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Family of 'Swat' Victim Sues Kansas Police, Lawmakers Propose 40-Year Jail Terms (cbsnews.com)
An anonymous reader brings more updates about the 'Swat' call that led to a fatal police shooting:
The gamer who dared another gamer to send police officers to his home had offered the address where he used to live, until his family was evicted in 2016. While he may also be charged for the fatal shooting that followed, the victim's family has now sued the city of Wichita as well as its police officers, with their attorney saying the city "is trying to put all the blame on the young man in California who placed the swatting call. But let's be clear: the swatter did not shoot the bullet that killed Andy Finch. That was an officer working under the direction of the Wichita Police Department."
The attorney points out that the 911 caller in California provided a description of the house which didn't match the actual house in Kansas, adding "How can Wichita police department officers not be trained to deal with this type of situation...? Prank calls are not new," according to CBS News. "The lawsuit cites FBI crime statistics showing Wichita has a ratio of one shooting death for every 120 officers -- a number that is 11 times greater than the national ratio and 12 times greater than the ratio in Chicago."
Meanwhle, Kansas lawmakers have introduced a new bill proposing a penalty of 10 to 40 years in prison if a swatting call ends in a person's death, which would also cause the offense to be prosecuted as murder.
One lawmaker argues that the bill is necessary because under the current system if a person phones in a swat call, "there's really no consequence for his actions."
The attorney points out that the 911 caller in California provided a description of the house which didn't match the actual house in Kansas, adding "How can Wichita police department officers not be trained to deal with this type of situation...? Prank calls are not new," according to CBS News. "The lawsuit cites FBI crime statistics showing Wichita has a ratio of one shooting death for every 120 officers -- a number that is 11 times greater than the national ratio and 12 times greater than the ratio in Chicago."
Meanwhle, Kansas lawmakers have introduced a new bill proposing a penalty of 10 to 40 years in prison if a swatting call ends in a person's death, which would also cause the offense to be prosecuted as murder.
One lawmaker argues that the bill is necessary because under the current system if a person phones in a swat call, "there's really no consequence for his actions."
At the barest minimum, the swatter needs to pay the cost of the police action he caused, which will be probably a few thousand if not tens of thousands of dollars after the government accounting is done.
Then making a false accusation and/or a false statement which could have caused other harm since the SWAT team wasn't available for real emergenicies.
Make swatting immediately illegal with at least possible jailtime, with punitive damages and of course actual damages incurred by the police department. Then the civil suit from the victims.
We need to get our police under fucking control. They're not heroes. They're not judge, jury or executioner. They're employees of our local governments. They need to be treated as such. The particular government employees who murdered this person need to be fired and prosecuted immediately.
I don't respond to AC's.
So there is nothing between police officers getting away with being trigger-happy and no police at all?
One might think that proper training and guidelines together with reasonable consequences for officers who abuse their powers might lead to a police force that dies a good job without needlessly murdering citizens.
How about a cop who wants to protect life and serve the people of his community rather than shoot them? Let’s hire cops like that.
Learn what’s going on before opening fire on people. Or don't be police officers at all.
We don’t need you to shoot us. We can shoot each other just fine. We need a police force to prevent violence and loss of life, not cause it.
we have a police violence problem. the victim was killed by the police and was unarmed. Well I think he was unarmed, apparently it's difficult to find that out. No matter, if he needed to be armed he would have been.
by all means let's put the prankster in jail for life and let the officer who showed such incredibly poor judgment and a police department that is operating under almost amazing levels of incompetence skate away without even a slap on the wrist.
This is not police thinking they were in a bad situation, this is a situation in which police think they need to handle every situation with a SWAT team.
Absolute statements are never true
10 to 40 years and prosecuted as murder sounds good, but it does make me wonder why a cold blooded execution isn't prosecuted as murder already. Oh, this is for the kid playing with his phone, not the criminal pulling the trigger? Nevermind, system's still fucked.
How about a cop who wants to protect life and serve the people of his community rather than shoot them? Let’s hire cops like that.
After 5 years of "Fight for the TEAM" there are never any such cops.
