technically a bomb hoax but 2 years ago.
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I know! Seldom do I go to bed at night without my every sinew being wracked with crippling fear of outlaws stealing my wife from under me.
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Maybe if the police officer had been more serious injured, police might have started taking swatting more seriously. I’ve always figured they wouldn’t really care until a cop actually died.
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Nah then they would just show up and start shooting without bothering to check.
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Guns and allowances to kill given to people who love guns and want allowances to kill people.
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In general I agree though I think that excerpt you posted needs three important pieces of context.
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The relevant stat isn’t how likely it is for a cop to die on the job, it’s how likely it is for a cop to die in a scenario similar to the incidents in question (SWAT call implying a dangerous subject, report of an armed person and the suspect isn’t following orders, etc). I suspect the majority of policing is fairly mundane and these scenarios are very unusual, which is part of the reason why they sometimes go poorly.
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For anyone the thing that guides their actions isn’t the true amount of danger, but rather the perception of danger. The idea of entering a confrontation with an unstable stranger whom you suspect to be armed is going to seem very scary. Especially when you consider cops are going to discuss every encounter that went bad among themselves. There needs to be a ton of focused training to combat that perception.
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We don’t know how much the low fatality rate is a consequence of the trigger happy US cops. It may be you can drastically reduce public fatalities without increasing officer deaths (I personally suspect you’d even decrease officer deaths). But it might be that US culture and gun saturation means that US cops need to be trigger happy unless they want a jump in fatalities, that’s certainly what the cops think.
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Also in a blaze of gasoline, with hostages in a closet and one already dead.
The fuck who made that call checked off all the boxes to encourage someone to pull a trigger. (Somewhere there’s probably a HOWTO for people like that.)
With caller ID spoofing, police treated it as confirmed rather than an unconfirmed anonymous tip, even though caller ID has been broken for years.
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No dude. Systemic issues like this don’t happen just because some people you’re suspicious of decided one day “hey I’m gonna be a murdery douche”.
There’s been a long series of top down political decisions in this country to move us towards an adversarial approach to policing. The War on Drugs. Stop and Frisk and broken windows. The erosion of public funding, leading to municipalities funding themselves by civil forfeiture and hefty fines for minor offenses. That whole “hey lets sell military equipment to the cops for cheap!” policy as Iraq and Afghanistan started to (sort of) wind down. The rise of for profit prisons.
This is not an issue of officers on the ground. Its an issue of elected officials (and the officials they then appoint) who want this. Nixon’s “law and order”. A police force that is actively antagonistic to the public and highly militarized. And where public funding is so stripped back that proper training is a no go.
A culture that constantly tells police they’re at war (implied to be against the public). Including Unions that constantly tell them to very, very afraid. Because every single attempt at reform, or criticism is an attempt to murder them, for the sake of garnishing votes in Union elections.
This shit comes from the Mayors, and Governors (and now the Federal Executive branch), commissioners and chiefs. Because somebody thinks these things are good. And that they work. Despite all evidence to the contrary. cough GOP cough
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God I’m from Wichita and I’ve driven by that house many times. I hope the person who called the Wichita PD get what they deserve in terms of their crime but I want to also say that the Wichita PD is full of Barney Fife types that obsess over doing such things. That part of Wichita is a bit worn down (even when I was a kid) but it’s not some war zone that needs any kind of SWAT response.
Wichita may be a big town in terms of population but it’s not a big city in terms of its people. It’s a very sleepy, boring town. So I hope more folks realize that maybe the Wichita PD needs to validate the need to use SWAT on a mere call like having a patrol car swing by to see what’s up first rather than going and killing someone because they can.
It really ticks me off but this isn’t unusual for Wichita PD, they’re mostly idiots. Heck, back in the 90s they were harassing black kids that wore Greenbay or Bulls jackets on the supposition that they were gang members (red for Bloods, green for Folk Nation). That particular PD needs to be dismantled or at very least put on citizen oversight.
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Good luck in prison, dbag.
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Didn’t say that. In fact I made no comment on why they decided that. I agree with much of what you said. But not this…
Oh no, it’s both. Peas in a pod. You join an army you shoulder a measure of the responsibility for the orders you obey.
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If this had been a hostage situation, the victim may have died, due to the violent approach used by the police.
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Its not an army. And persisting in thinking of it as one is a major part of the problem. The problem is not caused by the officers on the ground. The problem officers on the ground are caused by the policies themselves. The situation at hand disincentivize sensible people interested in public service from joining. The highly politicized nature of our law enforcement orgs, together with a whole shit ton of corruption at the top. Scares off those interested in a career in favor of those looking to punch a clock just long enough to earn a pension and those who’ve drank the Koolaid. While keeping those cops who are looking for a career, interested in public service, and are actually doing the job capably packed down and pigeonholed for fear of losing their jobs. I know a lot of very good, active in the community, reformist, cops who have been forced into early retirement for going against the grain or joining the wrong political party cough DNC cough.
Didn’t say it was. Just that that violent approach used by the police isn’t a simple factor of “cops are douche bags”.
