Three Charged in Fatal Kansas ‘Swatting’ Attack | Hacker News Reader

Three Charged in Fatal Kansas ‘Swatting’ Attack

krebsonsecurity.com

192 pointsrobin_reala319 comments

Swatting is a lot less effective in other parts of the world for the simple reason that in other parts of the world the results are super boring. Two officers will come to the door, ask if everything is ok, perhaps ask to look around, and then leave as calmly as they arrived.

There's something unique about the style of US policing (perhaps training? perhaps military backgrounds? perhaps it being styled as militaristic?) that means these kind of incidents are always escalated by the police themselves.

If you want example just look on YT for "Police Bootcamp" videos like this:

https://youtu.be/0LC6FTXAxo0?t=2m12s

To Americans this might not seem odd, because you've been so conditioned to view police like the military but to people from elsewhere that's uniquely military style training and conditioning and has no place in a civilian police force.

Plus the length of training in the US is unusually low[0]

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/28/us/jobs-training-police-trnd/...

https://np.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2dgwkp/what_makes_am...

His response reminds me of Officer Ken Lam, the Toronto Police officer who opted not to shoot the van suspect despite the fact that he was within a few meters of the suspect. In America, it's highly likely the officer would've used his gun.

More about Ken Lam: https://globalnews.ca/video/4168807/const-ken-lam-toronto-po...

1st generation Canadian who retired from being an engineer of 14 years because he wanted to do more for his community directly.

I know this is just one example but I think this contrasts just so strongly from all the police officers who join up for very different reasons.

He reminds me of the officer in this story who quit the CIA to become a beat cop because he believed it allowed him to make a far greater difference: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-ca... (This is a must read, by the way)

How do we get more officers like these?

Raise better children, and pay living wages, basically.

In addition: be more selective in choosing who gets to be a police officer, hold them accountable for their actions, and hold them to high standards.

I get the feeling that a major deterrent for folks who genuinely want to be a police officer to help their community is that there are many in the organization who view their role as an extension of the US military.

There's such a low threshold for the police's justified use of deadly force in the US, that Ken Lam's restraint was almost unbelievable for this 'merican.[0]

[0]https://twitter.com/boyermichel/status/988492132636913665?la...

Not to mention that the suspect really appeared to be attempting to provoke the officer into shooting him by brandishing something dark and acting like it was a firearm (was a cell phone I believe). The officer's response was very restrained which I think is a good thing.

Wow, that was very informative and interesting. Definitely worth a read. Thanks!

Wow what a great post. I’ve always had a hunch about the things the German police officer said but never had any (even anecdotal) evidence to confirm or dismiss them. Thank you!

I can't find the recent stats but years ago I read that my tri-city regional police have like 6 patrol cars at night. I'm not surprised. I've driven the town out of boredom a number of times well past midnight. Its boring. There's absolutely nothing going on aside from the downtown strip of bars and clubs.

It can be hard to reason about the culpability of the people involved in this thing, but I think your comment brings up an interesting point aside from culpability when you compare USA police to other countries that would "ask if everything is OK".

The police in the USA sent what was in effect an execution squad to the house of the victim. What kind of situation is that where there are execution squads ready to 'deploy' to anyone's home address?

The Philippines, Brazil, a few other places from time to time.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/02/philippines-pr...

> What kind of situation is that where there are execution squads ready to 'deploy' to anyone's home address?

USSR under Stalin/Lenin

Italy under Mussolini

Germany under Hitler

Chile under Pinochet

All it takes is one phone call...

One thing you also have to keep in mind though, to compare apples to apples, is relative crime rates. The homicide rate in Wichita is about 8/100k [1]. This [2] is a list of nations by homicide rate. Places with a homicide rate similar to Wichita include Ethiopia, Pakistan, Iraq and Qatar. Dorothy would not be happy! And it's presumably not those sort of places you reference when talking about expecting a couple of Sheriff Andy's to come up to the door asking if everything's okay before headed back to the station to finish up their game of checkers.

You'll find a pattern in incidents of 'extreme police behavior' is that it tends to be in locations with very high crime rates. There are definitely some exceptions, but again - they are exceptions. And I imagine the causal connection is here. The man who tends sheep is probably going to behave a bit differently on average than the man who tends lions.

It's probably a bit disingenuous to compare countries to cities, but a big part of the problem is that a lot of us live in bubbles and even when living in areas with high crime rates, we tend to be completely insulated from it all. Police are not. I grew up poor in the inner city and police tape stretched around an area was a not infrequent sight. And I think it gives me a different perspective than most. Just living in those conditions can make you feel uncomfortable at times. And police are actively walking into the worst of it day in, day out. That's not the sort of thing you're going to take casually.

[1] - http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Wichita-Kansas.html

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

There's a wide spectrum of behaviours in between "Sheriff Andy's to come up to the door" and "immediately shoot the first person to open the door". Police officers are (should be) professionals. You should expect better.

This doesn't strike me as a uniquely American thing. When I visited Paris, I saw lots of pairs of soldiers or police patrolling streets and subway stations carrying FAMAS rifles. You don't even see that in the US (most foot patrols only carry pistols, most officers in cars leave their carbines in the vehicle unless they need it).

Sorry, little digression here: It was probably in response to the Terror attacks, a stuff called "operation sentinelle"[0]. They still patrol near strategic points now and then, but you see them less often now.

And while military training is not police training, there was some controversy and some generals said it was a huge mistake, as the money spend on this operation (~1M$) would have shown better effect if spent on intelligence. Also, to afford the men, military had to cut monthly training. A friend of mine said that physical exercise/conditionment was divided by 2, while tactical and shooting by 4, but he really hated this operation so take it with a grain of salt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op%C3%A9ration_Sentinelle

I was backpacking around Europe in 1999 and I saw people in military uniforms with military style weapons patrolling the metro stations in Paris. It made me uneasy.

But unlike certain other countries they usually don't use them.

I grew up with a real combat rifle in the house, not a bump-stocked semi AR that looks scary. Complete with ammo. Same in a number of other houses in the neighborhood.

Never had reason to worry.

But I guess it might seem scary to Americans.

The individuals walking around with those weapons in France do not have the same intentions as the US counter parts. In the US those armed like this will size up every person walking by them, in France they are there patrolling but in a very passive manner. In such a way that made me feel like they were weak in France, but I prefer to not have the flight response when feeling the gaze of someone who is heavily armed.

I saw plenty of police in south Florida (Ft Lauderdale/Holywood area) walking around with M4-style rifles and what looked like flak jackets five years ago. I never bothered to be around them long enough to figure out what they were doing but their grouping (only a few officers at a time) and frequency seems to suggest it is a common occurrence here.

I think this is typically in relation to threats of terrorist attacks - it's not for ordinary criminals.

Given they are actually not allowed to use their gun when a large terrorist attack is going on right in front of them [0], it could be argued their role is mostly public relations.

[0] page 53 of this official report: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/pdf/rap-enq/r3922-t1.pd... (gist: neither the head of police nor the army allowed the soldiers to open fire, arguably for good reasons, but then what's the point?)

What was the time you visited Paris? I visited London last year and I have seen a quite some police carry MP5 around Big Ben and area (I was also in between attacks in there). On the other hand in Amsterdam where I live I have only seen police with machine guns after attacks in Paris.

From what I have seen UK police usually carry no guns like outside London. In the Netherlands usually pistols. In Poland where I am from I have not seen Policeman with machine gun only military and special occasions.

Shooting by the Police happen but it is like one in 3 maybe 5 years. Where in states it seems from my point of view every month at least (never been in states so it might be skewed).

In Paris, the cops don't get to use the FAMAS, but German (I think) assault rifles. But in the end it's still the same. And there are not a lot of cops with rifle, it's usually reserved when they are a lot of people in the same place (protest, music festival...). Most of the cops in France will have just a handgun and even then, not all of them.

I saw multiple US police officers with M4s [1] at the Warriors game this week. I feel like its becoming increasingly common at public events here.

[1]: I think they were m4s but they could be another similar looking rifle, I'm no expert.

Colt makes a civilian/law enforcement M4, the LE6920. It probably was an M4.

> perhaps training? perhaps military backgrounds?

Yeah, both, and they are provided with ex-army weapons as well in order to fight "the war on drugs", and train to see every potential citizen as a threat rather than an innocent victim. The book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" explains very well how we got there.

> Swatting is a lot less effective in other parts of the world for the simple reason that in other parts of the world the results are super boring. Two officers will come to the door, ask if everything is ok, perhaps ask to look around, and then leave as calmly as they arrived.

I remember the outrage in Belgium when kidnapper/pedophile Marc Dutroux[1] was found, and it was revealed that police had been previously called to their house, and hadn't taken any action despite (in hindsight) strong evidence.