Us v. Them all the way
Republicans, mostly
Those who are ready and willing to shoulder full responsibility for their actions. Meaning they think about what they do instead of acting as killing automatons with an "oh well" attitude.
Every state government ought to have a group whose sole purpose in to investigate and prosecute suspected crimes by local police.
We also need to outlaw qualified immunity.
I don't see why you Black Lives Matter types resort to the sort of racism that you've just displayed. Not only does it make you look like hypocrites, but it only serves to hurt your cause.
Americans of any and all races do support convicting a police officer who does murder somebody else.
The problem is that when it comes to these recent incidents involving the police, often the supposed "victim" wasn't innocent at all. What you wrongly call cases of "murder" end up being pretty clear-cut cases of the police acting in very reasonable self defense.
Let's take the notable Michael Brown incident as an example. The media and those on the political left immediately portrayed Brown as a "victim", before all of the evidence came out. Then as the facts of the case became known, it became clearer and clearer that Brown was the aggressor. There was indisputable footage showing Brown violently attacking a cashier minutes before he encountered the police officer. Then it became clearer and clearer that Brown had launched physical attacks against the police officer, including at least one attempt to steal the officer's firearm, before the officer was put in the extremely difficult position of having to use deadly force to defend himself against Brown's aggressive physical attacks. The officer was not a "murderer". He merely defended himself from Brown's attacks.
Time and time again we find that these incidents do involve the police being attacked with weapons, or the police officers involved otherwise having their lives put in imminent danger by a violent attacker.
Ignoring the reality of these sad situations doesn't help your cause.
Mislabeling very reasonable acts of self defense by the police as being "murder" doesn't help your cause.
Making generalizations about people based on the color of their skin, like you just did, doesn't help your cause.
Failing to acknowledge the problem of black-on-black violence in most major American cities doesn't help your cause. There have been single weekends in a city like Chicago where more blacks have been killed by other blacks, than there have been blacks killed by police officers (of any race) across the country in the preceding decade.
For all of your talk about "justice", people like you seem to be the least inclined to do anything positive to actually achieve real justice.
Our justice system is getting mucked up with innuendo and complexity. ;)
;)
;)
BTW I am not a lawyer so I truely don't know what I am talking about
Example
Murder Premeditated - did the individual do things in the real world related to planning the crime.
Murder Hate Crime - what was the individual thinking/feeling when the crime happened.
Do we really need all these special new laws? When our standard laws might be used as a path to justice.
Just something I wonder about as an uneducated lay person
Just my 2 cents
Here's a question, why shouldn't swatting be considered assault with a deadly weapon.
There are definitely big issues with how police deal with reports of crimes, recall also the swat team showing up recently at the home of someone with a phone mistakenly reported as stolen. A big issue is that for someone not a criminal and not currently engaged in a crime the police appearing is entirely unexpected and their brain isn't primed to process the situation and even realize commands are aimed at them.
How about a cop who wants to protect life and serve the people of his community rather than shoot them? Let’s hire cops like that.
Learn what’s going on before opening fire on people. Or don't be police officers at all.
We don’t need you to shoot us. We can shoot each other just fine. We need a police force to prevent violence and loss of life, not cause it.
That is a very valid criticism and generally a good idea that works just fine in many other parts of the world to the point where some countries don't even arm their police officers. Your suggestion is, unfortunately, also fundamentally incompatible with the traditional American fondness for 'come down on them like a ton of bricks' justice where police are heavily militarised, eager to shoot first and ask questions later and trained by defence contractors to use tactics pioneered by the US Army and the IDF when dealing with insurgents in the Middle East.
Have gnu, will travel.
California has deep pockets. This gamer was supposed to be in prison. But CA let him out early. So it's on them.
Have gnu, will travel.
I can't see it making any difference to the honest decent ones.
Both of them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Pretty sure he was saying that if it quacks like a duck, the police will shoot the duck if it is black. Rather correct. Do cops shoot white people too? Fuck yeah they do.
The only problem is leftists pretending that the shitbags are, "jus' a good boy on his way to church. He wus goin' to college next year!" when, in fact, he wus a violent drug-selling asshole who just brutalized the local deli owner, and tried to steal a cop's gun.
Whether that’s true or false, we still don't need police officers to go murder that guy. The deli owner can do it just fine. Or the rival gangs. Or just any random guy walking by. Guns are cheap and easy to fire.
We need police to prevent random violence and retaliation. Their purpose is to give a society an alternative means of dealing with problems. If the police are just another rival gang, then it's time for the public to stop sponsoring and supporting them.
One lawmaker argues that the bill is necessary because under the current system if a person phones in a swat call, "there's really no consequence for his actions."
So in other words, the police themselves are saying, whatever you do, don't call the police. If you call the police, innocent people are likely to die.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Seriously, what happens to the police who shot and killed a man with no other provocation than an out of state anonymous tip?
The theory is that every organization that surpasses a certain number of members eventually starts to make compromises when the optimal applicants start running out. In the case of police this means resorting to either hiring Wild Bills or social workers and it seems PD has made their choice.
prosecutors are generally in it for political points. It's a great way to launch a political career. This tends to make them hard on crime (since that's a popular political issue) and therefor more likely to look the other way at accusations of excessive force. Then you add to that how hard it is to get a jury to convict and it's basically impossible. I suspect if we tried to go independent it would a) be massively underfunded and b) be staffed by folks who couldn't make it as a regular prosecutor.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The theory is that every organization that surpasses a certain number of members eventually starts to make compromises when the optimal applicants start running out. In the case of police this means resorting to either hiring Wild Bills or social workers and it seems PD has made their choice.
So do less policing then. Stop trying to micromanage (for profit) everyone's driving. Stop being tax collectors. Stop worrying that a 19-year-old might drink a beer. Stop enforcing licensing rules that mostly protect incumbent businesses from competition. And, if you must do some of this enforcement, send unarmed administrators to do it so the real police can do real police work.
And - this is really critical - fire the bad police.
Look up the number of incidents handled every year vs. shootings. You will quickly see that you already have what you ask for.
So we can immediately fire the bad officers like this guy in Kansas then? There’s only a few of them, right?
If police killings of innocents are so rare that we can just live with them as an inevitable consequence of policing, then we can just as easily live with immediately firing the few officers involved.
When u need them. Cops are the first job I hope is done away with. Replaced by a robot.... that would be sweet.
[($)]
That should put an end to it.
Sadly, it wouldn't. Making punishments more severe only has a weak effect on how well they work as deterrents. People always assume if you punish a crime really harshly, no one will commit it. But it doesn't work. People go on doing it anyway. If you're thinking of committing a crime, whether the punishment would be five years in prison or ten just isn't going to affect your thinking much.
The thing that actually does make a big difference is the certainty of punishment. If you think you can get away with it, you just don't consider the potential punishment much. But if you think you'll probably get caught, that becomes a big deterrent even if the punishment is a lot lighter.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
The problem is that the problem is much bigger than that. I doubt that officer in Kansas is a particularly bad guy, it's probably a deeper issue.
This is far beyond the point where firing individual officers will accomplish anything. Things like this are much more likely to have it's roots in training, doctrine and "e'spirit de corpse". Firing individuals could have worked if they had started out with it when things were beginning to get out of hand, but now the problems seem to be institutional and cultural more than individuals.
Fixing this will require significant changes in leadership and will have to go all the way down. Maybe they'll need to fire entire units to get rid of the brain damage because this is organisational cancer, not a simple bad apple or two.
And yet there are huge numbers who do support the "it was self defense!" argument for police and citizens alike. Ie, George Zimmerman claims "stand your ground" as a defense even though he followed Trayvon Martin after police dispatcher told him not to, and is not even convicted of manslaughter.
Maybe they don't support police murdering someone, but they also rephrase it as self defense, or a quick reaction based on police training, or that the suspect probably was guilty of something so that makes it ok.
He/she thinks that punishing the people who make fake phone calls that lead to a police shooting death will cause the police to not come out. Pedantically, he/she's right, but only because people will stop making the fake phone calls.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"We need a police force to prevent violence and loss of life, not cause it."
