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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."
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."
You are making an assumption on the situation. What we know is that as far as the police knew they were rolling on a murder and hostage situation (hostage in danger of murder as well). We don't know if the potential hostage taker had his hands hidden, whether he made any sharp movements - basically we know nothing. We don't know if the officer followed procedure, or what he was responding to. To say that they just rolled up and shot the first person they saw is only showing your bias and not what was reported.
1. When the cops tell you to do something, you do it. The place to argue is in court, not when confronted with (a) police officer(s). The dead guy would probably have been fine if he did this (excluding a ND by the cops).
Even the cops aren't saying that he did anything wrong. Their statement is literally that he came to the door and one of the officers shot him. You're a cop sucker.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The guy put his hands up when told to. Apparently he did it too fast, which looks as though "he's got a gun". This attitude of "cops should be treated like kings", which is essentially what you're arguing, is the problem here. Cops aren't soldiers. If the person is not complying, that is not a reason for killing them.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Because it would have been so much better if they'd got the "right" guy...
Any time a SWAT team is used, police come prepared for war, and where you have war, you have fog-of-war. Everyone knows hasty decisions are unreliable, and none are more hasty and unreliable than split second decisions made under the belief that it's your life or theirs.
Consider the fovea, the only part of the retina which provides clear, high resolution images. It covers an angular extent roughly equivalent to twice your thumbnail's width held at arm's length. And yet we experience the world as if in super-HD resolution. That experience is interpolated by the brain out of a narrow stream of visual data. That is how police have, in documented cases, mistaken things like a slice of pizza for a gun. They expected there to be a gun, and their brains put the gun where that blob of pixels was. It's exact the same perceptual phenomenon that caused the Apache helicopter pilots to mistake a journalist's camera for an RPG in the so-called "collateral murder" video.
Seeing what you expect to see is why stage magic works too; magicians exploit the fact we each live in a conjectural world, the product of the brain's building complete and coherent models of our surroundings from incomplete data. These models only have to be good enough to confer an evolutionary advantage, and they're often exaggerated as anyone who has ever been surprised by an animal they don't immediately recognize can tell you. Your brain makes the critter larger.
All this makes sending men in primed for a fight for survival tantamount to manslaughter if there is no actual need for that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Nope, the person who pulled the trigger is the murderer. And you're a boot-licking swine.
Case in point (warning: disturbing):
http://www.newser.com/story/252649/video-shows-cop-fatally-shooting-unarmed-man-in-hotel.html
The officer in this video is clearly amped right up, _screaming_ at the poor fellow on the ground who is readily complying with the officer. Officer says he's going to shoot if the man touches his lower back one more time. Then instead of walking over and cuffing the man while he lays down with his hands out, the officer asks the man to crawl toward him. I've Never seen that request as part of a police procedure. Man starts crawling and pauses to pull up his pants. Officer then lets 4-5 shots go and kills the man instantly. Claims the main was reaching for a gun.
The way the office set up this situation is to create an extremely tense situation, amps himself right up, gets the suspect probably hysterical, threatens to shoot him if he does anything wrong, and then sets up the required actions so the suspect is liable to fuck something up, and when he does the officer has permission to get his gun off. Goal achieved.
What's even more sickening is that this officer was cleared of any wrongdoing and even claimed he'd do it again if he had a chance to do it over. If I were in charge the officer here would get death by lethal injection and be made an example of.
The JOB of the police is to PROTECT people
If only that were actually true...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html
Oh, come on. Learn to use an internet search engine.
900k 'sworn officers' - http://www.nleomf.org/facts/en...
(although other sources suggest 1.1m people working in law enforcement, so the 1 million number stated may not be inaccurate)
1093 deaths in 2016 - https://psmag.com/social-justi...
40 million times a year feels like a terrible under-estimate - that would involve each police officer contacting the public just 40-45 times a year. Less than once a week. Reality is likely to be an average of multiple times a day.
E.g. there are approximately 240 million 911 calls a year (https://www.nena.org/?page=911Statistics) so even though a lot of those wouldn't be answered, responded to, or require police attention, it's reasonable to assume they account for somewhere between 10 and 60 million interactions a year even without the various traffic stops, patrols and other police work going on.
Your crime rate was historically low, which accounts for the police slackness and the baleful attitude toward self-defense. The legal theory is that fighting crime is not an amateur activity and should be reserved for law enforcement professionals. But in recent years the crime rate has been rising fast, including for murder:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
Ours reached a peak in the Eighties and has been declining since as concealed carry spreads from state to state. As with those Cold War missile silos, thugs are less likely to attack people who could be armed, even though most of us are not.
Umm, no.
Murder rate in Africa is about twice the global average, and close to three times the USA's murder rate.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
*Knock knock* "Yes hello, is there a hostage situation at this house? I drew the short straw so have to come here to your door to take your word for if there is any problem here that requires our assistance."
Is that what you are seeking?
Yes.
In civilized countries that's how it works. Know what? It actually works, too. See, one thing you don't want to do - ever- is inject more "energy" into a situation. If there's nothing wrong going on, a simple query keeps things civil. A few questions and the homeowner is fairly likely to invite one or more officers in to confirm there's no hostage situation. No yelling, no screaming, no sudden gestures, no escalation. On the other hand, if something wrong is going on, there's some risk - yes - but there's a much better chance of talking it down.
Going apeshit is for military actions, not police actions.
"Oh no... he found the