The hindsight is key here, and I'm absolutely not advocating a change of policy. I'm pointing out the kind of national emotional response that can lead to a change to a more aggressive policy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Dutroux

It’s because instead of seeing themselves as public servants they see themselves as a gang[0] and have the “us vs. them” attitude which comes with that.

[0] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/steve-osborne/the...

> To Americans this might not seem odd, because you've been so conditioned to view police like the military

This is an extremely recent occurrence, specifically since 9/11 escalated first responders to `unconditional fragile hero` level.

I'd argue that the real genesis of the paramilitarization of policing was in the civil unrest of the late 1960s. Between the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, local and state police were being overwhelmed with the demands of policing major demonstrations and riots and became increasingly reliant on the National Guard. Fears of domestic guerrilla warfare by groups like the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army led to the establishment of SWAT teams across the country during the 1970s.

The war on drugs saw a vast increase in SWAT activity and funding. The 1981 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act facilitated the transfer of military equipment and resources to local and state police departments.

The vast homeland security budget has undoubtedly accelerated the process, but police units with military equipment and training were already widespread before 9/11.

Google trends for "swatting" - doesn't look related to 9/11 at all.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=16&date=all&geo...

I was referring to the public view of police as an extension of the military, not swatting.

I think Nixon and Reagan’s push for “tough on crime” policy (policy that went on to be pushed further by HW Bush, Clinton, and W Bush)also played a large role. But it definitely got worse after 9/11.

Agreed. I should note I am too young to remember much before 9/11; I just remember the attitude shift at the time.

Given that police report to local governments in the US, I would expect diverse responses. I wonder if some municipalities police very alike Europe while others are particularly militaristic. If they're mostly militaristic (like the responses in this thread suggest), I wonder what would drive the uniformity? These are earnest questions; I'm not trying to make any point.

> Given that police report to local governments in the US, I would expect diverse responses.

It doesn't work that way.

Lots of funding for local police comes from state and federal programs. So police end up doing the same thing museums, local theaters, and various other non-profits do-- they do the work required to continue getting the grant money that sustains them.

With a lot of this funding comes conditions in the grant that the department has to fulfill the program's purpose in order to continue getting funding. If a department secures funds to buy a hummer, some rifles, bullet-proof vests, and a drug dog they can't just use those things to take citizens deer hunting all year. They have to put it all to use and show that it was effectively used to fight drugs, or whatever the program is about.

Unfortunately, the U.S. did this batshit insane trillion dollar invasion of Iraq, and now we have a surplus of military equipment and military ideas up for domestic application. So most local police have a decision tree with one branch on it-- sign up for the programs that fund you for "war on drugs" and "post-Iraq war military surplus equipment and ideas" programs. Then maintain funding by doing all the training and policing within the guidelines of those programs and documenting it for further funding.

I don't see any easy way out. Imagine you're an officer and there's a program that will fly you out to an all-expenses-paid anti-terrorism training where you watch your instructors simulate bomb threats and blow a bunch of shit up. What are you going to do, not go?

Thanks for sharing, this was helpful. +1

> To Americans this might not seem odd

Make no mistake: it seems odd to us too. We're just working out exactly what to do about it.

For what it’s worth, most swatting calls don’t end with a shooting, and it’s actually unusual to get the SWAT team. Most police departments will make an effort to gather information before escalating so far. When news articles about swatting showed up in major papers, police departments across the country announced that they were aware that some people believed it was hilarious to make false reports, and they would respond appropriately.

"Two officers will come to the door, ask if everything is ok, perhaps ask to look around, and then leave as calmly as they arrived."

Did you read what Barris told the police operator in the article?

"Barriss allegedly then called the emergency 911 operators in Wichita and said he was at the address provided by Viner, that he’d just shot his father in the head, was holding his mom and sister at gunpoint, and was thinking about burning down the home with everyone inside."

It is an absolutely reasonable and necessary response for the police to respond to such a threat with the level of force that they did.

I am extremely skeptical that other countries police would handle a potential murder/hostage situation like that by calmly walking to the door and asking if everything is ok. They would be foolish to do so.

I remember an account by a French SWAT equivalent (The RAID). In that story, it was an hostage situation, with the hostage held with the knife in an appartement. The officer in charge decided to try to negotiate, all the while the RAID team was waiting next to the door.

There are too many guns in US households. That's why the police reacts as such...

Eh. Around here there is quite a lot of guns but it still makes the news if police fires a shot.

Difference is people doesn't usually shoot at each other here, aka culture.

This is my thought too. I feel like being a police officer going to a stranger's home would be a dangerous event in USA. I don't envy them.

Why do police officers shoot someone who was never a threat ? Kids will be kids, there will always be kids who do things that are completely irresponsible, by design. The fact that the person who pulled the trigger is not responsible at all for all this is beyond me.

Because they have received poor training, and bad influence from a community of peers that is very bad at risk assessment and judging priorities.

Nah, they wanna be RAMBO! America police is no longer fine with neatly pressed uniform and polished shoes. They want combat boots and outfit. Machine gun if possible, and all sorts of tactical gear that belongs in a battle field. They can't wait to toss a stun grenade and dive and role play as if they are military. It's really amusing to them, you should see a bunch of officers have their bro talk about a raid even a botched one, there's no ounce of regret that they broke down the wrong door and traumatized a family. It's all fun and giggles so long as no officer was hurt. It's the new police culture.

When the majority of threats are otherwise unknown (pulling over a speeder? You dont know if hes going to quietly accept the ticket or if hes a wanted felon who will open fire in traffic with an assault rifle to avoid capture), it is all too easy to over-respond to a presumably clear threat.

If you're going to "over-respond" by shooting people, you probably shouldn't be a cop. You probably shouldn't have any job that involves holding a gun, in fact. A bad day at work generally shouldn't result in a corpse.

Being a policeman isn’t even in the top 10 most dangerous professions according to the 2016 census.

For example: “Ground maintenance workers” were in 10th place.

http://time.com/5074471/most-dangerous-jobs/

By all means let's also put every officer into 20cm thick rubberized suits, because you never know when you're pulling over a speeder if you'll be hit by another passing car.

Actually that's way more likely than the situation turning otherwise violent...

[/sarcasm]

From my interactions with them in some traffic stops, it does seem like there's a bit of power-tripping going on sometimes.

So basically our cops wanna be TACTICOOL

AKA made fun of by all the actual military types

Because they were told he was a threat.

Also because of our highly militarized police tactics designed to reduce potential harm to officers at the cost of everything else.

> Because they were told he was a threat.

Ok but when they saw him, was he a threat ? Are hearsay enough to pull the trigger ? That seems irresponsible too.

Wait to evaluate if the guy is a threat and he could have already shot you. Safer to shoot him first. This is what people are talking about when they complain about militarized police. Treating unknowns as threats that must be neutralized instead of something you need to observe closer is how you end up throwing grenades on sleeping babies and shooting innocent people. But the converse is that the suburban drug lord pulls out his AR15 and shoots down 3 cops before they have a chance to figure out what is happening.

IMO it is the police's responsibility to die first. They are putting themselves out to protect the public from threats not to kill the public who might be a threat to them or a fellow police officer.

I am aware that currently legally it is the exact opposite and they have no responsibility to save or protect anyone only themselves.

> IMO it is the police's responsibility to die first.

And, pray tell, who in their right mind is going to take _that_ job?

Well most of the time they aren't dying and hopefully they are mostly helping people. Firefighters put their lives at risk in a similar way. The respect and honor earned by protecting your fellow people is a strong motivator.

Hopefully this would change the public's perception of police to some extent and improve public relations to the point that they would walk around being thanked like veterans.

In the military, they are not usually allowed to shoot someone just because the other person has a gun.

I've watched videos of police in other countries handling armed, definitely-a-threat suspects without using deadly force. Our police go to the gun first, period.

> But the converse is that the suburban drug lord pulls out his AR15 and shoots down 3 cops before they have a chance to figure out what is happening.

I've just gone through the information at https://www.odmp.org/ for the last 3 years and I can't find an example of anything like this.

Militarized police tactics work!

You are completely correct that it's largely a fantasy scenario, but who wants to take the chance?

But cops, especially highly trained SWAT officers answering a potentially very dangerous call are never just standing in the open - they were surely prepared for the situation, ducking behind their armored vehicles with automatic weapons drawn. I have trouble believing even the fastest criminal could get his gun out, while walking out the door and surrounded by highly trained SWAT officers in their protective gear, and manage to take one out. Or are you telling me that Hollywood movies are accurate? ;) Besides that, why not train officers to shoot for the legs instead? If they're so unsure of their accuracy, have a few people shoot... I imagine 5 gunshot wounds to the legs gives a slightly higher chance of survival than a head-shot.

Once the SWAT team is there you are heavily into militarized police tactics.

Gun training is if you shoot someone you shoot to kill. Wounding just gives them a chance to shoot you back. This is universal, ask any officer trained to use a gun and they'll tell you that shooting the gun out of someone's hand is Hollywood nonsense. Shooting to wound leads to accidental death (hit the femoral artery) and/or retaliation.

Or lawsuits.

>Ok but when they saw him, was he a threat

Yes (from their point of view). They were told he had a gun, and he lowered his hand to his waistband after being told to keep his hands above his head.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wichita-officer-who-kil...

He was also, of course, standing completely in the open, while a bunch of cops were in perfect cover a distance away. He couldn't hit anything even if he had a gun.

Why are they taking the word of a random, unidentified caller?

Isn't that every police call? As far as I know dispatchers aren't psychics.

There’s a big difference between sending people out to investigate an untrusted report, and going in guns blazing because an anonymous voice on the phone said the situation was dangerous.

You act on the information but you don’t trust it.

That's the real problem.

So you're saying if I tell a cop my neighbor (who I've never met) is a serial killer, they are well within their rights to go kill them?

Only if he does something really bad, such as move his hand.

Because, in the current climate, a cop who shoots first is certainly going home to their family at night and is certainly going to retire in good health. Even though the chances of getting injured by a person are pretty low, the chances of getting injured by a dead person are zero. Cops are humans with concrete human motivations and the risk/reward balance of shooting people is biased heavily towards reward.

This is definitely not correct. You are saying the police are safer if their strategy is "shoot immediately". If that is the case, they've just eliminated any incentive for someone with a gun to not shoot at them or to resist arrest. In many cases, the cops do not have the advantage, and if you know with certainty that you will die if the police get the first shot, you will shoot at the police at the first opportunity. You don't open the door and talk to the police. You find a place where you'll be protected and wait for the police to walk into the room.

I don't know the exact probabilities of each of these events, and it would depend on the situation, but it's dangerous to assume that the police are better off if they open fire just to be sure they kill the bad guy.

> If that is the case, they've just eliminated any incentive for someone with a gun to not shoot at them or to resist arrest.

Yes, I think that's a good point — it is a vicious cycle and sort of self-perpetuates.

> Cops are humans with concrete human motivations and the risk/reward balance of shooting people is biased heavily towards reward.

There is demonstrably little risk in the US for police who shoot people, absent specific evidence of bad faith. There's also no "reward" for shooting people, unless they're actually murdering people opportunistically under cover of their badges.

Then again, consider the case in Baltimore of a ring of officers carrying toy guns to plant on people after shooting them, and how the cooperating member of the ring was found dead of an apparent suicide just before he was going to testify. [0] Or that it's only the happenstance of a bystander with a camera phone recording a cop shooting someone in the back, then planting his taser on the body, and reporting the victim had taken it. [1] Or the car chase that ended in a death, during which the sheriff's deputy's body cam recorded him saying, "I love this shit. God, I tell you what, I thrive on it. If they don’t think I’ll give the damn order to kill that motherfucker they’re full of shit." [2] Those are just what we've found.

I get that being a law enforcement officer is a dangerous job, and that they're risking their lives every time they respond to an unknown situation. The thing is, they signed up for that. It's not like cops getting shot was a surprise sprung upon them only after they were sworn in.

They're also given the authority to use deadly force, and — ideally — the trust that they will do so judiciously. Not only do they sometimes abjectly fail to do that, the system fails to penalize egregious abuses of that trust. We've somehow chosen as a society to lionize the police, and give them incredibly wide latitude and presumption of good faith. Most cops are good cops, and probably can be trusted with substantial latitude. A permissive attitude invites abuse, however, and not only are there bad cops, but the good ones, and the system itself, abet them (which, I submit, severely mitigates their good cop-ness).

[0] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gun...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-officer...

[2] https://www.salon.com/2018/02/08/tennessee-sheriff-recorded-...

Because they've been falsely informed that there is such a threat. That doesn't make it right but it at least explains a part of what happened.

Low burden of proof isn't it.

That's not how that works. If you are a police officer in the United States and you've been told you are going into a situation where your opposition is armed and has already killed at least one person you will be very nervous.

That's a situation where if it is true somebody is likely going to end up hurt and I suspect the police officers tried very hard to make sure that wasn't them.

And so innocent people paid the price for a bunch of idiots duking it out over a $1.50 bet.

The part that makes no sense to me is that swatting is even possible, there are enough indicators that the call is not originating from the location indicated by the caller.

I still think this should not have happened but there is at least a little bit of leeway on seeing how this could have happened. Keep in mind that the swatters had a lot of experience in tuning their story for maximum effect on LE. This or something like it was their intention all along.

And "somehow", only people that are swatted in the US wind up dead...

even though 'gamer culture' is larger in Europe and Asia. ( and in many countries in both, swatting has been attempted ).

The number of guns floating around in the US has a whole pile of effects that are active in this case: more guns increases the chance of a gun really being present, it increases the number of dead LE officers the ones in the SWAT team are familiar with and it increases the chance of the officer not making it home. Add poor training, the SWAT team already being only called in into situations that are supposedly dangers and you're a stupid mistake away from one or more people being killed.

USA police always struck me as super insecure in the few interactions I had with them compared to Canadian and European police. Even in Latin America the police in general was a lot more relaxed.

Incidentally, in the military there were similar issues with something called 'force protection'.

In this case it was an irresponsible prank, but it seems perfectly possible that someone could mistakenly give an incorrect address for a real situation, or the 911 operator could copy it down wrong, or whatever. There are simply too many possibilities that could lead to a false alarm that shooting first and asking questions later when showing up at a house without in any way ascertaining whether there is a real threat is, in my mind, a completely unreasonable procedure.

I don't think this was a prank. This was a calculated effort to cause someone bodily harm by weaponizing the police services.

I thought it was a calculated effort to scare the shit out of someone, not actually getting people shot. (I'm admittedly not very experienced in this art, but my assumption would not be that if I called the cops on someone they would just gun them down.)

Read the article and how the situation is described. They are not asking for 'the cops' they know the result of the call is that a heavily armed SWAT team is going to go in with the intent of disabling the hostage taker.

That's way beyond just scaring someone.

> That's not how that works. If you are a police officer in the United States and you've been told you are going into a situation where your opposition is armed and has already killed at least one person you will be very nervous.

I have been told many times that police officers are very likely to shoot unarmed innocent people. Should I shoot police officers with the same levity?

> If you are a police officer in the United States and you've been told you are going into a situation where your opposition is armed and has already killed at least one person you will be very nervous.

If your trigger finger is itching because you're nervous, then you have absolutely zero business being a police officer in the field - much less a SWAT member.

By that standard you could disqualify all of the human race. Going into an active shooter situation would definitely cause almost anybody except for those that are totally apathetic to experience some degree of nervousness.

It's not ideal but it's human nature. I agree that the degree to which US police is 'trigger happy' is super problematic but in the case of a SWAT team called in on someone that has (1) already killed and (2) indicated he wants to kill more people in his environment some degree of apprehension is understandable.

If you're so ice-cold that you would not be nervous under those circumstances then maybe you should join a SWAT team?

> Going into an active shooter situation would definitely cause almost anybody except for those that are totally apathetic to experience some degree of nervousness.

But you've just equivocated on "an active shooter situation" and "a reported active shooter situation." Swatting has been well-known for long enough that there needs to be more evidence than an anonymous untracked phone call before police approach a home under the assumption that there is in fact an active shooter on the premises.

given that the person who died had nothing to do with anything, it's almost certainly the case that there was ZERO corroborating on-site evidence that a highly dangerous situation was actually unfolding.

> By that standard you could disqualify all of the human race.

This obviously isn't the case given that most of these incidents don't result in gunfire.

>The part that makes no sense to me is that swatting is even possible, there are enough indicators that the call is not originating from the location indicated by the caller.

Google search SS7.

https://securityintelligence.com/ss7-vulnerability-isnt-a-fl...

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/fix-ss7-two-factor-authenticat...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/03/hackers_fire_up_ss7...

TLDR; the SS7 protocol (which cell phones operate on) is extremely unsafe and vulnerable.

It seems to be accurate enough for McDonalds to tell cell phone owners in front of their stores that they have this great offer.

That's not the same system, and if you're McDonalds and fuck it up, you've just accidentally offered someone discounted fries.

Things are a little different when a location error might mean 911 doesn't send emergency responders to you.

>"Barriss allegedly then called the emergency 911 operators in Wichita and said he was at the address provided by Viner, that he’d just shot his father in

Ok, and there was no skepticism on the part of the officer taking the call?

Shouldn't you ask for some confirming information? Come on.

> That's a situation where if it is true somebody is likely going to end up hurt and I suspect the police officers tried very hard to make sure that wasn't them.

They also try very hard to make sure it isn't the mom and sister.

> They also try very hard to make sure it isn't the mom and sister.

did they all come out together?

I don't know, and I wasn't specifically referring to this incident. I was replying to jaquesm's point, which I took to be saying that officers are worried about self-preservation going into a situation where they believe there is an armed hostage-taker. They almost certainly are worried about their own life, but that's not all they're worried about. They also are worried about the lives of the (alleged) hostages. The life of the (alleged) hostage-taker? That's a lower priority.

And also because the victim lowered his hands to his waistband, and the officer thought he had a gun:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wichita-officer-who-kil...

Additionally, consider how disorienting it would be to wake up, hear a commotion outside, walk out your front door, and suddenly you're blinded by lights and a bunch of different voices are yelling at you to do stuff.

It is completely unreasonable to expect an ordinary person to have perfect comprehension and self control in such a situation. Which is why the procedures police follow need to anticipate this very problem.

the officer also fired partially behind cover using a rifle at a distance of over 100 feet (http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/v70e0w/picture1932940...)

if there had been a concealed weapon in the victims waistband, it could only have been a handgun or something less lethal.

Ever try and hit a target at 100 feet with a pistol? It can be done if you concentrate, have steady hands, and aim slowly; with practice. My point is that the officer should have waited long enough to confirm the threat. The element of surprise plus the advantage of distance, hardware, cover, armor, and backup afforded him at least 1 second of better judgement.

Your tone suggest that these were a couple of irresponsible 8 year olds playing a prank. There were 17/18 yo and the person that called in the swat was 25. They all are plenty old enough to know what our LE system is all about. As far as the 25 yo serial swatter, it was just a matter of time before something like this happened.

> Kids will be kids

Both persons are over 18 years old.

>investigators say the other two men’s efforts to taunt and deceive one another ultimately helped point the gun

Huh, so they're going after people who didn't make the call and ignoring the biggest culprit that is the police officers? What's the point of having "trained" professionals if they can't distinguish a real threat from a hoax?

This reminds me of binary classification algorithms that classify everything as 0 and end up with an accuracy of 90% because of dataset imbalance.

> Huh, so they're going after people who didn't make the call and ignoring the biggest culprit that is the police officers?

First, while we can all agree that the police didn't act well in this matter, I would certainly not classify them as anywhere near the biggest culprit. If you job is to sometimes exert force, possibly even lethal force, to enforce the law and protect people, if you aer primed for an encounter with someone who has already "killed their father and is holding someone hostage", it's easy to see many ways this meeting could have gone wrong, and it did.

Second, regarding "people who didn't make the call", read the article if you haven't. I had the same initial thought, but then you quickly realize, from the actual chat logs of the accudes which are included in the article, that the person being swatted first boasted he wasn't scared of being swatted, and then when challenged on it asked them to swat him and then supplied to fake address (actually, his prior address, which his family still owned and rented to the family of the victim). As for the third person, he's the person that actaully requested the SWAT call. From his own chat statements:

Defendant VINER: I literally said you’re gonna be swatted, and the guy who swatted him can easily say I convinced him or something when I said hey can you swat this guy and then gave him the address and he said yes and then said he’d do it for free because I said he doesn’t think anything will happen

They all contributed to make a very unsafe situation, which then culminated in the death of an innocent. They all have some culpability in this.

Felony-murder rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_rule

They aren't being charged with murder.

Here's what the story says:

    Barriss is charged with multiple counts
    of making false information and hoaxes;
    cyberstalking; threatening to kill another or
    damage property by fire; interstate threats,
    conspiracy; and wire fraud. Viner and Gaskill
    were both charged with wire fraud, conspiracy
    and obstruction of justice.

It’s been illegal for a long time, with very harsh penalties, to make false reports. Obviously that hasn’t stopped everyone from making them, but I’m not surprised that the people involved are being prosecuted and face jail time.

I would also like the police department (and other departments) to learn from their response.

It’s too late to edit the original comment: the person who actually made the call is probably facing charges of making a false report (and evidence tampering, for asking the other guys to delete their chat logs).

The others are probably facing charges of conspiracy to make a false report ( https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/conspiracy.htm... ).

There may be an argument that encouraging somebody to commit a crime, by way of a bet, isn’t the same thing as helping someone plan to commit a crime. I’m sure sure this wouldn’t be the first time for that argument to come up. Also, if they said anything like “just make a call and say ...,” that defense won’t work.

How much training is required to effectively distinguish between a real threat and a hoax? Do police even get this training or is Swatting a relatively recent phenomenon that hasn’t made it into police training curriculum yet? “Evil police” is a nice pat answer, but rarely are such answers correct.

Swatting is just a new twist on the long-standing pattern of high-strung police officers getting jumpy and killing people who were never a threat. There's even a famous Richard Pryor bit about it.

Earnest question: is this perception based on data or is it biased by media reporting? (not your perception specifically, but the general perception)

If you assume it was not a hoax, the police response was still to shoot without being provoked. Hardly seems like whether its a hoax or not is op's point.

I was responding to this:

> What's the point of having "trained" professionals if they can't distinguish a real threat from a hoax?

I don't know how you can read that and think "whether it's a hoax or not is not the OP's point"

> I don't know how you can read that and think "whether it's a hoax or not is not the OP's point"

the op's point seemed more about training and response/behavior, and the hoax bit was just the matter of the present circumstance.

It is amazing to me that law enforcement's trigger for using deadly force so light that two teenagers arguing about a video game can get a third party killed across a state line.

It really irks me the way the article says Andrew Finch was "at the wrong place at the wrong time". He was at _his_ house, which he's allowed to be at _any_ time.

It's a figure of speech that implies it was pure coincidence that it happened to him as opposed to someone else and that he could have done nothing to prevent it.

Well, I think being "a place where you get shot" is always a wrong place to be, for most definitions of the word "wrong".

I think two steps should be taken:

- Punish the swatters harshly

- Take a long hard look at police tactics. There are way too many incidents where unarmed people don't behave 100% compliant and get shot. This is a really stressful situation for untrained people and professionals like cops should be trained to take that into account. Some years ago I got T-boned pretty hard by a car. Once the cops arrived, one of them gave me instructions and I was simply not able to process them and did all kinds of stuff instead. Thank god that cop was pretty nice and patient but I can totally understand how people may do things against cops' instructions when they get confronted by a SWAT team yelling at them.

The cop that shot him was not part of the SWAT team, they arrived after the murder.

http://www.kwch.com/content/news/Preliminary-hearing-starts-...

Here's a line from the article showing just how poorly trained cops are: "He [Officer Justin Rapp] said he can’t answer whether he would have pulled the trigger if he knew it was a swatting call."

Somebody murdered somebody else in cold blood, at the home of the latter.

The fact that the former had an anonymous, unauthenticated report is not rightly even a part of this.

This is insane.

Yes, it sucks for the officer, because he was improperly trained to give a great deal more credence to the 911 report, which in retrospect, was downright trivial to fill with false information.

I don't think that the officer is 100% culpable, even though his person was enlisted to commit this murder.

This is an obvious, huge vulnerability in society. Do we have a CVE for this?

This is the only comment that gets at the heart of the matter. I would add that culpability is not zero sum. The shooter was 100% responsible, and the others were also partially responsible.

A thought experiment: An unknown person calls my house and says that someone is coming over now, and that the person has a gun. I get my own gun, and crouch over my porch railing, ready. A person walks down the street towards my house. Some 20 yards from my porch he reaches towards his pocket. I shoot him dead, thinking he might have a gun. In reality he was gonna check Facebook on his phone, and was in fact not even going to me at all. Would I be put on trial in this case? Or is this obvious self defense? Would the person who made call be put on trial for manslaughter?

I think the answer to this depends on if you are wearing a badge or not.

You would be charged with manslaughter because this person never displayed any type of threat. The severity of the punishment may be mitigated if you could prove that you got the phone call but you are still responsible for what you do, no matter what anyone tells you.

That's not necessarily the case -- although it's one possibility. You could also be charged with involuntary manslaugher or nothing depending on state and local laws, what the prosecutor believes your state of mind is and, frankly, the whim of the prosecutor and the strength of your defense attorneys. Conversely, you could face a higher charge for exactly the same reasons. There's what should happen -- which will vary according to local law, at least in the US -- and then what will happen, which will vary significantly depending on the DA.

This is not a difficult experiment. If you keep a weapon, you should familiarize yourself with the relevant local laws. RTFM, as they say. If someone makes a threat against you that is not immediate, you should contact the police. Yes, you would be put on trial for deliberately going outside and shooting someone not on your property. Duh.

Yeah I tend to agree with you on this thought experiment, a more appropriate response obviously - but if you take away the faulty variables like that and the call does in fact require you to defend yourself in the manner described, then yes, it it was a hoax then the caller should be responsible (if they figure out who obviously).

If you are white and the victim is black - self-defense.