Police forces are reactionary by their very nature. What you want is a physical impossibility. They can't be there before it happens unless you want a police state where they are literally listening and watching to everything from the get go.
This is also the same argument that comes out when people talk about the failing schools. Blame the teachers! The parents that are raising the feral rats aren't at all to blame. This cop may or may not have done something wrong. I'll leave that to the courts to figure out. I do know however that the parents of the swatter did a piss fucking poor job. The swatter himself is degenerative fuck and deserves to lose all freedom for the rest of his life.
* If I lock someone in a cage with a hungry lion - it's not I who killed them.
* I release a cobra into someone's bed and it bites them - it's not I who killed them.
* I chain someone to a pole in hyena country - it's not I who killed them.
This is all true - but it ignores the context, which is that I put them into an extremely dangerous situation which led to their deaths.
George Zimmerman claims "stand your ground" as a defense
No, he did not. Zimmerman's defense was based on a claim of pure self-defense. It was NOT based on "stand-your-ground". The preponderance of the evidence is that he was walking away when Martin assaulted him.
Personally, I think stand-your-ground laws are stupid. If you have a clear choice between killing someone and safely backing down and walking away, you should be legally obligated to refrain from killing.
But the Zimmerman-Martin incident is irrelevant to that, since it was not a SYG situation.
The reason for lax enforcement is that everybody(*) speeds, and the speed limits are set lower than necessary under the assumption that every car on the road will speed. If someone managed to pull over every car going over the limit, there wouldn't be room on the shoulder, and nobody (including police cars) would still be left on the road. Also, if everyone drove at the posted limit consistently, the entire road system would collapse into total gridlock.
And, more realistically, if a limited number of police cars started indiscriminately pulling over every car that was speeding, regardless of how far over the limit it was going, you would see a huge increase in traffic accidents, because the police would be busy writing a ticket for a nickel crime, and thus unable to chase down the morons going 30+ over the limit as they speed by.
So between the gridlock and the huge reduction in road safety, I'm pretty sure that if they started consistently pulling over people for going 5 MPH over the limit, people would probably light city hall on fire, hunt down the people who set bafflingly low speed limits, and put their heads on a pike. Such strict enforcement of speed limits is simply a terrible idea without a complete nationwide (or at least statewide) overhaul of all the posted speed limits.
* According to an Allstate survey, 89% of American drivers admit to routinely going over the speed limit, and a whopping 40% admit to regularly driving at least 20 MPH over the speed limit. And those are just the ones that admitted it to their insurance company! If I read Purdue's 2008 study correctly, approximately 100% of Indiana drivers think that it is safe to drive above the speed limit, with more than a third considering it safe to drive up to 20 MPH over. Based on that data, it seems likely that when it comes to speed limits, law-abiding drivers amount to a rounding error. Everybody speeds.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Singapore would be a good counterexample. Consider crimes in the rest of the western world that are met with relatively light sentencing, like drug trafficking and "illegal firearm trafficking" (defined as being in possession of 2 or more illegal guns). In Singapore they are met with a mandatory death penalty, and not surprisingly there's (1) remarkably low occurrence and (2) even lower recurrence of those crimes.
A remarkably low occurrence because once you're facing the death penalty, why not do more crime. It's the problem all justice systems face, the punishment is supposed to be proportional to the crime but you have a limited dynamic range. Sure we could dial up to where jaywalking = death penalty, but then kidnap-rape-murder couldn't really be punished any harder. Singapore keeps the petty crime away through huge penalties. Does it keep serious crime away... I doubt it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Police called it stand-your-ground, according to wikipedia. So my mistake.
'tis true. Look at other countries with strict sentencing. America for example executes people or puts them away for very long periods in horrible prisons and has one of the lowest murder rates in the free world. Same with illegal drugs, those harsh penalties mean almost no illegal drug use. Meanwhile there is the various Scandinavian countries with very light sentencing plus coddling prisoners, very high crime rates.
