Watch any American cop show.
Then think of it as a police training video, because it is.
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Not just conspiracy but also accessory or even accomplice depending on jurisdiction. I really hope these fuckers are made an example of. This isn’t prank ordering a pizza to someone’s house, this is something that has a high likelihood of someone getting killed.
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When someone threatens to send an armed violent group of people to your house, giving him someone else’s house address is not the correct move, especially when the guy has a history of carrying out those threats.
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The 911 call and video of the incident.
If you don’t want to watch, it plays out something like this: dude opens his door to see WTF is going on outside his house. He’s clearly disoriented and confused. Moments later he gets shot. The whole incident plays out in seconds.
It really is a sad state of affairs that such shoddy police work is considered normal.
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Those who try to cause the swatting incident will use caller ID spoofing or other techniques to disguise their number as being local.
The phone companies really need to patch their broken caller-id. It wasn’t a problem back when a digital switch was major corporate equipment, but now spoofing has become trivial.
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The whole swatting thing legit scares me for society. I wonder how the more sensible designers of police policy consider (a) acting against swatting (i.e. how to protect against it), and (b) if swatters are going to (or have already?) swatted, for example, off-duty cops?
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Yay, Kansas is in the news again - oh for fucks sake.
OK, this is another especially bullshit shooting. I will post the link below to the body camera, which is short, but shows the few seconds leading up to it.
This is a bad shoot in every way:
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No weapon presented.
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They cops look to be about 50 yards away, but were at least 25 yards away, with rifles, with cover. With vests. Let’s just assume for one minute that the guy had a pistol. The average person can’t hit shit at 25 yards, much less at 50 yards. They weren’t in any sort of immediate danger. The fact the guy shot with out seeing a weapon is preposterous.
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One guy shot once. (Well it cuts off, but that appears to be the case). Which means all the other officers didn’t feel like it was time to shoot. This reminds me of the guy who was shot, supposedly accidentally, by a cop while on his back (the guy with the autistic kid).
Seriously, I think soldiers in Iraq had more restrictive ROE in dealing with civilians.
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I’m pretty sure that if anyone ran the statistics, ‘had hands in vicinity of waistband’ would be among the twenty top leading causes of death in the United States today. It certainly seems to be a feature of every police shooting.
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With immediate shoot-on-failure-to-follow-command rules, anyone with a hearing problem is going to be shot.
Also, ordering someone to “walk this way” while blinding them with lights is criminally dumb.
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Are those the official rules with police forces? I don’t think so, and I don’t see how that could be considered constitutional. Resisting arrest isn’t a capital crime.
I agree it is both bad policy and a bad mentality.
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Yeah I expect cops and SWAT teams are going to spend about 0 seconds of introspection on this. It’s never been their fault before, why would they start now, especially when there are far more tantalizing angles to the story to distract the public. Look at the monkey!
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I hope the gamers responsible get put under the prison.
I doubt there will be any real consequences for the cops involved, as usual.
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Are you from around these parts? ('Mercuh.)
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Maybe this is why in science fiction, often people are depicted wearing unitards in The Future?
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No, but “failure to comply” in the absence of a real threat seems to be the defacto default for shooting in too many cases.
Oh well, “the officer was acting to the best of his knowledge and was in fear of his life”, move along.
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Security state autoimmune disorder
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Perhaps I’m being unreasonable, but it seems to me that right after the very first fucking time a swat team raided the wrong place because of an anonymous call, there should have been procedures in place to ensure it didn’t happen again.
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Well, it was only sheer dumb luck that no one had been killed before this, given how police operate. Now maybe we can finally start treating “swatting” as attempted murder, because that’s what it is. The reluctance to specifically call it that came from refusing to acknowledge how dangerous the police are in the US. Can’t pretend otherwise now, though.
And when what you did is a felony (e.g. filing a false police report), that’s felony murder.
They were expecting a man who was armed and ready to go out in a blaze of gunfire. That made the cops extra-twitchy, when standard procedure is to shoot anyone who looks suspicious.
Short, charitable answer: the police have no training and can reasonably expect that anyone they meet has a fucking gun (and that whatever the outcome, the cops won’t be held accountable). Leaving aside issues of racism, corruption, and tribalism that turns the cops into another criminal gang, those dynamics alone are the perfect storm of cops shooting people - which is why, in an increasingly low-crime country, the US populace has more to fear from cops than the other way around.
There’s almost never a trial, even in the most egregious cases, as the previously mentioned interplay between police unions (which have essentially set up deals with the local government that allows them to get away with murder), prosecutors and a judicial system weighted in favor of cops makes sure it doesn’t get that far.
This situation is a total CF- there’s three people involved. The intended victim - who gave a false address, the guy who was pissed at him, and the guy he hired to actually do the swatting. The latter two definitely sound like a conspiracy - I’m not sure what the intended victim is in all this. Certainly not innocent.
The 911 system seems so screwed up that it’s essentially impossible for the police to know what’s going on, sadly. They have no way of verifying calls are coming from where they say they are, and not all information gets passed along to the cops, either.
You’d think so, but nope.
It’s pretty much the only training cops get…
Yeah, I frequently see vets talking about video of police interacting with people, and their response is universally, “None of that would have been acceptable behavior by military in a war zone.” I’ve always thought that treating police like military in a war zone was a terrible, terrible idea, but apparently it would be a huge step up.
When the populace is armed, the police can argue that “resisting arrest” slides into “presenting a potentially deadly threat.” Unlike in a society where there’s gun control, this becomes a sufficiently convincing argument that the police can get away with it. There are consequences to our gun laws - this is one of them.
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No, I’m from Finchley in North London, where we drink tea.
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Now, I’ve heard out in them thar parts, some of the po-lice don’t even CARRY firearms. Insanity, I tells ya!
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