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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."

22 of 681 comments (clear)

  1. Reporting on this is terrible by ArtemaOne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To make it clear, the man who was shot by police was not the intended victim of the swatting, and had nothing to do with either party. The police just rolled in and picked off the first guy they saw.

    1. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by cob666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are making an assumption on the situation. What we know is that as far as the police THOUGHT 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.

      Fixed that for you...

      --
      Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
    2. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by Baron_Yam · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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....

      There's pretty much no scenario where the swatting aspect is significant compared to the cop killing the guy who answered the door.

    3. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, the moral of the story is no matter what you do, you're probably going to get killed by the police.

      Don't comply immediately? Get killed. Comply too quickly? Get killed. Don't resist arrest? Get killed. Run away? Get killed. Unable to control your body's reaction to getting suffocated? Get killed.

      Discerning intent was not impossible. They were, as you say, at a safe distance. There is nothing wrong, if you think the person is about to shoot, to find cover and assess the situation, especially if you were already at a safe distance. There is nothing about policing that demands you shoot first and ask questions later. There's something wrong with Americans thinking they're going to be the hero. There's nothing wrong with hiding. You're supposed to be the police. You're not a fucking soldier.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    4. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by mtmra70 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Discerning intent was not impossible. They were, as you say, at a safe distance. There is nothing wrong, if you think the person is about to shoot, to find cover and assess the situation, especially if you were already at a safe distance. There is nothing about policing that demands you shoot first and ask questions later. There's something wrong with Americans thinking they're going to be the hero. There's nothing wrong with hiding. You're supposed to be the police. You're not a fucking soldier.

      Even soldiers are held to higher standards and typically cannot, and will not, shoot unless shot at first. Obviously different when they are actively invading a building after having tons of intel, but normally on patrol they do not shoot first in hostile zones.

      I love how city policy do more killing, with less info, and in less hostile areas, than our military.

    5. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by hey! · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    6. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by religionofpeas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The poor bastard who opened the door did not comply instantly with their instructions, as he was righteously confused...

      A decent system allows for innocent people to be confused and not comply instantly, without getting executed on the spot.

      A police officer could carry a shield to protect himself, instead of a finger on the trigger.

    7. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by Cederic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      I am. I'd prosecute the cunt for murder, because he just shot an unarmed man with no warning and with no justification.

      If he really felt at risk, wearing his body armour, crouching in his cover, with the support of twenty colleagues, then he needs putting in jail to protect the public anyway. There is no self-defence justification going on here.

    9. Re:Reporting on this is terrible by sjames · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The cop was behind a car and is supposed to be a trained professional. Why didn't he just duck? The camera shot clearly shows that he had that option. Sorry, but the hard part about being "the good guys" is that you don't get to shoot first when you're too far away to verify your target. If you shoot first, you're just another goon with a gun and innocent people end up dead.

      The lot of them were literally tools. They were the tools of an outraged gamer getting disproportionate revenge against the wrong target over a couple dollars.

      The police should ask themselves "were we a force for good that night?". Considering that an innocent man was shot dead while doing nothing, the answer can only be NO. They were not a force for good that night.

      Rather than making excuses, the police need to be explaining how they will change their response so that never happens again.

  2. Re:It's a male, take him down! by Faluzeer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I noticed in the reuters report the following :

    “As the incident unfolded, a 28-year-old male opened the front screen door and stood in the doorway or just outside that doorway,” he said. “Officers gave him several verbal commands to put his hands up and walk towards them.”

    A police officer opened fire, shooting once, after the man quickly raised his hands and appeared to point a weapon at the officers, Livingston said.

    I wonder if any body / dash cams were working...

    Link :
    https://www.reuters.com/articl...

  3. What intelligence? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... one of our officers discharged his weapon.

    So the man at the door might be a hostage, which the police knew, were present. This is a total lack of concern for other people in the apartment.

  4. Re: It's a male, take him down! by c6gunner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder if any body / dash cams were working...

    Given that the linked article includes body cam video, I'm going to guess the answer is "yes".

  5. Re: It's a male, take him down! by gbjbaanb · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hey, we don't even RTFA! You want us to watch the f-ing article too now?!!

  6. Re:I am going to say it by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No. You live in a sick fucking country. Other countries in the developed world are not like this.

    --
    Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
  7. Re:Two points on this by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.'"
  8. Re:Two points on this by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  9. Re: It's a male, take him down! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    1. In cases where people riot over a police shooting, the person shot is usually not complying with police orders. Rule 1: do what the person with a gun says.

    2. The issue here is that people are swatting, not that the swat team shot someone. Those teams are brought into the most volatile situations and must be on a hair trigger if they want to go home each night. Because of this, if they think they see a gun, you will be shot. Rule 2: if a swat team orders you to put your hands up, do it slowly and deliberately.

    The real issue here is swatting. This is not a prank. It has always been deadly and it is only luck that nobody has been shot until now. I hope they catch the person that did this and put him/her in prison for a long time.

    BULLSHIT

    In this case, they had no verified information that they were actually in a volatile situation, and they shot a guy from 200 feet away without verifying he was armed.

    The JOB of the police is to PROTECT people, not create a "volatile situation" on their own simply because some jackass gave them bad information.

    They didn't even bother to verify the information they were given.

    Some guy walks out onto his porch, and they shoot him from 200 feet away. Didn't bother to verify if he was armed - they were TOO FUCKING FAR AWAY TO DO THAT.

    The fact that "swatting" is even possible means the police are TOO READY to be all butch.

    Government in the US is out of control - literally.

  10. I had police pull firearms on me by lamer01 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And so did a buddy of mine. Both white. Both in relatively affluent areas. Both times for absolutely no good reason (there was no justification for them pulling me or him over and no tickets issued). Neither of those areas ever had a shooting happen towards a police officer. And, this was many years ago, like 30 years. The cop had his firearm pointed at my head from behind me while I was talking to the another police officer through the window. So, I am sure I was quite close to getting killed had I made a move that they considered 'threatening'. Once you have an experience like that you will never forget it and you won't spout your mouth off as 'police are justified' and all that bullshit. So, cops have always been inclined to pull their weapons for no good reason. You know the saying, 'If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?'. Well, I think that is the main problem here. Police are trained to resolve issues through force and that's what they know how to do so they do it. I know my stories are anecdotal but they have created a deep mistrust of police and most authoritarian symbols which I make sure to convey to anyone who will listen.

  11. Re: It's a male, take him down! by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Something is wrong with the way Americans train police. I don't think they know this, but American police are the butt of jokes around the world. They're not real cops.

    Most of them are former security guards and prison guards who think their guns are toys, like this acquitted Philip Mitchell Brailsford piece of shit who forced a guy begging for his life to play "Simon Says", pumped five rounds into him, and then typically claimed self defense like an American policeman will always do.

    Cops with prior military training don't act like this at all. Maybe you would be better served by unloading your current "police force" and starting anew with recruits who have been trained to respect weapons and understand that they serve the public, not the other way around.

  12. 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.
  13. Re: It's a male, take him down! by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 5, Informative

    *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 .sig setting."