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

Would a robot have killed him better?

[shanen]

Another highly active topic. Another massive Slashdot fail. However, if I ever had a mod point to give, I might have given it to your comment.

Oh wait. As I understand the broken rules of moderation, if I did that I would be unable to make this comment.

Can anyone remember that the original intention of moderation had something to do with helping you find the kinds of comments you want to read? Maybe there are some "Funny" comments here, but I found none among the few with that mod. A few of the ones moderated "Insightful" did show glimpses of insight, but not much.

My text searches of the visible comments (to evade the broken moderation) focused on "example" and "robot". The "example" search was for aspects of "making an example" of the prankster or of the overly militarized and over-reactive police SWAT teams. The "robot" search was for possible solutions (which was also my main hope from the "Insightful" search).

Your comment is the only visible mention of robot, so I decided to reply here. Enough with the meta. Now to the ACTUAL topic.

I also had the idea of sending in a robot first. However you know that they will wind up arming the robots and then the wrongful deaths will come from programming bugs. Actually, we've already had an example of a robot used to blow up a shooter. Remember that sniper in Dallas? If there were any hostages involved, the robot may well cause their deaths.

Initially my main concern was that they make an example of the prankster, but I'm confident he'll face justice. My newer concern is that the SWAT team also learn something from their mistakes, but I rather doubt that they will.

Time to go meta-rogue again? More searches from that perspective? Naw, today's Slashdot ain't worth the effort and I've already wasted too much time this morning.