Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by BeauHD on from the first-of-its-kind dept.

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."

13 of 681 comments (clear)

  1. WTF police? by Ash-Fox · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I live in the UK and, I just don't hear of stuff like this happening regularly (police shooting people coming to the door) when guns are involved. I don't understand why it's a problem over there.

    --
    Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
    1. Re:WTF police? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think its simply because all the cops there are armed, and are taught that all situations they go to are life-threateningly dangerous (due to everyone, particularly criminals, having firearms themselves). As a result, cops in the USA have to be much more alert and ready to shoot to defend themselves.

      the trouble then comes when you have so many cops which means that many of them will be relatively poorly trained. None of them get the kind of intensive firearms training a UK armed policeman (say) would get, because it wouldn't be possible to train them all to the required level.

      I doubt this case was a SWAT team member shooting, but one of the beat cops who was there to provide support and was shitting himself that the suspect would come out guns blazing.

      Either way, I doubt its possible to really improve the situation in the US, you have too many cops, too many guns, and as a result you have quantity over quality. These kinds of incidents are likely to happen occasionally (and they do occur less frequently that you are led to believe by the media as the media just loves to report them all).

      in this case, lets hope the gamers are made an example of, big time. The cops should be finding them, prosecuting them, parading them before the media, keeping the whole "no more of this, we will come for you" message out there for the rest of the children who might think its a good idea to do this.

    2. Re:WTF police? by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I doubt this case was a SWAT team member shooting, but one of the beat cops who was there to provide support and was shitting himself that the suspect would come out guns blazing.

      When I was a kid of about fourteen years, I punched a sign in Library Park in Lakeport. I did not hit it hard enough to damage it. The sign was about three inches thick and wooden, and it had split from weathering so they had slapped acrylic over both sides of it. I did not crack the acrylic, and I clearly did not break the sign. A cop saw me do it, and he decided to arrest me for it, even though there was no evidence that a crime had occurred. The cop put me in handcuffs and put me in the front of his shitty little Impala cruiser, with my head almost against the dash where I would have been killed instantly by any halfway decent front end collision. This cop turned out later to be a total piece of human waste, involved in numerous thefts and the statutory rape of a fifteen year old. He was a member of the SWAT team.

      SWAT team members are completely capable of being complete pieces of human shit.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:WTF police? by Ash-Fox · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think its simply because all the cops there are armed, and are taught that all situations they go to are life-threateningly dangerous (due to everyone, particularly criminals, having firearms themselves). As a result, cops in the USA have to be much more alert and ready to shoot to defend themselves.

      I live in Northern Ireland, a part of the UK that is friendly to firearms. All the police here commonly carry firearms and have the same risks. I own firearms, my neighbours own firearms etc.

      the trouble then comes when you have so many cops which means that many of them will be relatively poorly trained.

      We have more police officers in Northern Ireland than some States do... (more than Delaware, yet you still see more police shootings there).

      Something just genuinely doesn't seem right.

      --
      Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
  2. Re: It's a male, take him down! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I can't view it because it uses some 20-year-old technology called flash instead of a real <video> tag

  3. Re:Two points on this by Christian+Smith · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Two points:

    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).

    Erm, he did. He answered the door, from the body cam video, he raised his hands when told to.

    The caller ID thing is neither here nor there, the phone company will record the actual caller for billing purposes. Finding the real source number will be no problem.

    But if the police try and pin this entirely on the prankster, that would be a travesty of justice. The police are completely culpable here, the officer who shot was not fit to carry a weapon.

  4. Reporting is intentionally terrible by FeelGood314 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The police just shot a completely innocent person and are trying to blame this on swatting and deflect attention from themselves. The media is happily helping them. US police officers are very jumpy, with some justification, but I suspect the training and the way the entire situation was handled was done incorrectly. The officer that fired the shot is at fault, but I will bet that the entire chain of communication escalated the threat and down played the fact that it was just a call.

    If you have never had a non-friendly interaction with the police and the police suddenly tell you to do something, you aren't going to do it. You are going to wonder what is going on. It's perfectly reasonable for Finch to not raise his hands. It's likely a situation he ever thought he would be in.

    In some places in the USA blacks are taught how to interact with the police to avoid being shot. Maybe they need to extend that training to visitors and the general population.

    I'm a white Canadian. I've twice had American police officers reach and hold their guns (not point) when interacting with them. Once at a traffic stop when I was looking for something the officer asked for and once when a black friend and I ran up to a police car to ask for directions. My youngest son at 9, also had an ill advised interaction with a SWAT team. As a frequent visitor to the USA, a couple hours learning how to interact with the US police would definitely have been useful.