If you are black and the victim is white - you are going to jail

Charge the officers and the entire chain of command

I'm glad they caught these assholes, but I remain frustrated that the cop who shot an unarmed, innocent man on nothing but someone's phoned-in say-so will escape unscathed.

http://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/swatting-fatal-charges-k...

What about the phone company's role in all this? Don't they share some culpability for delivering spoofed information to a 911 operator? I understand that their entire business is delivering calls, but for whatever reason that 911 operator thought the call was legit based off of the metadata they saw. I feel like if they had a "hey this looks like a shady voip call" message on their terminals, they could communicate that to the responding officers which could have diminished their response.

I'm probably vastly simplifying the phone system, but if it doesn't hurt for telcos too when this kind of abuse happens, they're not likely to help improve the situation.

I read the answer to that in an article a while back: the swatter did't call 911 directly, but instead called the security desk at city hall.

Ah, TIL. Any kind of additional metadata likely wouldn't have helped anyway.

I'm amazed by your mental-gymnastics of trying to shift blame to someone else.

At worst it is 50/50 between the scumbag caller and the unprofessional SWAT officer. I still think that blame should go to the scumbag person because it wasn't his first SWAT "prank". IMO he should be charged for murder 25-life.

Most of these comments are insane. Probably not even people. Did any of you listen to the 911 call and watch the video? http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article192244734.html

I'm trying to understand how Gaskill is being charged, here.

He gave a different address to avoid being swatted himself. It is now "conspiracy, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice" to exercise one's instinct of self-preservation?

Can someone with a better handle of the law than myself explain how Gaskill's actions are unlawful?

He instructed other people to delete tweets/messages after learning someone died to cover up what happened. That seems like obstruction and conspiracy to me.

I think it is a stretch to call tweeting a wrong address "wire fraud" though.

I think his main crimes are conspiring(1) to delete evidence(2) (obstruction). I'm not sure what "wire fraud" is for — maybe just by virtue of (1) and (2) being done online instead of by phone, letter, or in person.

Sounds like he knew the address he gave was going to be swatted and intentionally gave a valid address of someone else. A rational person would have just not answered the question.

That's not what he was charged with, AFAICT. That would be manslaughter or something along those lines, right? I think he's getting charged entirely for the cover-up.

Apart from the other issues, one of the big things is that it is so easy to spoof phone numbers. This has resulted in swatting, telemarketing, robo calls, people pretending to call from the IRS, among other badness.

Email also used to have this problem, until the DKIM. Once email servers started using DKIM, it became a lot easier to filter out spam and to exclude the bad actors.

Maybe we should require some type of cryptographic verification on who originated the call, and have that be visible. It would definitely make my life a whole lot easier if I saw that a number that called me originated with ATT Wireless vs "VOIP Warehouse".

Having a DKIM equivalent for phone calls would do a lot to tackle these type of abuses.

So, why weren't the police charged for opening fire on an unarmed civilian?

This is good doc about the increasing militancy of the police in the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcZ1HvdPEEk

Why isn’t the cop getting punished at all?

And none of the charged are cops, who shot an unarmed man just walking out of his house. Do not fire unless fired upon is common rule of engagement for military operating under much more adverse conditions. If police cannot respect the same, they should not be allowed to have guns. Right now they are not even trying.

> Do not fire unless fired upon is common rule of engagement for military operating under much more adverse conditions.

No, there are different ROEs depending on the situation. "Don't fire unless fired upon" applies to a checkpoint or other defensive situation.

If you're doing a cordon and search, which is very roughly equivalent to what SWAT does, you shoot if you see weapons.

The process to clear a room is a team (typically of four) stacks against the door, breaches the door, and then the goal is to get into the room and eliminate targets in your assigned sector.

You absolutely would fire preemptively because when you're going into a room there's just no time to wait, and you're relying on speed and ferocity to overcome the fact that you just dived into a room.

Now, all that said, that's also why you want to do that sort of thing as little as possible.

Source: US Army doctrine and training as combat arms. Thankfully never had to do one myself...

Had a childhood friend whose dad got his face blown off by a shotgun during one of these searches.

It’s easy to be an armchair expert on an Internet forum, whole different world when at the scene.

> whole different world when at the scene

That works both ways.

Sometimes, it's better to make national law enforcement policies when not pumping with adrenaline at the scene of a tense scenario.

> If you're doing a cordon and search, which is very roughly equivalent to what SWAT does, you shoot if you see weapons.

Looks to me like the military has less itchy trigger-fingers. The man was outdoors, and they didn't see any weapons.

For military this would be a war crime.

OK. That's not the situation here.

Fair point; to be clear, I was responding very specifically to the argument that "but military won't even do this."

Similarly, where are the cries about a flawed system, where anonymous tips can lead to militarized responses? SWAT teams should ONLY ever be engaged after being escalated from a normal police response.

Many policemen are happy to promote the view that cops put themselves in harm's way for society's benefit, but in reality, they go in shooting first, instead of taking on the risk of determining without doubt that a forceful response is necessary first (at their own risk). If all the news stories of unarmed victims are any indication, the net innocent lives saved would be much higher as a result of taking on that risk, even if the rarer instances of an armed, dangerous, and aggressive criminal did result in some of those lives lost being officers.

In any case, this risk of being wrong should only go down if police modernize, with the availability of drones and other technologies.

The fact that these people KNOW it's called "SWAT"ting means they know that a SWAT team is going to go to the house with guns. The people that called it in are more guilty than the police. Yes it sucks that we don't train police better, but they should definitely make the punishment so severe that it helps reduce future SWATTING calls.

They're guilty, but I don't see how it follows thst the person who actually did the shooting is blameless.

Given random person through-out the world could make a Swatting call, and more broadly, hearsay evidence of a terrible crime is always going to exist in potential, if you don't secure your procedures against killing people only on hearsay you're guilty of something kind of terrible.

They know a SWAT team is going to go because they know police will overreact to a phone call.

That's exactly what I'm saying - yes the police bear some responsibility, but the caller still wanted this dangerous situation to exist.

The root problem is the overreaction to the phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without police overreaction and lack of verification.

We can control how police act by settings standards and demanding better. We cannot prevent terrible people from making false 911 calls.

Exactly, swatting DOESN'T exist outside the U.S. (save a rare counterexample).

Cops in my country aren't great, but they don't do this, ever.

Wouldn't it make more sense to reduce the incentive to commit the crime, rather than increase punishment?

Ramping up punishments doesn't seem to deter criminals, and study after study seems to confirm this.

The best solution is to do both. Increase punishment and also reduce incentive. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Sure, but I think that's a larger issue than SWATTING, right wouldn't that comment apply to all crime in general. If you can point me to the studies and what exactly is proposed to deter crime without punishment I'm all ears :)

https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

> 4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.

My point is that if SWAT teams stop shooting random people going for a walk, they'll stop being used as weapons.

It's doesn't suck. It's murder.

In the USA it's shoot first ask questions later. There is very little consequence when an officer kills someone by mistake (or even intentionally sometimes) because the tax payer will cover the settlement with the surviving family, etc and the officer typically gets a slap on the wrist and at most a demotion.

My solution to the quick or reckless trigger finger is either holding the Police Union responsible for any settlements and not the Tax Payer and/or the officer is charged with manslaughter, loses all his benefits and can never own a gun again.

There was an officer in Toronto who had a Van Rampage Murderer actually either point a fake gun or motion that he was reaching for one multiple times and to the officers credit wasn't shot but taken into custody. At least now they can figure out why it happened and not have to speculate or attribute to some unknown reason.

I think a big part of the problem is our gun culture, in particular our self-defense culture. If you read online gun forums one of the main themes is people hesitating and being afraid of hesitating. For example,

  Force yourself to make a decision and implement it as
  quickly and completely as you can. Go all in or GTFO.

  -- http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/04/robert-farago/hesitation-kills/

Similar themes are speed and stopping power. So you're told to never, e.g., use a non-fatal round in a shot-gun. Moreover, people are constantly told to use the most lethal round available.

It's much worse with cops because not only do many cops have the same mentality, it can be compounded by an us-versus-them and better-him-than-me mentality. Basically, the mentality and the discipline leaves no room for actually assessing the situation. Whether or not using using the most lethal rounds, for instance, is legitimate, the emphasis is entirely misplaced. Such things are some of the least inconsequential aspects of what should be most concerning to someone training and preparing to use lethal force.

How much of that is cultural or due to a "mentality", and how much is due to the mechanics of gunfights, though?

It's very easy for a person to be fatally injured but still able to kill you, and likely highly motivated to do so. For most women and men over 60, any aggressor with a knife and surprise can overpower them physically. At that point, you may as well assume their intent is lethal.

> So you're told to never, e.g., use a non-fatal round in a shot-gun.

Non-fatal rounds make sense in riot control, as do many police tactics where you have a large team and the ability to bring in backup.

For an individual, when you reason through it, you think you need to shoot someone with nonlethal, okay, what do you do if it doesn't work? After all, you don't have backup, so you don't really have a "plan B".

That article also hints at a legal problem, which is a result of the perverse logic of intent and probably not amenable to any legislative remedies.

1. Speaking generally, you can commit homicide in self-defense if there is a genuine threat to your life.

2. But, if you shoot to wound, you're demonstrating by your actions that you didn't think there was a genuine threat to your life.

3. Therefore you just weakened your claim to self-defense.

I think the statistics belie your claim that there's a cultural problem because, despite all this, the fact is that defensive gun use is overwhelmingly simply brandishing a weapon or arresting an individual by holding them at gunpoint. By orders of magnitude, violent situations are resolved peacefully vs. by shooting.

> how much is due to the mechanics of gunfights, though?

[snip]

> you think you need to shoot someone with nonlethal, okay, what do you do if it doesn't work?

What matters once you're in a gun fight should be less of a concern than how and whether you get into a gun fight. By emphasizing behavior in the former you're priming people to shoot when there's no need to. It's like bike-shedding some inner loop when what matters most is the larger structure of the program. Focusing on whether to make an inner loop O(1) vs O(2) is inefficient if the outer loop is O(N) instead of O(log N).

It's like with terrorism. What if a terrorist does X? What if a terrorist does Y? That sort of discourse primes society to overestimate the risk of terrorist incidents.

What if 1) a burglar 2) breaks into my home and 3) I shoot and hit and 4) he still comes after me? In that hypothetical #4 is the last thing I should be concerned with, let alone optimizing for. I should be most concerned with #1, that I properly identified the intruder as a burglar and not my daughter sneaking back into the house; then #2, that I'm not an easy target; and finally #3, the decision of whether or not to keep and be ready to use a gun.

#4 should be such a distant concern that most people, perhaps even most cops, shouldn't give it a second thought.

I would go further and say that #1 and #2 so dominate the equation that the standard advice should be to hesitate; for the sake of God, hesitate. There's a flip side to the fact that these situations unfold so quickly--when you're scared and amped up time also slows down. If people are told that they need to make split-second decisions then you're almost guaranteeing that they're going to make premature decisions simply because they'll feel like they're reacting too slowly. And that's precisely what happens again and again with these "accidental" shootings.

I'm not trying to dispute whether guns are useful for self-defense. But I think the dominate narratives within our gun culture are extremely dangerous and lead to unnecessary harm. I grew up around guns and I've noticed that the way many gun owners keep and use their guns is actually in opposition to how they talk about them. That they may say "never hesitate" but if you pay attention they actually do hesitate. They just don't realize it because what's happening internally is that they're quickly and skillfully processing their environment; experience has taught them how to filter and focus on their environment.

If I'm hunting duck I'll often shoot too early whereas my father is far more patient. That patience is learned. I've also been in a couple of physical altercations that could have gone really bad. Time does slow down and I'm glad I intentionally "hesitated" before I escalated.

The advice really should be to hesitate. When you finally have enough skill and experience to make so-called split-second decisions, you'll be relying on discipline and learned environmental cues, not on some heuristic advice. Lacking those specific faculties, the most important thing to remember is to assess the situation, and in a fight-or-flight situation where your autonomic system will try to override your executive functioning you absolutely want to give yourself more time. Again, time will seem to slow down anyhow so it's preposterous to me that we should be optimizing for some unfathomably rare scenario where the extra fractions of a second--if any--would matter.

Gun owners are rightfully taught to respect guns, which is another way of saying they should have a healthy fear of guns without allowing that fear to dictate their behavior. Perhaps what we need is a positive euphemism for "hesitate". But telling people not to hesitate is like telling people not to fear guns. Which would be stupid. Lacking the vocabulary to make finer distinctions, it's better to tell people to fear guns than not to fear them. Lacking a pithy word or phrase that denotes waiting to assess the situation, we should absolutely counsel people to hesitate rather than not to hesitate.

My understanding is that one of if not the primary motivator of the "shoot to kill, not to injure" mantra is to reduce the liability of the shooter. It has been demonstrated many times that when you shoot someone, even if there is insufficient evidence to convict you, you are often able to be held civilly liable if the person you shot survived.

Not advocating for this, just repeating what has been expressed to me by many different people.

This doctrine isn't applicable to police, however, as they're (privately) immune to civil action anyway.

The officer (read: most officers) needed better training and probably deserves some type of discipline for negligence, but not criminal charges.

To those downvoting; this is the cause of most cases of police usage of excessive force. Sometimes it's real racism or abuse of power, but those cases seem to be the minority. More often it's fear, combined with a lack of sufficient training in maintaining self-control under tough situations.

I often hear veterans weighing in on cases like this, shocked that domestic police are so incredibly undertrained in de-escalation compared to the military.

Are you seriously suggesting that we disarm the police?

"Stop it right there, or I'll... I'll get really mad!"

Are you seriously suggesting that the police should have rules of engagement far less strict than those applied by many militaries around the world in literal war zones while fighting actual enemies of their state?

The UK has 4.9x fewer population compared to the USA, yet manages 246x fewer deaths due to policy activity. While some of our police are armed (covering Northern Ireland only - 1.65m population) the majority are not.

The real problem is likely not having armed police, after all, Northern Ireland does not suffer a 246x increase in police-attributed deaths compared to the rest of the UK, but the expectation by police that theirs live are at risk - due to the common access of regular citizens to offensive weaponry

> Northern Ireland does not suffer a 246x increase in police-attributed deaths compared to the rest of the UK

Well, not at the moment, but during the Troubles there were armed troops and armoured cars deployed on the streets. Quite a lot of people were killed by police and army shootings, some of which were extremely illegal (Miami Showband, Bloody Sunday) and one or two of which were actually prosected (Lee Clegg's shooting of Karen Reilly).

Reform of the police was critical to peace there, and will be critical in America. America needs a peace treaty with itself.

More like demilitarize them.

Edit: To the point: Yes. Anyone who can't respect "Don't fire until fired upon" should 100.0000% be disarmed.

I think it has more to do with training and better use-of-force regulations. The police in the States appear to have a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality as evidenced by these events. Disarming them in a country like the US is impossible, but surely better training and stricter rules/penalties would help the situation.

In other countries, not all police carry guns. Those countries are not suffering from the epidemic of gun violence which plagues the US. We are definitely doing something wrong, and they are definitely doing something right. So while we may not disarm the entire police force tomorrow, should we consider ways to deescalate? Hell yes.

It's appropriate for them to have 'less lethal' weapons. It is also far more appropriate for them to be trained in the proper use of force and de-escalation of situations.

Peace officers are supposed to be professionals.

Yes, until they get better trained and stop shooting first. They should also get rid of all of the military style equipment. If they want to be soldiers, then go be a soldier...except soldiers have a set rules to adhere to before shooting at possible hostiles.

Barring repeal of the Second Amendment, the police in the US have the same right to keep and bear arms as anyone else, and that right isn't predicated on training or trigger discipline.

> the police in the US have the same right to keep and bear arms as anyone else

And we have the right to make them not be police anymore.

Disclosure: I am a staunch Second Amendment supporter, well into the "extreme."

The Second Amendment does not override the employer-employee relationship - firearm possessors are not in a "protected class."

You're free to have that firearm and you may not be arrested for it - even while at your place of employ. We need not maintain your employment, however.

Fair enough, but that leads to an unarmed police force facing an armed populace, which either leads to armed citizen militias filling the power vacuum needed to maintain civil order against that armed populace, or a collapse in civil order, because people aren't going to stop shooting at the police.

Which is why I argue that it's an intractable problem barring repealing the Second Amendment. Even if there are legal ways to accomplish merely disarming the police, it doesn't solve anything unless you disarm everyone.

I didn't say this was a good or reasonable idea, just that it was legally workable.

Then treat them like every other person. Claiming "I thought I saw a gun" after shooting someone means most of the population is going to jail.

I get that accidents happens, but something has clearly gone wrong with either the training or lack there of.

I agree with you, one of the biggest contributors to police violence in my opinion is tolerance for it within the system.

> Barring repeal of the Second Amendment, the police in the US have the same right to keep and bear arms as anyone else

Not while acting as government agents they don't, just as those acting as government agents don't have the same freedom of expression and association in that context as they do as private citizens.

In fact, the underlying premise of the second amendment (alluded to, though not expressly stated, in it's preamble) is that there would be no substantial professional military forces or paramilitary police force in the US, and that there would instead be a dependence on (selective or mass, depending on situation) mobilization of the citizen militia to address threats requiring response of an armed force. The second amendment isn't rooted in the idea that having an armed population provides security against government armed forces, it was based on the premise that the government relying on the armed citizenry instead of government armed forces, military or police, was a foundation for securing liberty.

> Barring repeal of the Second Amendment, the police in the US have the same right to keep and bear arms as anyone else...

Employers are allowed to say "no guns at work" in other situations, correct? Does a cop have a corresponding First Amendment right to call everyone a n-word while out on patrol?

>Does a cop have a corresponding First Amendment right to call everyone a n-word while out on patrol?

Unfortunately, yes.

That's demonstrably false.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-william...

https://foxync.com/3493743/pennsylvania-police-officer-fired...

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/palm-beach/boca-raton/fl-p...

http://www.ebony.com/news-views/police-recruit-fired-rap-lyr...

Uhh, what? Yes, they do. We also, as their employers, have a right to restrict the choice of arms we supply them with _as part of their employment_. Or is your argument that police should be able to buy and have whatever weapons they like, without restriction, for their jobs?

As a private person, yes, they have that right. Doesn’t mean the police precinct needs to stock and hand out military or paramilitary equipment to all officers.

Perhaps there should be 2 tiers of officers, with appropriate training and psychological evaluations required for those authorized to carry firearms.

This already exists, with SWAT. They like to shoot people (and dogs) for no good reason, too.

The police in other countries function without guns.

Are you seriously suggesting that we should arm people who can’t even behave with at least the restraint that we expect of soldiers in war zones?

I'm saying they need to get their act together, and for that there must be consequences for not doing so. Make do-not-fire-unless-fired-upon standard RoE. Suspend or fire officers that violate it. Jail officers who kill or maim innocents. Put management that don't do their part on trial.

Yes.

The police, along with everyone else, should be disarmed. NOBODY should be allowed to defend themselves with a gun. Guns should only be allowed for hunting.

Are you seriously suggesting they shouldn't?

What should they be allowed to defend themselves with? Where do you draw the line? Should a woman not have the right to defend herself against a potentially stronger rapist? Should an individual not have the right to defend himself against a group? A group as small as two on one drastically changes the risk factor if you are a victim. Not everyone has the privilege to be physically fit enough to ward off any attacker with success, nor the privilege to live or work in a safe area.

So, how does the vast majority of the country live without guns?

Is everyone without guns dead?

How do they manage to survive, but gun owners can't without their guns?

> NOBODY should be allowed to defend themselves with a gun.

I'm exceptionally happy that you are not the one making the decisions on these rules then. You appear to not have put much thought into this at all.

We already know what happens in a world completely bereft of firearms, it's called history. And history is dark and brutish for much of it, until very very recently. Firearms are but one of many technological advancements human society has achieved that has brought about an end to the dark and brutish existence we lived until now. Why, you might ask?

Quite simply, eliminating firearms returns society to a situation in which defense is only possible through literal force of arms (e.g. the force you can exert with the arms attached to your body) which greatly enhances the power of those who are physically fit when they behave in a brutish manner. In your world the old, infirm, meek, physically unfit, and women have no effective way to defend themselves. Self-defense becomes the hallmark of only the strong, and something which is a far bloodier and less sure affair.

Spare me your world, because I have been a student of history and I see what that world is like. I like the world I live in now, where I can be reasonably assured that I will not be attacked by someone simply because of my small stature and have the legal and practical means to defend myself if I am.

Please don't use simplistic models of the world. You don't have enough information to deduce how the world works and know how everyone in society behaves.

I do.

Pro-tip: ask yourself how the vast majority of people in the country live without firearms.

And ask yourself why they don't live in fear, while you do.

Perhaps government should offer mental-health counseling services for people that seem to be unable to live without firearms? You know, in order to allow these people to live normal lives like the rest of society, without fear of dying a violent gruesome death.

Again, if a 90-year old grandma can live without firearms, you can, too!

All of us have enough information to know that violent crimes still happen - and people should be allowed to defend themselves from it - that's a human right, after all. Fact is, if the attacker is bigger than you, you're going to need a weapon to defend yourself.

> You don't have enough information to deduce how the world works and know how everyone in society behaves.

> I do.

Your trollish arrogance notwithstanding, we both have the required available information to deduce the outcome of your proposed policies. We have documented history for centuries that clearly shows what that outcome would be.

How are you going to fight off two or more 250lb men with knives who want your wallet, your life, and your wife?

Harsh words?

And when Elmer Fudd decides to commit a crime with his hunting rifle, what should the police do about it?

Are you saying we should allow more crimes since we can't stop all crimes?

Were you trying to reply to a different comment?

also, is hunting that important? like, if that hobby is the only reason for people to keep guns, I'm fine with sacrificing it so that no one has a reason to have guns

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America has absolutely nothing to do with hunting.

The Federalist papers will enlighten you to the actual purpose of private arms if you need.

I don't disagree with you, but those are documents written over two centuries ago, mostly about long guns, and at a time when it was suggested that the federal standing army be no more than 30k troops.

The fact that these things are regularly trotted out as if they have anything but the most peripheral relevance in discussions about things like handguns, bump stocks, and silencers is nuts.

At the time the Constitution was penned, almost all of our actual ordnance and navy was privately owned. People had the right, ability, means to own cannonry and mortars.

None of the intent behind the Second Amendment has changed. It's quite frankly sad that to hear that people think so lowly of the Framers' intelligence to foresee technological advances.

The Girandoni Air Rifle existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girandoni_air_rifle

The Framers couldn't extrapolate or imagine future technology? If you read the original justification, private ownership of arms has everything to do with individual liberty in spite of destructive capability.

Me too, but I have relatives who grew up in families where hunting was a thing and they just don't see it this way at all— to them, a hunting rifle is exactly as dangerous as a kitchen knife or circular saw. Basically, a tool that has a time and place and needs to be treated with respect.

Which is not unreasonable, but more importantly, someone with this context sees comments about taking away hunting guns as ignorant urban superiority, scapegoating, and cultural disregard.

I agree, however, hunting is important for keeping wild animal populations (mostly deer) in check, since humans have eliminated most of their natural predators like mountain lions. Therefore, it would need to be replaced with something else, such as state-operated culling (basically hunting, but done by professionals, and preferably in a way so that older/sick animals are killed rather than ones in their prime).

Hunting helps sustain the environment, so it does have its useful purpose, and guns become a tool for that purpose.

Hunting helps fix a problem that, one could argue, was caused by hunting in the first place (the hunting of predators - wolves, mountain lions, etc.)

> NOBODY should be allowed to defend themselves with a gun

Why?

Hell, I suggest that we disband the police entirely.

I blame the cop. Just because police are called doesn't mean someone needs to get murdered. It's the police who bring the idea to the table to murder someone. There's talk about gun control, yet I never hear anyone talking about controlling police guns. That's the first step. Without even an attempt at controlling police guns and power, there is no dialogue. The false report in this case is secondary and hardly interesting when considering the main issue, the police.

Reminds me of the organ donor sketch from monty python, except real and tragic.

The transcripts are just about killing me. A man is dead, and the two are arguing the finer points of who trolled whom like a pair of high-school freshman debaters.

Isn't the real issue here that the cops are all trigger happy? To me, that feels like it should be the real issue.

Can't both issues be the real issue?

The law can't come down hard enough on scum like this.

I'd love the law to come down on the people who murdered an innocent man without verifying claims.

Why do they approach assuming guilt? It shouldn't be this easy to get people murdered by making false claims.

I 100% think these people and anyone else who "SWAT"s should be severely punished, but at the same time worry they may be used as scapegoats to draw attention away from the excessive use of force of police.

I'm not worried in the sense that I think these idiots will be punished too severely (they SHOULD be punished severely), just in the sense that I don't want having them as scapegoats diminish asking questions about why police are so often killing innocent people (regardless of how the situation in which the killing was done happened to occur).

The solution to too much law enforcement is more law enforcement? Maybe we should take a step back and consider the situation more deeply.

The solution is probably fixing the education system and this mess of a society we've built.

Why do you think the "education system" isn't working as intended?

I do think it's working as intended, I think that's the problem, the intentions are not good.

If by 'scum like this' you mean the over militarized, over aggressive police who always escalate situations so that they can put on their battle jammies and act like they are in Fallujah then I completely agree with you.

The killer was not charged.

What's with all the anti-law enforcement? They thought they were dealing with a highly dangerous situation and individual. It's pretty easy to say they should of handled it better as I sit here in the top floor of my corporate office sipping La Croix but let's not forget that the caller was intentionally putting others in dangerous situations.

>They thought they were dealing with a highly dangerous situation and individual.

Are you saying hearsay from a random citizen is probable cause to go kill someone? If that's the case than the police may as well advertise themselves as the cheapest and easiest to use hitmen in the country.

I am in no way excusing the kansas officers here. However this does bring up an interesting point. To properly answer the question about "hearsay" you would need to find out what percentage of 911 calls with details indicating a need for a SWAT team are hoaxes. If the percentage is sufficiently low then the officer may well have been primed by previous experience to expect specific things during the call.

When someone is used to working with accurate information and is then fed inaccurate information from that same source then you can predict the results pretty accurately.

It is probably a combination of a man being killed as he walked out of his mother's house for adjusting his belt and a string of similar, high-profile cases of excessive police force killing people.

Well for one even if the swatter had told the one hundred percent truth the police would have been damn negligent. Imagine a hostage taker instructing one to head out and leave as a diversion or just to open the door while he is in cover with a rifle readied so he can take potshots at them or something. Then the police would have shot the hostage for no reason without even a crossfire as an excuse.

Also the fact they are so trigger happy that they can be used as a free dial-a-hitman is in itself a huge problem. Sure the callers are dirtbags but the fact they are so readily exploitable is on them.

It is not anti-law-enforcement to point out the incredibly negligent independent assessment of the situation, required because the report was totally unsupported by any facts, the incredibly bad risk assessment training that US police use, and the incredibly bad escalation guidelines that virtually guarantee that many innocent people will be killed.

In fact, I would say it's quite pro-law-enforcement to insist that all these things be improved.

I'm sorry but the people in this thread that ONLY want to blame the cops are damn idiotic. IF you had someone SWAT you and your mother or father died, would you really ONLY be mad at the cops?

Let me put it another way too - a swatting call is now rated at giving someone a 1/5000 chance they are GOING TO DIE when the police show up. I definitely think someone knowingly doing that to someone else deserves severe punishment.

No one here is ONLY blaming the cops. Nice strawman you're throwing up.

The fact is the cop (Justin Rapp) was not punished at all, and has been on paid vacation.

Don't even try to blame this on the law enforcement.

Here is the picture of where the cops were when they killed the guy: https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/singl...

The shooter claims the guy held up a gun. Obviously, he didn't. But assuming he DID: how did this cop get a 1-shot kill at that range without a scope? If he was using a scope, he could have seen there was no gun. If he wasn't using a scope, it's very unlikely at that range you could tell if someone was holding a gun up or a cell phone in the dark. The cop was even behind cover, and well across the street.

"The reality was that Finch was unarmed and that nearly every officer on the scene never saw him raise his hand with a gun in it. Several reported that they didn’t fire because they didn’t see a gun."

So, yeah, I'm totally fine with blaming the trigger-happy cop that killed this innocent father of 2. As it turns out, the cop will not be charged at all.

> how did this cop get a 1-shot kill at that range without a scope?

One cynical guess: it will happen eventually, and we didn't hear about the previous 99 times when a police officer shot out the porchlight next to some unarmed and confused man who pulls a sandwich.

> The shooter claims the guy held up a gun.

Remember that what he "sees" isn't what's there, it's what his brain tells him is there. And I'm willing to bet that police officers in the US who constantly see, fear, and think of people holding guns, will end up "seeing" guns a lot more times than there actually are guns there, and more so than officers in countries with much smaller gun threat [Citation needed :) ]. And if that's the case then that is just one more scary side effect of the US gun climate.

> The cop was even behind cover, and well across the street.

Which is why he (or anyone else from the look of it) wasn't in immediate danger and should probably be charged with the killing.

People who hallucinate guns in civilians' empty hands should not be on the police force, and ideally shouldn't even have access to guns themselves.

That is really far away: 30 yards at least? Most target shooting enthusiasts couldn't have made that shot with a pistol. The victim certainly couldn't have, so the cops were never in danger. However as you can see at the bottom left corner of the picture, the cops are packing "assault weapons", so it's understandable that they could murder from that distance.

The murder is definitely law enforcements fault. If they go in wanting to use deadly force without any proof that is on them.

Of course the guys who made false claims should also be in trouble, but just because they were wrong, doesn't mean the law enforcement wasn't ALSO wrong.

> should also be in trouble

Should be charged with a murder. 25-life.

I don't think that they should be charged with murder as they did not commit any actual murder themselves. That being said, I would consider it sane to give a sentence equivalent to murder to people who call a trigger-happy mongol horde (such as the law enforcement) in non-life-threatening (or similar) situations.

Someone made a call saying someone was armed and dangerous and had already murdered at least one person.

What more do you want? A picture? A video?

> What more do you want? A picture? A video?

I want police officers to assess if there is any danger before shooting. The guy they shot was not even the guy who made the call, they had no proof that it was the same guy. I just want police officers to think about the current situation before shooting. If he had no weapon drawn, he was not a threat and there was no reason to shoot.

In the U.S. military, operating in a foreign country, the typical orders under similar intelligence are to go and evaluate the situation themselves to determine if there is really a threat, before opening fire.

It seems crazy to me that soldiers operating in a theater of war are held to a higher standard for use of lethal force than officers of the law interacting with U.S. citizens.

> What more do you want? A picture? A video?

Direct observation of the threat. Period.

> someone was armed and dangerous

That's a rumor at that point (just like ANY call). They need to assess it themselves. Arriving at a scene and assuming anyone they see is this someone also seems pretty irresponsible.

Evidence?

Rules of engagement that don't immediately mean an innocent person winds up dead?

Can you honestly not see this?

A conviction

So it'd be okay for the cops to shoot you if I made such a call to your address?

It was pretty much 99% law enforcements fault with a tiny bit the kids fault. If someone across state lines can call in a hoax and get someone killed then sorry but it’s pretty much on the LEA idiots.

99% of the ill intent was the kid's fault. He sent people with guns to someone else's house and created a threat level that was bound to make police very cautious.

I'm so sick of people defending the swatter. THERE IS NO DEFENSE. NONE.

I think you may be misreading what people are saying. I'm not seeing anyone defending the swatter. (I might have missed it of course).

I'm arguing that the cop ALSO behaved in a way that is criminally incompetent. But blaming the officer isn't somehow saying the swatters aren't responsible. Blame and responsibility isn't shifted from one party to the other.

Edit: > a tiny bit the kids fault.

I DON'T agree with this: but what I disagree most with is the attempt to divide the responsibility. It doesn't need to be divided. Two crimes were commited. Treat them separately. The kid is 100% responsible for his action, and the cop is 100% responsible for his actions.

It's pretty clear that without the actions of one, the person wouldn't have ended up dead. So why try to divide it?

It seems to me that this is not defense of the swatter, but rather an indictment of swat. There will be hoaxes. The government still shouldn't kill people over a hoax.

Blame doesn't "move" or "shift". It's a sequence of events with blame in each one. Saying the kids committed a crime doesn't in ANY WAY vindicate police shooting an unarmed person.

Modern [edit: American] law enforcement training puts so much priority on the safety of officers that it results in the deaths of unarmed innocents in this manner.

> The reality was that Finch was unarmed and that nearly every officer on the scene never saw him raise his hand with a gun in it. Several reported that they didn’t fire because they didn’t see a gun. At least one officer said that when he saw Finch dropping his hands to his waistband and pull them back up he remembered thinking, “that’s not a good idea. . . don’t be lifting, tugging at your waistband.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Warrior_Cop is a good read.

Another example of how horrifyingly bad this sort of "everyone's a threat" training is can be seen in the disturbing video of Daniel Shaver's execution.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/12/0...

It's hard to watch.

> Modern [edit: American] law enforcement training puts so much priority on the safety of officers that it results in the deaths of unarmed innocents in this manner.

'Pantywaist machismo'

All the trappings of machismo without any sense of duty or bravery.

> Modern law enforcement training puts so much priority on the safety of officers that it results in the deaths of unarmed innocents in this manner.

No it doesn't. But contemporary american law enforcement training sure appears to.

A fair point. Edited to add.

Maybe the training is calibrated correctly. Perhaps these deaths are an anomaly, but a different calibration that might save these lives would result in ten times as many officer deaths? Without frequency information, it’s hard to tell. And then there’s the ethical question of trading off between police and bystanders... Seems more nuanced than some in this thread want to admit.

Well considering the estimate as of 2013 was 400 calls PER YEAR means there have probably been what, 5000 swatting calls total since it started?

1 Death is basically damn fucking LUCK.

You can put the blame on multiple parties for the same crime. It's not 'this or that'.

Ok then. Politicians? Citizens who don't force political change to prevent it? Over-militarization of law e.... oh, right, I'm not allowed to blame them.

You can start with the scumbags who placed the SWAT call. That's a good start don't you think.

> You can start with the scumbags who placed the SWAT call.

Let's just agree that someone having committed a crime doesn't mean the next person in the chain of events isn't responsible. People saying the cops should have done differently aren't in any way saying that the people placing the call aren't responsible. It's a false dichotomy.

The problem is with stopping there.

If these scumbags had tried this in, say, London, chances are the victim would still be alive today.

What is with your agenda to not pin blame on the cops?

Why not?

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