In principle, I certainly agree. But in the reality of contemporary American politics, I think that sometimes we need to make decisions about which path to take.
Is it a problem that anybody that knows an address can summon a heavily armed, often poorly trained, sometimes mentally ill group of people to break into a home at that address?
Or is it a problem that, given the above, people are actually doing it?
I want to suggest that we do actually need to choose one or the other in this situation, and that the answer is flatly the former.
Swatting is an abhorrent practice but if a society does execute people (and I don't think that they ever should) you absolutely do not execute them for swatting.
I think that the maximal culpability for the caller's crime is in the realm of irresponsible disclosure.
"The bug" is the fact that American police kills innocent people that have done nothing wrong. Of course the caller should be fined for abusing a critical service, but the root cause of this murder isn't in the phone call - it's US police killing innocent people in alarming number of cases. Blaming it on the caller completely ignores all other police killings that have happened without a swatter.
Unless you're trying to say that being able to call up men that murder someone is a feature desired in your country?
Certainly the U.S needs to stop the police killing people, but it also should treat people harshly for exploiting the 'people-killing' bug in their system.
If I figure out your internet of things refrigerator has a setting to add salmonella to chicken 25% of the time, and I then use an exploit to run the salmonella adding routine, the manufacturer should be sued for a lot of money for their stupid salmonella adding routine, and remove that routine. But I think you would agree that while my activity was similar to that time someone made your internet of things lights blink on and off, it was also more serious and I should suffer more for it.
If you know there's a strong possibility (and in the US, this is the case) that your phone call could result in someone's death - and calling in a fake hostage/murder to trigger a SWAT response certainly qualifies - you are part of the root cause, definitely.
> Blaming it on the caller completely ignores all other police killings that have happened without a swatter.
This is ridiculous whataboutism.
Pointing out apparent independence in a variable is not whataboutism, it's ideal deconstruction.
> The penalties for driving drunk and killing someone are harsher than a simple DUI.
The penalties are harsher because they are different crimes. That's not an argument for executing prank callers.
Even in this example, drunk drivers who kill aren't executed. I definitely agree the punishment on this particular individual should be stronger but executing him? That's taking it a bit far.
A long jail stint (and some growing up) would likely stop this particular individual from ever repeating their actions again. Executions should be reserved for those who are truly beyond rehabilitation IMO.
Alternatively, you can treat extraordinary claims with some level of skepticism.
I've had the joy of being swatted. I got a knock on the door, a few M4's in my face, cuffed and pinned against a wall, and then later an apology from the officers. All told, it was handled reasonably well in that I wasn't shot...
Still, you'd think having a few cops knock on the door and go "Hey, so funny story..." and assessing the situation from there, hell even with a few storm troopers behind 'em, would be a reasonable enough approach. Unfortunately the officers were fully keyed up and ready for a fight, so I had to deal with a bunch of adrenaline junkies playing Operator for an evening. It kills me how many combat vets I know who had to work under stricter ROEs than street cops in a country that supposedly has a distrust of government and a hatred of tyranny.
They should be trained to interact professionally and as calmly as possible with people who are armed to the teeth. If it's such a regular occurrence, why are they dealing with it with the same panicked exaggerated responses as an untrained civilian would?
I think we need a discussion as a society around how much risk we expect police to take on. Similar to how astronauts or military personnel take on calculated risks.
Human spaceflight is REALLY expensive if you want only 1 death per 10,000 launches.
Having police is REALLY expensive in terms of innocent civilian casualties if you want 1 death per 10,000 interactions with "believed to be armed" (but maybe not actually armed) civilians. How many deaths of innocent people equal the death of one police officer? What is the proper ratio? 10 to 1? 100 to 1?
I've never understood this argument. I assume that some 10-30% (depending on where I am in the country) of people around me are carrying a concealed weapon, and yet I don't react with such recklessness.
We are all surrounded by guns all the time; in what way are police disproportionately vulnerable as a result?
If we put police in the circumstances you describe, the number of people randomly walking down the street who were shot by a police officer also randomly walking down the street was 0 last year.
You certainly don't low-ball your punishment desires.
Shooting someone yourself is intentional homicide.
Really it's ridiculous to me that some people are blaming someone else for an incompetent trigger-happy cop.
Throwing out my own analogy, it's like someone prank calling a hospital to tell them they have cancer, then a doctor killing them with chemo without doing any tests to verify they actually have it.
At some point you have to hold trusted professionals responsible for actually doing their jobs properly.
Presumably then capital punishment, itself an example of intentional homicide, is among these "exceptional" circumstances?
I'm just pointing clarifying that, in your moral system, capital punishment must be one of the exceptions - it's obviously a form of intentional homicide, so you make an exception, right?
Just be careful with handing out such exceptions!
The innocent people caught in the middle are living proof of the seriousness of the flaw.
Like in software though, this bug will likely be haphazardly fixed, rather then fixing the underlying problem: the militarization of our police force.
By calling the swatter a murderer, you're only bringing into sharper focus the grotesque failure of American police to respond to allegations in a lawful and proportionate way. If a swatter is a murderer, then by definition the swat team has ceased to be part of a police department and has become an extrajudicial death squad. A functioning police department is not expected to kill law-abiding citizens on a regular basis.
The law says "innocent until proven guilty", not "innocent until proven guilty, unless the police get nervous, in which case we'll kill you on sight".
Charles Kinsey, a mental health therapist from Miami, was shot by police in 2016. He was lying on his back with his hands raised, begging the police not to shoot the autistic man he was caring for. After he was shot, he was handcuffed and given no first aid until an ambulance arrived 20 minutes later. There is clear evidence that the swat team knew that neither Kinsey nor his patient were armed prior to the shooting. Through pure luck, Kinsey survived the incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey
We are beyond the point of rationalization, we are beyond excuses. Whether by accident or design, we have created a system where police officers can kill with impunity, where law-abiding citizens live in real fear of killed by the police simply because they live in the wrong neighbourhood, have the wrong skin color or stream video games online. The only humane and rational response is root-and-branch reform of police training, supervision and accountability.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/training-officers-to-s...
The correct response here is to prosecute the SWATter for murder, and carry out the police reforms you mention. I don't object to the second in any way, I merely object to the diminishment of responsibility for the guy who made the call.
Are you talking about Andrew Finch?
In that case, sure, the police officer who shot him is very much in the wrong. Is that what you're wanting hear?
I also think in a such militarized environment, that police officers who might never have imagined themselves murdering anyone are now, yes, murderers. And that's a shame.
We don't really need SWAT teams in the USA at all, and certainly not thousands of deployments of them every year.
The officer who actually fired the weapon probably deserves the label too.
Well, yeah, I don't that the person who made the call, while culpable for involvement in homicide is guilty of murder in the traditional sense.
Something more like involuntary manslaughter. The murderer is unambiguously the person who killed.
1. Intent to kill,
2. Intent to inflict grievous bodily harm short of death,
3. Reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (sometimes described as an "abandoned and malignant heart"), or
4. Intent to commit a dangerous felony (the "felony murder" doctrine).
It looks to me like at least #3 would be the case here, and likely #2 or #1.
I have no problem saying that the SWATter killed this person. Convincing the police to go and kill someone for you is little different from convincing a gun to send a bullet into their heart. The difference, of course, is that the police are living creatures with their own thoughts and culpability, but that just means their responsibility is added, not that the SWATter's responsibility is somehow diminished.
While I don't view assisted suicide as any sort of crime, I think that the relationship of the caller to the death is pretty much the same: they set up some conditions, but the police officer is the one who caused the death.
As I said from the beginning, I don't really see the societal benefit to even talking about this person.
The police need to stop killing people so that we can move on with the important matter of having a free society. That's the only story here.
However, the divergence of the interests of the state from those of the planet and its people are quickly becoming more visible.
My sense is that, in order to do away with warfare generally (and SWAT teams specifically), we'll need to deprecate the state in favor of more compassionate approaches to, inter alia, emergency response.
SWAT was originally intended to be used for "special" situations, and increasingly (over the past few decades) has been the go-to tool for many police-citizen interactions.
If I were playing video games, and my front door exploded and the entryway were flashbanged, my first response would probably be relatively instinctive (get up, maybe to see WTF is happening in my house), and it's _very probable_ that such responses would make the breaching officers fearful enough that they'd shoot me. I don't have any weapons in my house, have no intention of resisting any police action, but the fact that I might stand up out of my chair, or move, or who-knows-what could easily be misconstrued.
In the article, they said that the man had "reached for his waist" -- I literally do that every time I get up from my computer chair.
I'd much rather that the police did some kind of surveillance first ("oh, hey, looks like a dude playing video games ..."), and verified that the situation matched the emergency described in their dispatch.
This isn't intended to detract from the badness of the SWAT-ter's actions: I hope that (if he indeed caused this) there's some serious consequences. However, it would have been a lot more difficult to cause such mayhem if the police were less trigger-happy.
Every jurisdiction is different with their procedure but in many, this is exactly what they do. They generally want to know where in the house the supposed gunman is, where the hostages are, where the best points of entry/escape are, etc.
I get the impression that in this case, the victim saw police assembling outside his house and tried to investigate as they arrived on-scene, which caught them off guard.
Being indifferent to death of innocent people is the opposite of maturity.
...except that's exactly what happened. Regardless of whether you think the changes are effective, just compare airport security before and after.