One thing that won't affect crime rates is culture. Having a culture of getting along and deference to authority won't make any difference. Another is economics, when stealing a loaf of bread in Great Britain meant being hung, along with most other crimes, people just sat down and starved rather then turning to crime and the crime rate was almost non-existent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It's not needless murder if some police goon gets to power trip over sanctioned blatant murder which everyone knows will go unpunished.
Requiem for the American Dream
If I read the summary correctly, the proposed law doesn't charge the incompetent police at all, only the person who makes the misleading call.
The summary seems to garble together two different actions, one aimed at police incompetence and the other aimed at making prank phone calls...although "prank" is not exactly the correct term for a call that can be expected to lead to, if not death, at least severe property damage. Still, there's often too little actual intelligence involved to call it malicious, and idiotic doesn't imply destructive. A more appropriate punishment would be to deny the perpetrator all use of electronic communications for a decade on penalty of actual confinement in prison (with continued denial of electronic communication) for an additional decade if they break the prohibition.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Courts ordered California to bring prison population below 137.5% of design capacity. California did not add capacity to bring prison population below this mandated point. Their decision, their liability.
Have gnu, will travel.
This cop may or may not have done something wrong.
Can we can agree that shooting and killing completely innocent people is "wrong"?
Is there any indication this guy was NOT shot by a cop?
So a POS caused the SWAT team to be dispatched. Sorta like calling in a fake bomb threat. When it comes down to reality, who pulled the trigger that ended an innocent life? What are we doing about THAT problem?
You muddy the Michael Brown issue. You make it sound like he was shot in a struggle for the gun, but in fact he ran away and the officer pursued him and killed him. You know little or nothing about the cause you are intent on criticizing.
The handful of videos of police shootings I have seen lately show a police force acting very, very differently from how the police handle situations here in Norway. I think they must have been trained according to fundamentally different philosophies.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
How difficult is it to bring a spare gun to a SWAT. They could have just given it to the dead victim and everyone would be happy.
Because of the nail the shoe was lost
because of the shoe the horse was lost
because of the horse the rider was lost
because of the rider, the message was lost
because of the message the battle was lost
because of the battle the kingdom was lost
So the king sues the iron monger that provided the iron that made the nail?
Amadou Diallo 's "crime" was being black and perhaps having a wallet. It's hard to tell with all the gunfire, and the fact that he was damn near blown to tiny chunks by the officers.
Ousmane Zongo's "crime" was being in the crosshairs.
Oscar Grant's "crime" was being around a cop who wanted to test out his new toy taser on a guy who was already down and cuffed, except his toy was actually his gun. Oops.
Aiyana Stanley-Jones's "crime" was failure to get out of the way of a flashbang that was fired blindly into her house. She was seven.
Rekia Boyd's "crime" was running into a drunk cop.
You need to read about the Michael Brown incident before you spew any more misinformation and disinformation.
The Wikipedia article very clearly states:
Of course Officer Wilson was pursing Brown; Brown had just committed several serious crimes that involved violent physical attacks! Brown needed to be placed under arrest given this harmful behavior he was actively engaging in.
But instead of surrendering like any sensible person would have done when confronted by the police, Brown proceeded to attack Officer Wilson repeatedly, and Officer Wilson was left with no choice but to defend his own life using deadly force.
Your comment is a great example of how Black Lives Matter types such as yourself try to distort the truth to fit your nonsensical narrative. You incorrectly portray the aggressor (Michael Brown, in this case) as the "victim", and you incorrectly portray the real victim (Officer Wilson) as the "aggressor".
It's not just the police that's out of control. When shit happens, juries are told the swat team methodology is just the right way of doing things. The whole nation believes the way things are done in TV films is the only way.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
The point isn't that firing a few police officers solves the problem. The point is that they'll never agree to even that.
The "it's rare, so nevermind" argument is phony. What they're really saying it "it's rare and it doesn't happen to us, so nevermind". Change it so it affects them and all of a sudden it won't matter that it's rare.
Lets also have a rule, whenever someone orders pizza and the deliveryman drives over a pedestrian, the caller is executed, home confiscated and relatives loose citizenship.
