But I wonder about the cop as well:
http://amp.kansas.com/news/local/cri...192111974.html
400 of these calls a year. I suspect many or most are US citizens. Wonder how many are white.
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But I wonder about the cop as well:
http://amp.kansas.com/news/local/cri...192111974.html
400 of these calls a year. I suspect many or most are US citizens. Wonder how many are white.
The fact that swatting is getting so popular and the police still show up in full tactical gear, trigger happy, and ready to bust down random doors is disgraceful. The fact that you have to contact police before hand to warn them that you're a swatting target is disgraceful.
The officer fucked up. Hopefully that doesn't get swept under the rug as they go after the swatter (if they can at all).
How are police officers supposed to know if this situation does or does not require tactical gear? If the police had not treated this seriously and hostages had gotten killed, what would your response then be?Quote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
Why do you assume swat tactical gear is the only appropriate first contact response for a threat to be considered serious? :noob:
For a hostage situation where you have been told someone has already been shot and killed? Seems appropriate to me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
Absolutely! How else should hostage situations where there's already been a fatality be dealt with?Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch the Red
Anyone involved iniating false claims should be given a lengthy jail sentence. Making false Police reports is already a crime. To deliberately set an innocent person up to be surrounded by armed Police who have been lied to into thinking you've already killed someone is heinous.
An ANONYMOUS report where you have been told this. It's not as if the practice of "swatting" is a completely new development. Anonymous reports should always be a sign for: "Be careful, report may be bogus!"Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch the Red
Also, since when is the first reaction in a potential HOSTAGE situation the order: "Send in the clowns!"?
Seriously, what happened to: "Assess the situation, try to defuse and deescalate first"?
Also, isn't it at least equally likely that in a HOSTAGE situation that an actual hostage may be the first to the door? Because when you don't assess the situation you end up with shit like this:
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...r10-story.html
What do you mean by anonymous? This wasn't an email or letter that got sent to the station with no return address; this was a phone call to dispatch, by the person who said they had killed their father. In fact, from the sound of it, it was multiple phone calls, including a call after the police had shown up.Quote:
Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro
Note, none of this should be read as a defense of the officer who may have acted improperly. I haven't seen the footage of the incident.
“This call was little peculiar for us,” Livingston said. “(The call) went to a substation first, then it was relayed to dispatch, then dispatch gave it to us. We have a lot of information to go through.”
As near as I can tell that has nothing to do with the call being anonymous, and everything to do with how the call was routed. I am by no means an expert, but it sounds like the call went to a substation, (which sounds like a mini police station with more limited functionality from what I could find) and then got routed to dispatch for handling. That tells me that they didn't dial 911 directly, but I would guess everything was handled according to established procedures. I would also doubt specifics as to how the call was routed was passed along to the officers, but I could be wrong about that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch the Red
This was the error I was pointing out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch the Red
In my city we have 2 main numbers. 911 for emergencies and a separate non-emergency number. Calling a substation directly sounds like a lazy google search for an address + find nearby. The police themselves said the call was particular, which is a glaring hindsight is 20/20 admission.
Right, my mistake - the call did not originate to dispatch, it was routed there; either way I doubt that level of granular detail is passed onto the police officers from dispatch. I would also guess calls to nonemergency numbers do regularly get passed to dispatch after the fact. I could call the non emergency number to ask them to perform a welfare check, but I would hazard that then gets forwarded to police officers via dispatch with a lower priority.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
Emphasis mine. The person was not identified so it has to be treated as anonymous. Seriously, if all you have to go on is the name a person gives you over an easily spoofed line then you better treat all such calls as suspect.Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch the Red
And, again, this is a known issue. It's not as if swatting is a completely new problem which has hit the US totally out of the blue.
Additionally, the reports give the typical excuse by your moron cops again: "The shot person moved his hands to his waist line!"
Yeah, fuckhead. When I open a door, where will at least one of my hands be in 90% of the time?
Amazing how the same people who talk about the need for guns to fight government oppression are quite happy to excuse cops who shoot anyone posing even the slightest threat to government officials (i.e., police officers).
Turns out it may have been commissioned:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...n-los-angeles/
This guy is making money calling in swat and bomb threats?
I hope he gets a lengthy jail sentence akin to Manslaughter. See how funny it is then.
I'm sorry, what kind of calls do you think the police get everyday, and what kind of verification are you supposing routine calls go through? Of the two or three times I have had call to phone the police I think I only gave my name once. You are describing what I can only imagine are the vast majority of 911 calls.Quote:
Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro
A third of all 911 calls are hoaxes. Cops and dispatchers have to be cognizant of this sad fact, and adapt their reasoning and behavior accordingly.
That's a ridiculous statistic and there should be zero tolerance on that.
