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.