"We need a police force to prevent violence and loss of life, not cause it."
...What you want is a physical impossibility. They can't be there before it happens unless you want a police state where they are literally listening and watching to everything from the get go.
Police exist to provide a means of settling disputes without the blood feuds and cycles of violence and revenge that exist when there's no law. That's how they prevent violence.
The problem is that they're now handling this role very poorly, bringing violence where there was none before and escalating minor situations into deadly ones.
This is also the same argument that comes out when people talk about the failing schools. Blame the teachers! The parents that are raising the feral rats aren't at all to blame.
I have a similar answer for that teacher. If the kid can't be taught, we don't need to pay you to fail to teach him. Anyone could do that. Or no one. It you can't be blamed, you aren't part of the solution. Just go away. Leave the problem to someone who can be blamed.
Tigers, lions and hyena's oh my aren't people, and aren't trained to deal with hostile situations. Cops are. And when said cops fuck up - like shooting at the first unarmed guy to come out the door within seconds when they were at distance and behind vehicles and ballistic shields - they should go to jail. For a longer sentence than the prank caller.
Being a cop isn't even in the top 20 most dangerous jobs in the USA, once you take out car accidents which don't have anything to do with them needing to get their guns off. Dumb, panicky shits shouldn't be allowed on the force in the first place, but need to be prosecuted for negligent homicide when they fuck up. As this cop did.
Since we're not willfully obtuse authoritarians, we can see that cops who had a house (that didn't match the description in the 911 call) surrounded, at distance, were in cover and yet shot the first person to come to the door within a matter of seconds.
Cops don't have dangerous jobs in the USA - roofers, retail workers, fishermen about a dozen other professions all have it harder than cops do, and thats before taking out car accidents that have nothing to do with Officer Fife needing to get his gun off.
You can stop trying to fuck that chicken now. I know you would really like to make this "the left supports unaccountable police unions" thing happen, but it's not going to happen. Unless you can point to where leftists and the UAW have gotten together to allow auto workers to beat people heads in with wrenches (for no reason) and get away with it scott free, of course.
Unless it's not. Cops in NYC insisted that stop-and-frisk was responsible for lowering crime rates, and if the policy was ended, crime rates would go back up. Policy was ended....and crime rates continued to fall.
Any country that allows itself to murder it's citizens is by definition not very safe in my opinion.
How about a cop who wants to protect life and serve the people of his community rather than shoot them? Letâ(TM)s hire cops like that.
Sounds good; when are you signing up?
That's some pretty lousy trolling. I think you can do better. Try again.
It's not death penalty for everything, but proportionately high penalties for everything. Fines for seemingly common things like fare evasion or littering reach into the S$1000s. Thus, no littering and no one dares jump a turnstile. For price perspective the cheapest adult train fare is less than 80 cents.
A few years ago Singapore was listed as the #1 safest country for women to travel alone. This is a country where four completely opposite cultures live peacefully (Chinese (Atheist and Buddhist), Islamic, Indian (Hindu and Buddhist), Western/Christian). If the high penalty / high enforcement system did not work, it would be a lot worse than America's minor white/African American/Hispanic friction (which all fall under Western/Christian).
I see your sarcasm, but it's completely wrong. We do not have strict sentencing on the level of Singapore. There's "deals", "parole/good behavior", and "release due to overcrowding" which all allow violent offenders the chance to get back out there and do it again. Our prisons are also a lawless place - they do not rehabilitate but instead breed worse criminal behavior. As for the death penalty, there's reluctance to use it, and no such thing as a speedy, mandatory, no-pleading-out death penalty. The US implementation is a reverse lottery, rather than a sure thing.
As for culture, there's at least 4 separate cultures in Singapore that manage to get along.
As for economics, that's a failure of the US social safety net. Singaporeans have government provided jobs and housing as a safety net. The US cuts low skill government jobs every time there's a financial crisis (the NY Subway got rid of many train cleaners in the late 2000s). So we have dirty trains and homeless people while they have clean, well landscaped everything and employed people.
... George Zimmerman ... even though he followed Trayvon Martin after police dispatcher told him not to, and is not even convicted of manslaughter.
So if you follow someone against instructions and he attacks you, you're supposed to let him kill you? I guess that's why we have jury trials: to answer those sorts of questions.
What crime would you convict George Zimmerman of for following someone against instructions where nothing bad ends up happening? You must consider following someone to be criminally reckless in some way for this to make any sense.
An unarmed person was shot, and there was little evidence about what really happened or if he was really attacked or merely felt threatened. Zimmerman had phoned the police often in days and weeks before the shooting, complaining about suspicious people and that they kept getting away.
Shitbags who put toy guns under unarmed men should be hanged
... there was little evidence about what really happened...
Hence the Not Guilty verdict. When no one can really say for sure what happened, it's reasonable to doubt that he wasn't engaged in self defense. He doesn't have to prove it was self defense. The state has to prove it wasn't.
Obviously I have no idea whether it was or wasn't.
1 Have the persons prison uniform marked with a flag for SNITCH
2 make sure they spend plenty of time in "Gen Pop"
3 have an Admin review decide if it was a "good shoot" (hint unless the person that got swatted was guilty of SOMETHING ELSE it ain't)
4 any costs/payouts from the civil suit come from the Police Pension Fund
Back to the original point, there were people who did not mind that a black guy got killed, and there are people who don't mind if a police officer shoots someone, even if the victims were unarmed. Yes, most people think it's a tragedy, but there is the fringe who don't. I brought up Zimmerman because in some circles he's celebrated as a hero.
One lawmaker argues that the bill is necessary because under the current system if a person phones in a swat call, "there's really no consequence for his actions."
In Canada, it's Criminal Misconduct, and also Criminal Harassment see https://www.canlii.org/en/bc/b..."> R. v. B.L.A., 2015 BCPC 203 (CanLII)
I'm not prepared to believe the US is a lawless domain: I am prepared to suspect the unnamed legislator of lying. Or perhaps mere stupidity.
davecb@spamcop.net
Back to the original point, there were people who did not mind that a black guy got killed...
There were people who were ecstatically happy a black guy got killed because they make their living exploiting race grievance. If Travon hadn't been black, they wouldn't be daydreaming about the $$$ they're going to make from "community organizing" the aftermath. The white racists and the minority community organizers feed off each other.
> jaywalking = death penalty
There was a Star Trek TNG where a civilization had that.
Have you always made up stupid hysterical bullshit in order to avoid a simple point, or has this been a recent condition for you?
In this case, yeah, it didn't happen in one of the areas where the laws were adjusted to treat swatting appropriately instead of as a harmless & amusing prank--once you can cause significant harm by making a false report, the penalty needs to be more than the usual slap on the wrist of misdemeanors.
I'd argue that enforcement is more important then high penalties. You can have the death penalty for jay walking but if charges are seldom or never laid, it won't affect the numbers of jaywalkers.
Police states usually have low crime as once a police state is implemented for political reasons, it can also be used for plain crime. The Soviet Union had low crime, even Iraq was a fairly safe place and Cuba is perhaps the safest place in Latin America, ignoring political crimes in all cases.
Singapore is fairly authoritarian, small with a large police force, a culture (or cultures) of subservience to authority and enforces its laws. There's $1000 fines for littering where I am but it isn't enforced and there is tons of littering. Same with vandalism. Those German students may have been just as discouraged from being repeat offenders by serving one month in jail, and knowing that if they repeat the offence, they will be caught.
Singapore also has a fairly good safety net combined with very high employment, which reduces the desperate type of criminal as you seem to recognize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I actually can understand the 'did not match the description in the 911 call' part, but that's because people under stress have lousy memories and some of the experiments proving this are actually quite easily and regularly repeated as a demonstration, they're that reliable in their results. You'll also get some...remixes on addresses, too, which is why modern 911 systems don't require you be capable of giving your location accurately.
