Yeah, police are never responsible for anything! Zero percent responsible! ZERO!!
such brave, so heroes, thank you for your service officer
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Fix Caller ID!
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As a former Wichitan, I’m hoping he enjoys Leavenworth (the prison, not the army facility).
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I remember when this story initially broke. And it is still shocking. My kids play online FPS games. Sad and scary. This swatter is a real piece of work. Also, i agree with other commentors… and what about the police?!
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I’m not going to assume our newly minted felon is a sociopath. 20 years is a very long time for him to contemplate his shitty behavior.
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The phrase that keeps coming to mind, is “open up a can of whup-ass”.
The script that this clown used to kill a stranger might be called, “the can opener”.
That always struck me as a peculiar, uniquely American turn of phrase. Once you open up a can, you gotta use it all, because therwise it will just go to waste.
If whup-ass was a substance, and if it was something I needed to use for legit reasons, Id want to titrate the stuff for an exact dosage. Whup-ass in an airbrush. A syringe. Time release capsules of whup-ass… A pharmacopia of whup-ass!
But amassing the stuff in easy to open, pop top cans, the way SWAT teams are organized, thats a deep down fundamental design flaw.
A society not at war with itself, would ensure this kind of thing could not possibly happen. Theres several other failure modes in the news that come to mind as well.
Im glad this one intance led to a conviction, but still, fuck this shit.
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It’s so tempting to throw the criminal-justice-reform baby out with the justifiably-outrage-inducing-act-of-criminal-idiocy bathwater.
But twenty years is an extremely long time. It’s so long that Scandinavia–a place that I, at least, think of as being particularly civilized–treats it as essentially equivalent to a life sentence. I’m a significantly different person than I was twenty years ago.
The counterargument, of course, is that the victim here will be dead forever, so why shouldn’t the person responsible have to pay forever? To that I can only answer that if we focus on eye-for-eye retribution, we are impoverishing ourselves as a society by rejecting the notion that even people who repeatedly do awful things are capable of change.
This guy is going to have to pay for his crime with what remains of his youth. All of it. We can hope that he’ll learn something in the process. Twenty years of long prison nights offer a lot of time for reflection.
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And he’ll continue to pay once he leaves prison. Convicted felons don’t get much in the way of protection from discrimination in the US. His job prospects will be limited, he won’t be able to live just anywhere, and he’ll be constantly harassed by police.
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Perhaps because that is the real problem; one individual alone would not be able to wreak so much havoc if our law enforcement system was not already hyper-militaristic and primed to be weaponized.
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When the police go to a house that provably had no hostile occupants and those occupants are killed,
the problem is always the police response.
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That really does depend on which state he’s living in and whether he’s also a sex offender felon.
If I were the police, I’d be furious that some punk can make a phone call and deploy me to do some stupid crap on his behalf. Unless, of course, I like doing that stuff.
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True. Here in Austria, you either get up to 20 year, or a life sentence. People are eligible to parole after half of the sentence, and of course, there is no “life without parole”, so even with a life sentence, people have a non-zero chance to get out before the 20 years are up.
“Murder” requires intention (at least by the definitions in use in Germany, Switzerland and Austria). A serial swatter does something “incredibly dangerous”, and definitely “should know better”, and takes an unacceptable risk with other people’s lives, but (usually) doesn’t intend for the victims to be killed.
So unless it is proven in court that this was indeed the intention, it is just “negligent manslaughter” (“Fahrlässige Tötung”). I just googled the relevant paragraphs - the maximum penalty for that is 3 years in Austria and Switzerland, and 5 years in Germany.
Of course, you wouldn’t get that for SWATTing someone in a country where it’s reasonable to assume that the police are not criminally insane, because then it’s not even negligent manslaughter;
in Austria it’d be “Verleumdung”, the act of knowingly exposing someone to prosecution by making a wrong accusation. Maximum 1 year.
20 years is a barbaric punishment for this.
20 years in an American prison doubly so.
And on top of that, he’s agreeing to a plea bargain. That thing where people waive their fundamental human right to a fair trial because the prosecution has made a credible threat that they could make an even more excessive sentence stick.
So it’s even more barbaric.
Sorry people, I can’t find it in me to celebrate.
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Those swatting calls follow scripts fine-tuned over time to push as many cop buttons as possible:
- Children in immediate danger.
- Deaths already.
- Killer has weapons.
- Time is of the essence.
- The call came from this address.
- It okay to shoot!
- Time to be a Hero!
As much as FixThePolice would be the best answer, fixing caller id might be a quicker fix. Name some phone companies and the group that manages that tech standard in liability lawsuits, and I think they’d suddenly find that fixing caller id isn’t as hard as they said.
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Well, I certainly don’t know German law! In Canada if you do something that you know or ought to know is likely to cause death without regard for whether it does, that’s murder, not negligence.
I’ve heard it called the “thin skull” rule* after a hypothetical: If you get angry and punch someone without knowing they have an unusually thin skull and they die from the punch, you are guilty of murder, because while you didn’t intend to kill them, you intended to harm them, you knew there was some chance you’d harm them greatly, and it did in fact kill them.
I don’t think that’s a monstrous way to look at things. When you do criminal things with the intent of harming other people and the consequence ends up being death, I can see how society’s view is that you are culpable for the death.
Of course in America if you swat someone then you ought to damn well know you are risking their life and the argument is kind of moot.
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If punishing this one little twerp were the only consideration n, five years would be plenty for someone like me whos never been SWATted . But if other gamers think about 20 years s before they initiate their script, then itll be have been worth it.
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SWATting is horrible, but de-escalating the militarization of our civilian police force might be nice too.
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And it’s not only Germany - situation is similar in most of European countries, even the poorer ones.
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Except for the purchasing supervisor for the department.
“Just a reminder, folks, before you head out on your beat. Purchasing wants us to shoot more through the end of the fiscal year, or our ammunition budget may be decreased for next year…”
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