Both. The police certainly have culpability for being willing to send armed thugs anywhere to bust down doors and start shooting based on nothing but an anonymous phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without America's militant police culture.
>Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?
Again, both. The police are always, and obviously, at fault for pulling the trigger on someone who doesn't pose an obvious threat. The instigation is the fault of one party, but the escalation is the fault of the system.
I'm not saying the person who posted the picture isn't at fault, obviously they have some culpability, and I'm not justifying it either. It's just odd that the employer is never considered to have any agency or responsibility in these discussions. The decision to fire the employee was entirely that of their employer. Presumably when they sat the employee down and asked for his side of the story, they weren't satisfied with "I was just cracking my knuckles." They could have taken one look at the photo and decided it was nonsense, but they decided to do an "internal investigation", suspension and eventual termination. No one made them. No one put a gun to their head.
By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...
Almost certainly none. It was a tempest in a teapot that would have blown over in a few days, maybe a week. They didn't do an investigation because they were intimidated by the "shrieking hordes of Twitter" but because their own policies required it.
And it's worth pointing out that we don't know anything about that investigation other than its outcome.
>By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...
Plenty of companies shrug off bad publicity all the time, and we're talking about a small utility company that, all things being equal, has no reason to care.
If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?