The call itself ought to have tipped them off, though, since it was to the non-emergency number and apparently there wasn't even spoofed to a local number (never mind a phone belonging to the address), and I've yet to see a decent explanation for why attempting to call the house as the first move was ruled out. Hell, pretend to be scammer or something otherwise relatively innocent; you don't have to say you're the cops when you're just trying to make sure you're not doing something like having a tense standoff with a completely empty house.
That should put an end to it.
Sadly, it wouldn't. Making punishments more severe only has a weak effect on how well they work as deterrents. People always assume if you punish a crime really harshly, no one will commit it. But it doesn't work. People go on doing it anyway. If you're thinking of committing a crime, whether the punishment would be five years in prison or ten just isn't going to affect your thinking much.
The thing that actually does make a big difference is the certainty of punishment. If you think you can get away with it, you just don't consider the potential punishment much. But if you think you'll probably get caught, that becomes a big deterrent even if the punishment is a lot lighter.
Getting caught committing a crime is a risk.
The thing about risk is that it's actually two categories, severity and likelihood. Severity is how bad the punishments are, likelihood is the chance you'll get caught. Jacking up the severity doesn't work if the likelihood is very low. Raising speeding fines to £1000 of 1 MPH over wont do much if the police never enforce it.
Just making harsher punishments does not make society safer, in fact it does the opposite, if the punishment for burglary is high, why not turn that B&E into a murder, it reduces the chance of being caught and the punishment is harsh enough that it's not that much less than murder.
We're be better off enforcing a lesser punishment.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It shows that the Australian government is authoritarian and the people are capable of being bullied into compliance.
Getting rid of drunk driving is a laudable goal, but keeping people from driving even 1 kph over an arbitrarily set speed limit is not. What will they go after next and why is this sort of behavior a good thing?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Yeah, young children playing with toy guns are extremely dangerous, and anyone armed in the vicinity should shoot them.
Michael Brown is a really bad example for BLM, and they shouldn't mention him. There are other cases where the police officer shows up, shoots an unarmed child, and is not held accountable.
If police were imprisoned for a long time for shooting people who presented no actual danger, people would be more willing to accept Michael Brown as a justified case.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Since she was a fairly young blonde woman, I'm expecting a bad law to come out of this. I don't know her eye color, but if it was blue it would be a near-certainty.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It would take years to build out sufficient prison capacity
Gov. Schwarzenegger declared overcrowding an emergency in 2006. The state did nothing. There are numerous unused military facilities that they could have put to use as minimum security prisons. Nope. Wouldn't do that either. The state had more than a decade to permanently solve the population problem. And they did nothing.
Time to put that shit hole state under martial law.
Have gnu, will travel.
And what exactly was Tamir Rice guilty off ? 12-year old kid with a BB-gun. Even if it had been a REAL gun - why shoot him ? Isn't gun rights supposed to be enshrined in the constitution ?
It's not like he was threatening anybody, there's video that shows he did nothing wrong.
For that matter, what exactly did John Crawford do wrong ?
I could keep going -but the fact is even if you were right about Brown - I can list a hundred names of people killed where it's absolutely, provable that they did nothing wrong- and where no cop faced any justice.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Where is the evidence that he had an assault record ? Oh right, he didn't.
Even if you are right about guns. So. Fucking. What.
He was American - he had a constitutional right to own a gun if he wanted to.
You do know that black people have that right as well ? Right ?
Amazing how the SAME people who keep fighting even the most basic of common sense gun regulations ALSO keep claiming that "I thought he had a gun" is a justification for killing somebody !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If I ever wanted to follow a career in law enforcement - I would only even CONSIDER doing it in a country where teh police do NOT carry guns.
That's most civilized countries.
Intriguingly it doesn't seem to cause the anarchy you seem to fear it would. The UK doesn't arm police - they ONLY get given guns for specific, known-dangerous operations and have to give them back after the op.
They patrol unarmed.
Since 2000 only 3 people have been shot by police in the UK - and nobody is therefore accusing the UK police of being trigger happy and wondering if there is maybe too many for it all to be legitimate ?
Oh, and they have a LOT less cops who GET shot than the US police as well.
So, to answer your question - I would refuse to be a cop WITH a gun.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *