They don't just call the police; they call fake active shooting incidents to the police.
Read the case you just cited. It overturns a depraved indifference conviction and so goes deep into the details on this.
> "Depraved heart second-degree murder requires a conscious disregard of the risk, sufficient under the circumstances, to manifest extreme indifference to the value of human life. Recklessness that can be assimilated to purpose or knowledge is treated as depraved heart second-degree murder, and less extreme recklessness is punished as manslaughter. Conviction of depraved heart second-degree murder requires PROOF that the defendant acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. This language describes a kind of culpability that differs in degree but not in kind from the ordinary recklessness required for manslaughter."
So yes, you still need to show proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this was a prank gone wrong. Unless the accused called assassins, it's going to be hard to argue intent.
Ordering armed people who expect to fight an armed murderer with multiple hostages is not a prank.
> According to the article, allegedly two Call of Duty players were threatening each other over a $2 bet. One call of duty member gives the other a fake address when the other threatens to SWAT him. Police go to the fake address and shoot somebody. Guy who got shot couldn't have possibly prevented the situation and is ironically the least at fault of anybody involved.
There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill, in fact it was a random address that another third party had posted, and somebody decided to pull a prank that went horribly wrong.
Involuntary manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought.
Of course I'm not a lawyer but I refrain from allowing emotions to taint the lens of truth. I've yet to see any constructive counter arguments from you, instead you've sidetracked the debate by attacking my character.
No, in the example you've presented, that is directly demonstration of intent to kill using a device (a gun) that has high probability of death. That is not the point I've made and you are attempting to bend what was said.
Conviction of depraved heart second-degree murder requires PROOF that the defendant acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.
"There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill"
It does not require that they "intended to kill." It just requires that they "acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life." You find it hard to believe that anyone could consider it reckless (and indifferent to the life of the victim) to send a team of gunmen, who you've explicitly instructed to be on high alert?
Assuming this player is in an extraditable country, I predict he's going to rot in jail for the rest of his life. It's not like he was playing CoD through TOR. He won't be hard to find.
So yes, it's a very short matter of time before police start knocking.
Who are you trying to fool here?
Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting. If it weren't, they would have called family and child services to fraudulently report child sex abuse, animal control to report an escaped rabid panther, or any number of other government bodies that don't show up to the party with fully-automatic assault rifles.
The victim was shot because he refused direct police order and endangered himself by making the SWAT thinking he had a gun.
The guy calling the SWAT is an effete asshole but there's no way he could've predicted the endangerment that the victim put on himself by directly refusing orders to keep his hand up (he didnt and he was shot thinking he was pulling a gun).
So if you wanted to prove intent to kill, you'd have to
1) Show the probability of getting killed by SWAT vs Hitman is the same, which the judge will throw out as intent.
2) Show that the SWAT caller could've predicted that victim would put himself in danger by disobeying a direct armed officer.
3) Retrospectively show intent to kill in previous SWAT calls the perpetrator has been charged for.
This is just the harsh realities of court. It's very hard for prosecutors for cases like this, especially when the public is so skewed to one version of the story. It's ironic that such zealous energy from the mob crowd will only hurt the case, the internet and the mob mentality doesn't prevail against examination of facts and evidence....
Hence this is why I stopped pursuing a legal career...because I realized that true justice will rarely be delivered. To convict someone, you need more than just conjectures and emotional response, you are up against highly intelligent defense lawyers who are expert in raising doubts in those that react with emotion, not logic.
Nonsense. The point is to cause incredible inconvenience to the victim, not to kill them. Most of the time the cops will probably waste a few hours of your day, and make you look pretty bad in front of your neighbors.
This is quite possibly the first death after thousands of swattings, it seems unreasonable to assume that the perpetrators wouldn't be aware of how rarely this actually happens.
Didn't think so.
I simply believe that the vast majority of the people engaging in this activity do not do so with the intention of actually killing the victim.
I don't expect there to be a significant decline in swattings.
I believe deaths caused by swattings are far too rare for that to be a common motivation.
Just a "prank", for the most part... An entirely unforeseen circumstance and byproduct of merely trying to "inconvenience" the victim...
>Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting.
Is usually not correct.
So when you react with such vulgar statements and continually attack others who present facts and evidences against your conjecture, it's hard to take you seriously.
You keep thinking the accused somehow had blood lust without even looking at all the pieces. It's so easy to jump on the bandwagon, but there's always those that choose logic over passion, this is what the legal industry is about.
This may be the first death as the direct result of a prank call, but it is far from the first accidental death as the result of a swat team being deployed.
If inconvenience were truly the goal, a prank call to child services that launches an investigation would work much better. But that's not the outcome the caller actually wants to see happen.
SWAT teams are not deployed by the police when they think that it is likely that they will need to behave inconveniently to someone, they are deployed when the police think that it is likely that there will be a need for overwhelming deadly force.
The point of falsely triggering a SWAT team is not to cause inconvenience through police.
The point of triggering a SWAT team is to deliberately risk someone's life.
Great white sharks rarely eat people.
However, if I admit to having deliberately pushed someone into the water with a great white shark to see what would happen and then they get eaten, quoting the probabilities is not going to impress a court very much.
Unfortunately, it wasn't as if the SWAT team were going in guns blazing. The victim specifically chose to put his hands down when ordered to keep it up. He failed to do so and that resulted in his death.
Seeing the huge number of SWAT cases, this is the first time that I'm aware of, where a person has been deceased. To make the argument that calling SWAT team to somebody's house is akin to calling a hitman to your house is ludicrious.
The case falls further apart because the victim was unknown to any of the parties involved, there's no way they could've predicted the victim would disobey police orders that put himself in danger.
“malice aforethought”, as noted uphtread, isn't the same thing as “intent to kill”. Gross recklessness/depraved indifference is also malice aforethought.
> in fact it was a random address that another third party had posted, and somebody decided to pull a prank that went horribly wrong.
SWATting is a “prank” which inherently involves the mental state of depraved indifference; the fact that the target endangered is different than the one the “prankster” expected is fairly immaterial.
The victim was killed because he disobeyed direct orders from an armed officer. At the end of the day, this is what boils down to, not what he said or she said.
As I said, calling SWAT to somebodys house is not the same as calling hitman to whack somebody. Even in cases involving spouses calling hitman on their estranged lover, it takes an awful lot of evidence to get a malice aforethought and even more damning evidence to get intent to kill.
This is just the reality of working under a legal system that relies on evidence presentable to a neutral third party. If anything, the internet mob mentality will hurt this case as the judge will throw out anything related to the notion the prank caller technically called armed hitman, because the prosecutor will need to show evidence that the accused knew the target victim would willingly disobey armed police officer, which is impossible because the victim was unknown to any of the parties involved.
An intend to kill might be far fetched but an intend to harm is not.
To me, the (standard) overreaction by the police makes arguments minimizing what the gamer did here even harder. Unless you live under a rock, you're aware of the controversy about armed police response in the US. Surely this gamer knew that, and called a fake report in anyways --- one involving an active shooter and a hostage.
I'm with Ken "Popehat" White: what the gamer did here is homicide. We can argue about the degree.
† really, in almost all cases in the US, "assault officers", and we should separate the two concepts, stop hiring new assault officers, and start hiring a new class of less-armed police officers
Later
It turns out there's already a concept in US law that captures this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depraved-heart_murder