In Australia there was an odd problem in the 90s with a very sudden spike in incorrect (not hoax) calls. There the emergency phone number is 000 which wasn't a problem before but then suddenly the line was getting lots of calls by faulty electronic machinery. Eg vending machines which would call when stock was running low might after a power cut get their phone number reset to a string of zero's which then led to the emergency services getting called.
Actually it's a misremembered statistic. The number varies greatly from city to city. On the whole, a third are non-emergencies. Some places report a large number of butt-dials. Some places experience a large number of prank calls.
Yeah butt dials, like the vending machine issue I mentioned, are a problem of technology. But its not remotely in the same category as spending 20 minutes on the phone reporting a murder and hostage situation.
Neither are most prank calls which are more Bart Simpson than this.
Still no excuse to shoot someone seconds into an encounter, especially when you're fully protected by a SWAT uniform.
Indeed. That's surely the purpose of sending in SWAT, they should surely be both better equipped, better trained and more experienced than your regular beat cop.
Surely.
Aye, I think it's good to respond with SWAT expecting the worst, but not to shoot on sight when you have no idea what's going on.
And? That's what "assessing the actual situation" is for.Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch the Red
Of course you can always try to ram your way into a home and set fire to a toddler, but I think that's rather poor behaviour for an agency that's a) NOT the military and b) supposed to "protect and serve".
And from what I understand, even the military has stricter rules on when to fire their weapons.
Right? Are you disagreeing with something I have said? Am I missing something? Assessing the situation is an incredibly important part of policing. So is deescalation. Agreed. What is your point?Quote:
Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro
Zero tolerance for swatting is what is needed. It is difficult because of the ease of spoofing but an example needs to be made. It is not only an expensive waste of time in the BEST case scenario, it can also easily lead to someone's death.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
Honestly would hope he dies in a tragic accident while in prison. That would make him see how funny it was and more importantly it would send a message to would be assholes. The bottom line is for someone who is utterly morally bankrupt, the only way to prevent shitty actions is fear of consequences.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
How about zero tolerance for trigger happy cops?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewkowski
US cops very frequently die on the job if they don't shoot first.
What comparable justification is there for swatting?
We had this discussion before. They don't, a certain level of risk is part of the job, they get little training in deescalation or use of firearms, and they have riot gear for a reason.
Just because we've had this discussion doesn't mean we've reach a conclusion or agreement. You think a cop dying is an acceptable risk as part of the job, I don't. You think too few cops are dying and they should put themselves at much greater risk, I don't. You're willing to simply dismiss the thousands of American cops that have died this century on the line of duty and the tens of thousands injured as part of the equation as to why they pull the trigger, I'm not.
Other nations manage to get by without such a massive death toll for their cops dying at the hands of criminals which is the environment they're then pulling the trigger in. Why can't or won't the US solve that problem?
It is a more acceptable risk than the risk of them killing innocent people. In this matter, the two are often in opposition--you can't optimize both to zero. Either cops accept that their jobs entail a greater risk of being injured or killed than most other jobs, or we accept cops killing innocent people out of a desire to eliminate risk--both real and imagined--to themselves.
Why is it a more acceptable risk? The cops are themselves innocent people too. Collateral damage happens in war zones and it seems the streets of the USA aren't much better.
There is a third option which that that you address the root cause of the problem. American society shouldn't be comparable to a war zone.
It's a more acceptable risk because risk is an inherent part of a cop's job and they take on that risk voluntarily, for which they're generously compensated. The same is not true of their innocent victims. Firefighters also have a job that comes with inherent risk. The only way for a firefighter to nearly eliminate that risk is to never leave the fire station. The only way for a cop to nearly eliminate the risk inherent in working as a cop is to never leave the office.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
I'd like you to live in reality once in awhile. You don't hear about the thousands of cases where things went exactly like they should, you only hear about the cases where it doesn't. We are also talking about *people* not robots. Adrenaline, nerves etc do a lot. You can put the same guy in a hundred similar situations and maybe 99 times he gets it right but here, he got it wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Do we need better training? Yes.
Do we need better screening before handing out guns and badges? Yes.
Do we need zero tolerance for destroying evidence or misplacing cam footage and/or turning off cams during operations? Yes.
But we can't expect police/citizen interaction with a report of an armed individual posing a danger to others to always turn out ideally. THAT is why it is critical 911 abuse and 'swatting' not be allowed to occur.
There's also the concern that if someone shoots a cop they are likely to shoot other people too. The chance of a criminal killing and escaping the officer and then killing other people is a real issue and would have to enter into this moral calculus.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
A cop that murders people or kills through recklessness is, similarly, a risk to other people, liable to harm more people unless he's held accountable. In this case, of course, we're talking about a person who didn't shoot at the cops.
It seems like we aren't going to see eye to eye on how we view the consequences of police foul ups. However can you at least agree that we should throw the damn book at little shits who do 'swatting' and other 9-1-1 prank calls?Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless