Slashdot Mirror
Man Pleads Guilty To Swatting Attack That Led To Death of Kansas Man (arstechnica.com)
Federal prosecutors in Kansas announced Tuesday that a 25-year-old Californian has admitted that he caused a Wichita man to be killed at the hands of local police during a swatting attack late last year. Ars Technica reports: According to the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Kansas, Tyler Barriss pleaded guilty to making a false report resulting in a death, cyberstalking, and conspiracy. He also admitted that he was part of "dozens of similar crimes in which no one was injured." In May 2018, Barriss was indicted on county charges (manslaughter) and federal charges, which include cyberstalking and wire fraud, among many others. U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister said in a Tuesday statement that Barriss would be sentenced to at least 20 years in prison. Barriss also was involved in calling in a bomb threat to the Federal Communications Commission in December 2017 to disrupt a vote on net neutrality rules. The 25-year-old Californian is scheduled to be sentenced on January 30, 2019, in federal court in Wichita.
Just wait and watch. You will see an inundation of posts defending this guy and how he didn't do anything wrong and it is all the swat teams fault. The reality is if you arrange for loaded guns to be pointed at people eventually something WILL go disastrously wrong.
why in the hell aren't the police facing the same charges?
They are the ones who pulled the trigger(s) and ended this person's life.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You will see an inundation of posts defending this guy and how he didn't do anything wrong and it is all the swat teams fault.
Nobody is defending him. What he did was clearly wrong.
But what the SWAT team did was also clearly wrong. They gunned down an innocent person based on nothing but an anonymous phone call.
The prank caller isn't the only one who should be going to prison.
He has intentionally, and multiple times, sent armed men with a penchant for shooting first to go and invade some innocent persons home EXPECTING to find violent criminals!
So if someone throws molotov cocktails into peoples windows and somebody dies of smoke inhilation or is burned to death, or just maimed by fire (If you've seen what the scars from 3rd degree burns are like you'd understand why survivors of them are considered maimed) you think they should just have a few hundred hours of community service?
He was knowingly and intentionally putting many peoples lives at severe risk!
It's not like it's any secret that the police prefer to shoot first and lie about it later whenever they think their target has so much as a rubber band.
That scum is getting off light in my opinion.
According to the police he was gunned down because he did a suspicious move - a move he was ordered not to do.
The cost was his life. That's a huge price to pay. So, you have to wonder why an innocent man would gamble on paying that price for no reason. There are a few possibilities. One is that the police are simply lying about how it went down: they went in amped up and scared for their own lives and someone took a shot before assessing the situation. One is that the guy just happened to be suicidal or a nihilist and didn't care about living or dying, so just decided to take the opportunity to die... this one seems to be pretty unlikely. Another is that the police barged in, guns drawn, with multiple officers screaming and yelling incomprehensibly and the guy didn't know what to do and, while one officer was yelling at him to stand still, and another was telling him to get against the wall, he got shot by whichever one of them he didn't obey. The next is similar, but rather than just failing to obey, he failed to understand that the black clad commandos bursting into his home with guns were police because their muffled screaming was, once again, incomprehensible in the very brief time he had to react, so he tried to run, or ask what was going on, or hide under something, or maybe even to to find a weapon to defend himself. I would say that one of the last two is very likely it.
The simple fact is that failure to obey a police officer is nonsense. Have you ever watched them try to direct traffic? When it's anything complex, it's generally a disaster. Partly because people just don't understand their signals all the time often because the hand signals get pretty lazy and vague after a while. I've seen plenty of raging cops screaming at people in cars who clearly simply couldn't understand their directions. I've been in the situation of not knowing what to do when a police officer stepped up next to my car (when it was already moving at about twenty five miles an hour) to give a hand signal that looked like maybe a stop. I didn't know if he meant me or just the traffic behind me. So, I stopped, but I couldn't stop instantaneously, so I ended up about thirty feet ahead of him with him standing behind my car, giving me a patented police officer death stare in the mirror. No signals, no words, no approaching my car, or turning to the traffic behind him, just standing there death glaring, apparently expecting me to understand what he was trying to communicate, if anything. After about thirty seconds I tried a little gas to see what he would do, and he just stood there staring. So I went ahead and drove off. But anyway, this seems to be how police officers communicate. They expect you to be telepathic and to know their commands even if they don't actually give them. One order over a scratching megaphone that no-one in a crowd can understand, and the order has been given, and they can start firing teargas if the crowd doesn't comply. For that matter, when they give an order to a crowd that's half a mile wide from the edge, they'll hold everyone in the crowd accountable for following the order that's been given. Give a public order at 5 PM, someone who didn't even arrive until six gets their head cracked for not obeying.
That's one of the fundamentals of the authoritarian viewpoint. It's self-centered. It's not just that their word is law. It's natural law. Once given, it's a force of nature that all matter must bend to. Everyone must have heard and understood, because only the authoritarians ego is real and everyone else is just an extension of that. This is a little hyperbolic, but seems like the only way to understand how incidents where the police are claiming that an innocent person decided to just throw their life away and disobey the orders of someone who is prepared to kill them if they do. If you'll recall, another popular refrain of the authoritarian set is that harsher and harsher punishments are required to make people compliant to the law. If they truly believe that h
He's not an easy fall guy, he's the guy who decided to use a seriously flawed system to knowingly put innocent lives in extreme risk for pocket change and giggles.
Both are messed up, and for different reasons.
By the way, the cop that murdered the guy got off scott free.
So as many people have pointed out, there's more than one person guilty, and that in no way reduces the culpability of anyone involved in this travesty, but of course, cops are almost never punished at all, even when you have the video evidence that they lied and murdered a harmless and innocent person. Too bad we don't have the video evidence for this, not that it would likely help obtain justice.
You're fucked
Sorry folks, but the Brailsford case caused me lose every scrap of respect I once had for the police.
So what you are saying is that if someone disables the breaks on your car as a "prank", and you get killed because of that, they should not have to go to jail because it was just a prank, right?
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
According to the police he was gunned down because he did a suspicious move - a move he was ordered not to do.
Unless that move involved lifting a gun of his own in a threatening manner then why shoot. Do you really think its ok for police to be able to murder anything they deem a POTENTIAL threat and then have to do no more than say that they felt threatened?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Sending armed invaders into anothers home over being beaten in a game isn't "for giggles", it's an act of terrorism.
On top of that, the cops already have their guns out and aimed. Unless the guy is a quick draw expert (and those people train for precise distances and angles), they have plenty of time to verify he is actually pulling a firearm and then shoot him before he can get a shot off in their direction. At best (worst), he gets a shot off that goes right into the ground.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
But what the SWAT team did was also clearly wrong. They gunned down an innocent person based on nothing but an anonymous phone call.
The prank caller isn't the only one who should be going to prison.
I've come to the conclusion that here in the USA we'll almost never see police held accountable for this kind of thing. There was an episode of South Park where there were major hunting restrictions so to get around them, Jimbo and Ned said "It's coming right at us!" and shot any animal they wanted to. Cops can unfortunately do the same thing. All they have to do is say "I was scared for my life" in court and it seems like about 90% of the time they walk. I can promise you if the police in this case ever go to trial - and I said "if" - that they will just say they were scared and they'll probably walk. There's nothing I can do about juries. They seem inclined to just let the cops kill anybody they want to if they say they were scared.
It's that simple.
The swatter is a piece of shit who should go to jail for basically sending a squad of armed police to someone's house on a false report.
The cops are pieces of shit because they have no fucking discipline and shoot people at the drop of a hat. People seem to have a really hard time understanding this but "Getting home to their family" is NOT the job of a cop.
If you choose to be a cop, you're an arm of the government. You have been invested with the coercive force of the government- you are far, far different from a regular civilian worker. Your job isn't to protect yourself first- it's to protect everyone else. That's the cost of your privileges. You are literally being paid to hesitate a moment longer to make sure you don't murder an innocent civilian because if they turn out to NOT be so innocent you are legally authorized to kill them if need be in a way that a civilian is not. If you get killed because of that hesitation, that's the fucking gig. Either deal with that possibility or don't be a cop.