Not every department needs a fully armed anti-terror unit with a tank on call 24/7. Beat cops in frikin Whichita shouldn’t be hearing every minute of every day that everyone is out to kill them and they need to prepared to shoot at all times. Leaving them jumpy and prepared to go off.
Swatting is an artifact of how militarized our PDs are. You’ve got all these tactical units ready to go at all time for the least thing. So it becomes trivial to toss them at anything, trivial for a trolley to get them rolling out with a false report. Toss in the bevy of unprepared idiots certain that Obama is hiding in the bushes to scalp them for wearing blue that typically end up pursuing such positions. I’m surprised this hasn’t happened (a lot) already.
“US cops decided the (non-rich) public was their enemy”
Doesn’t explain that. Nor does it even suggest at a solution.
That solution being getting some reformers into positions of power over these things. Numerous departments have make huge steps in fixing these problems. Dallas was one of the bellwethers for it. Big cruel irony with that shooting there. Fact of the matter is we know to reverse all this. And we know to reverse it quite quickly. There is just no will to do so from the top down.
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It shouldn’t be, but they don’t seem to grok that fact.
Yeah, no kidding. At this point, no ethical person with two gray cells to rub together would join an American police force.
Doesn’t surprise me. But they’re better people for quitting the force.
Of course reform is needed. Meanwhile let’s be realistic about what the cops are, a giant criminal gang. Gang members aren’t the cause of gangs and you can’t solve that problem at the street enforcer level. But anyone with a brain still holds them culpable for their actions in the gang and still treats anyone else who joins that gang as a threat.
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St Louis has a Democratic mayor and Eric Garner was murdered in New York. Where his killers are still carrying badges and guns, under the protection of de Blasio.
Murderous, racist authoritarian policing is a bipartisan sin.
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They didn’t quit. They had their careers ruined by corrupt higher ups.
We’re not talking an “i can’t do this any more” situation. Or a principled stand. We’re talking good people doing good work. Who were punished for it. A corrupt politician deciding to prosecute union reps for imagined crimes, and the Union leadership allowing it/participating because those Reps were ad odds with leadership. Very good investigators told “we can help you make homicide, if…” who see their overtime disappear and are suddenly stuck in the precinct when they say no. While the guys who do like to throw punches at the right people, bury charges, drum things up. Curiously get extra pay. Promotions they aren’t qualified for, and an awful lot of looking the other way.
I don’t think you’re being too realistic about it. Your being incredibly, incredibly simplistic about it. These are just people. And like any other people some of them are assholes. Some of them are panicky. Some of them are just shit at their jobs.
A large part of the problem. The one majorly responsible for those “most cops” we hear about (and it is most cops in my experience, and nearly every time I’ve seen the subject poked with the data stick) that just want to do there jobs. Keeping their heads down and staying out of it.
Is the vast politicization of the subject. On the one hand you have the right wing backing the cops no matter what, they can do no wrong, etc. On the other you have the knee jerk “all cops are bad, by default as a concept” approach that seems so common on the left.
In between you have actual reformers and activists like the BLM movement trying to actually explicate whats going on and the source of it. And push towards those well understood reform policies. The news and politicians keep us away from that practical space by pointing to the shit fight surrounding it.
The NYPD has many policies put in place during Guliani’s reign, and continued under Bloomburg, and that are only sort of being abandoned now. Like really sort of. Like under court order with a lot of push back sort of. Things like stop and frisk and broken windows but some less unsung policy issue. There was also a lot of top brass that carried over through that era. The same few guys cropping up and swapping positions. Which is not to say Dems or De Blazio have done anything to actively improve things. De Blazio is nothing if not an idiot prone to shooting himself in the foot.
The policy situation in question was established largely by the political right during the Reagan years, proliferated after. And really came to a head with changes made under Bush. Persisting and getting worse because noone was bothering to do much to fix it. The erosion of public funding is an ongoing project.
Not saying these things don’t happen everywhere. But it comes out of a very particular political movement. And only one of our political parties is not just excusing it. But actively championing the worst of it.
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That seems to be true of all the swatting calls I read about. That’s so explicitly the purpose of swatting, I’m finding it hard to accept that these aren’t all being treated as murder attempts.
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Look, I agree with about 80% to 90% of what you’re saying. But US cops are predatory in a vast and systemic way and you don’t sign up with that kind of organization unless you’re evil or really naive, and if you’re the latter then you either turn bad or you quit or you have an “accident”. US police operate almost exactly like a mafia which is almost never punished.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but my distrust of police has almost nothing to do with my political alignment and everything to do with what cops do. I lived for three years in South Central LA and gangsters were a fact of life. They weren’t all bad people, many were just trying to get through life with their skin and a roof over their family’s heads, but they were still part of a mafia like organization. Cops are all that and none of the answerability.
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The courts have a problem handling fractional assassination attempts.
If you launch a chain of events that only have a 10% chance of killing someone, it’s hard to prove that it’s a murder attempt to a jury. (Which probably isn’t allowed to hear about other 10% longshots.)
I am shocked, shocked I say! that Scientology hasn’t tried swatting, that I know of.
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