Call of Duty Gaming Community Points To 'Swatting' In Wichita Police Shooting (dailydot.com)

schwit1 shares a report from The Daily Dot: A man was killed by police Thursday night in Wichita, Kansas, when officers responded to a false report of a hostage situation. The online gaming community is saying the dead man was the victim of a swatting prank, where trolls call in a fake emergency and force SWAT teams to descend on a target's house. If that's true, this would be the first reported swatting-related death. Wichita deputy police chief Troy Livingston told the Wichita Eagle that police were responding to a report that a man fighting with his parents had accidentally shot his dad in the head and was holding his mom, brother and sister hostage. When police arrived, "A male came to the front door," Livingston told the Eagle. "As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon." The man at the door was identified by the Eagle as 28-year-old Andrew Finch. Finch's mother told reporters "he was not a gamer," but the online Call of Duty community claims his death was the result of a gamer feud which Finch may not have even been a part of.
UPDATE: The New York Daily News reports police in Los Angeles have now arrested 25-year-old gamer Tyler Barriss, who the paper describes as "an alleged serial 'prankster'..."

"Barriss gave cops Finch's address, mistakenly believing it belonged to a person he had feuded with over a $1 or $2 Call of Duty wager."

Comments

Re: Reporting is intentionally terrible

[c6gunner]

I can sum up that training in 4 words: "don't be a retard".

Unfortunately most people are incapable of following that advice.

Re:Reporting on this is terrible

[dissy]

Unless the guy answered the door shouting he was going to kill the cops, or unless he was holding a firearm as he opened the door....

I'm really unsure about that one.

You don't usually wait for the person to finish raising their weapon, train it squarely on you, and open fire, all before you react to defend yourself.

In the half a second or less that it took for the victim to very quickly raise his arm from a downward position to a pointed directly at you position, at that point you have less than a fraction of a second for a trigger to be pulled.

As you can see from the video, the victim raised his arm Very fast to get it to a straight outward pointing at the police position, all in less than half a second.

If the person DID have a gun, then at that moment you have far less than a half of a second of time to react before a trigger is pulled. His fist was clenched as well.

The only way to know for sure at that point that he in fact did not have a gun would be to wait for the shot to not happen, and then wait even longer for him to continue raising his arm upwards (at a slower rate for some reason)

Personally I would have most likely thought the same thing, although it would have been more "I am about to be shot and killed" as I wouldn't have had a weapon on me or trained at the guy to prevent it.

To be clear, I'm not blaming the victim for "putting his hands up" wrong.
What I'm doing is not blaming the officer for believing in that half of a second the person was about to open fire, nor blame the officer for not waiting the tenth of a second or less to hear and see someone get shot or not.

The entire situation was fucked up for everyone that was in it to be in, and even more fucked up after taking into account what caused the situation in the first place.

Re: Murder charges all around...

[guruevi]

As a logical person, I wouldn't feel different about statistics and facts just because my family is involved. It's this kind of emotional uneducated reasoning that starts terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and BLM