  5. Re:Murder charges all around... by dissy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Whoever made the call, as well as the officers who couldn't be bothered to Not shoot someone.

    And this should be trivial.

    The stupid kid that requested the swatting call posted on his twitter account "That house I had swatted is on the news"
    The other stupid kid he was arguing with also posted screenshots of his direct message with the first stupid kid, providing the address as his own and telling him to come try something.

    Twitter should have all of that logged along with their home or cell IPs, which would lead back to a name on an ISP account with an address.

    Their gamer tags were also used and shown, which should similarly point to connection logs with IPs.

    Only the 3rd stupid kid who actually placed the 911 call himself may possibly have not left a call or voip trail.
    But seeing as this will be a murder charge, and they will soon if not already have in custody the kid requesting the swatting, I highly doubt that kid won't drop the swatters name and info if for no other reason than hoping he gets a less harsh sentence.

    You know nothing will happen regarding the cop though.

  6. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And the reason the jury did not convict in the Brailsford case is that they were not shown the video that is now viral online, nor were they told about the inscription on. Brailsford’s gun. Both cane out after the trial.

  7. Re: It's a male, take him down! by jittles · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Where I live, swatting fails because they check where you're calling from. If youre a kilometer away or much more, they sarcastically ask why you think you know what happens elsewhere.

    First of all, everyone knows that it's the Shine that lets you know whats going on so far away. Secondly, a good Swatter would use a VOIP system that lets him put whatever caller-id info he wants. He'll put the victim's number and address into the E911 fields.

  8. Re: It's a male, take him down! by Powercntrl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Those teams are brought into the most volatile situations and must be on a hair trigger if they want to go home each night.

    So, send in a robot or drone, and assess the situation with no risk to human life. Swatting will fall out of fashion very quickly if the prankster/troll risks jail, and all it accomplishes is law enforcement sending a flying camera to peek through the target's windows for a few minutes.

    --

    ---
    DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
  9. Re: It's a male, take him down! by rilister · · Score: 3, Interesting

    +1 I think there has been a concerted effort to persuade 'civilians' that being a cop is the equivalent of being in the military in terms of danger. Any level of response is justifiable when your life is 'continuously under threat.' What you see on TV is not representative of the average police officers daily life.

    I just parsed the 2016 statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS):(https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm) and figured out that the fatal injury rate for 'Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers' is 14.6 (the rate is a bit complicated, but weighted by total hours worked by total employees in that profession, to make jobs comparable)

    Police work: @14.6 - slightly less, but roughly equivalently dangerous to Cement Manufacturing, Construction Laboring, working in Fish-Farming, Landscaping.

    Professions that are 50%+ more likely to kill you than police work: Farming/Ranching (23.1), truck driving (24.7), steel-working (25.1), refuse collection (34.1)

    More than THREE TIMES as dangerous as being a police officer: Roofing (48.6) and Aircraft pilots (55.5) (presumably a lot of private pilots crash?).

    The most dangerous jobs in America today? Being a commercial fisherman (nearly six times as dangerous as being a cop) and Forestry Logging (more than NINE times more dangerous).

    In case you're thinking it's a sample-size thing: in 2016, (according to the BLS), 108 police officers were fatally injured doing their job. 101 roofers, 91 loggers, 570(!) truck drivers.

    So let's take truck driving, a considerably more dangerous profession than being a police officer, as an example. By the way, you 'need' truck drivers - it's how the food gets to your supermarkets and the medicines to the hospital. Truck driving, unhappily, causes some 'civilian' deaths, for a bunch of reasons: job stress, some bad training, some drivers don't take the mandatory breaks, maybe some use stimulants, whatever. How about we all look the other way when that happens, because, hey, it's a dangerous job, man? A lot of those truck drivers die on the job, y'know: you'd have to be one to understand.

    I believe we should hold police to a higher standard than truck drivers, not a lower one. Being in danger is no excuse at all for being sloppy.

    --
    'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
  10. Re: It's a male, take him down! by sonamchauhan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Police are unnecessarily jumpy these days it seems... "Better him than me" (even a bulletproof-jacketed me, with backup present). Whatever happened to backing down? To taking cover, to de-escalation, to providing space for cold blooded moves (as opposed to hot-blooded)? I wonder how much police pride is involved in all this?

    Also, I wonder how the dispacher's words contribute to this? Do they say 'shots fired' as a statement of fact, or do they use words like 'unconfirmed' or 'alleged', especially if there is only one, unknown, witness reporting the incident.

    Also, bring the other coward to justice, the one who gave the fool doxxer the fake address.