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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
* 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.
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.
'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
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.
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.