My argument here is that it is not reasonable to let the caller off with a slap on the wrist and then in an environment where prank calls are increasingly the norm, hold the police solely responsible for the outcome. That is a broken model that will only create trouble. Whatever problems the US police force already has, it only gets worse if you say "Totes fine for someone to make prank swatting calls, but fry the police every time they mess up."

I cannot fathom why that isn't obvious on the face of it. Setting people up to fail is a thing. How can so many people apparently not see that?

>> Setting people up to fail is a thing. How can so many people apparently not see that?

Are you OK with your kids and your spouse and your parents being murdered by police because... some random POS made a phone call, and "set them to fail"?

No, of course not. And that isn't a rebuttal of my point that the caller absolutely needs to be held responsible for his actions in this debacle.

If you re-read carefully, you will see that absolutely nobody in this thread ever argued that Tyler wasn't responsible, nor that he shouldn't be charged with manslaughter. He is, he will most likely be found guilty, and we're all happy with that.

The point you misinterpret as "pro-Tyler" is that the police officer is probably co-responsible of the manslaughter, and should be charged in addition to (not instead of) Tyler. And this seems infuriatingly unlikely.

I quoted what I was replying to:

By primarily blaming Tyler (who's a super-nasty piece of shit, but that's another issue

Maybe you should reread more carefully. A lot of the replies to me have assumed things I did not actually say.

Yeah that POS needs to be in prison or psychiatric instituton or whatever, we all agree on that.

I am more concerned with... killing people.

How about... instead of military rifles, we use... tazers, rubber bullets, stun grenades and other non-lethal weapons?

That way, we all live, and whoever is accused of crime, can be dealt with judge and jury and so on. In this case, the guy that was murdered by police would be not dead... he may be sore, and also pissed, but that surely beats being dead.

Regular police do use those tools. SWAT is "special weapons and tactics", the heavy-equipment arm of the police used precisely in situations of such danger that normal levels of force are not appropriate (in this case, a situation where they believe there is a hostage and an active shooter).

If there is an active shooter and who is a competent marksman and has a perfectly ordinary hunting rifle, approaching them with non-lethal weapons is just giving them more opportunities to kill while they police try to incapacitate them.

Note the "pranker" didn't call in an event that would have resulted in normal police being dispatched (say, a domestic disturbance, or somesuch). They specifically called in a situation that demanded immediate application of potentially lethal force against an already active shooter.

I would love to see the numbers. How many "hostages" were saved by these SWAT teams, vs how many innocent people were shot.