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