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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.
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.
It can be more than one person's fault.
This guy who plead guilty is unquestionably at fault of "making a false report resulting in a death", and definitely was at fault for causing the death. And yet I see slashdot posts question it. He sent armed people to another man's house to harass him (although harassed the wrong man too). Accidents happen and it's criminally unreasonable to assume that this is a harmless prank.
The guy who took the shot also has some implication, and a mitigating circumstance. There should be a criminal investigation into him and maybe he gets off on the circumstance. But even if innocent he absolutely should not be allowed to have a job where he points guns at people anymore without a truly extraordinary reason, since he's proven to be incapable of doing it without accidentally killing innocents.
Then the training and hiring should at least be reviewed. Can we make systemic changes that reduces the risk of this? Eg. training of the shooter, hiring of the shooter, training of the dispatcher, etc.. Is this truly, tragically impossible to avoid / impractical to do so without vastly increasing the risk to other innocents?
Not sure you ment it that way but I fully agree with that!
There are. 50000 SWAT raids per year in the US. That's 50000 cases of terror and violence. A society with those statistics has deep systemic problems and is very close to fascism.
The point is not defending this guy, the problem is that there the system is structurally arranged to point loaded guns at people for the slightest reason and yeah this guy is an easy fall guy because he clearly did something wrong. But it's a diversion from the real problem.
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
But that's the thing, there was no potential threat. They had a phone call that falsely claimed there was a hostage situation going on, and they had a guy ho voluntarily came to open the door who they immediately pointed guns at and then opened fire when he twitched a little bit (unsurprisingly people are kinda nervous when they've done nothing wrong and go to open the door only to be faced with a squad of armed cops pointing guns and yelling orders). They hadn't done any kind of work to verify that the information given to them on the phone was accurate. Hell, even if it was accurate information they had no idea at that point if the guy who came to open the door was the perpetrator, and not a hostage that the perp made to open the door at gunpoint.They lacked any and all information to make the determination that this guy is a legitimate threat and not a civilian, yet they immediately and without any cause assumed him to be both armed and dangerous. That's not how competent police officers respond to a threat situation like this.
I can actually give some contrast, because over a decade ago here in Finland our (extended) family was the target of an attempted swatting by our then mentally unstable (an alcoholic and a schizophrenic off his meds) neighbor who called the cops during a large family party telling them that one of us had pointed a gun at them and threatened to kill them (none of us even owns a firearm). We had maybe 20 people around, including plenty of kids, I was around 17 at the time and was sitting in my room playing on the computer when I saw a couple of armed cops run past my window. I went to the backyard to see what the hell was going on and saw a handful of cops in tactical gear with weapons out but not pointed at anyone talking to my dad who had been barbecuing with our cousins. The female lead-officer told dad about the call, and also told him that they had been monitoring us for the past 30 minutes (I don't know where, but there's a large bridge crossing the railroad tracks a couple hundred meters from the house, I think they had guys up there with binoculars, or maybe just dudes in bushes on the other side of the street, maybe both) and that they'd come to the conclusion that we were not a threat and it was likely a prank call. Dad told them that the neighbor had a mental history and would occasionally yell stuff and insults at us, though he's never been violent, and also said that we don't have guns in the house but that the cops can come inside if they want to look for the gun that they will not find there. The lead officer responded with: 'there's no need sir, you have little kids in the house and there's no need to scare the.' They then checked the IDs of the adults around and left, but not before knocking on the neighbor's door and having a long talk with him about what this will mean for him. He eventually got a hefty fine for causing such a massive police operation (my brothers had went out as the cops were leaving and counted at least 6 cop cars (with 2 officers each) at a nearby parking lot, they'd come in fully prepared for a potential fire fight). I mean look at it from the cops' perspective: they knew none of us had a criminal record and there was no licensed firearm registered to anyone. They look at what's going on and they see a bunch of guys casually sipping on some beers, grilling and listening to music and a few smaller kids playing soccer in the yard. To top it all of, the neighbor who made the call was sitting on his porch (apparently wanting to witness us getting arrested and/or shot). It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this is not the kind of sight you'd expect to see after someone had supposedly been pointing a firearm at someone and angrily shouting death threats.
That's how you're supposed to handle a situation of this magnitude. You don't just go in an point the guns and then open fire at whichever guy you happen to see first because h
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
This, but equally I don't think that the SWAT team or local PD in general should get a pass either. Swatting is a thing, they should have been aware of that and started on getting as much due diligence done as possible from the moment the dispatcher decided to send a unit (not even SWAT, any armed unit) to try and avoid this kind of thing. SWAT does not arrive on site instantly, and that gives at least some time to think whether or not things feel right.
Anonymous call? Long distance call? Caller seems to know details that they shouldn't have? No proven history of priors for the address? No proven history of priors for the resident(s), if known? Kids in the house? Is it Stupid O'clock meaning people might not be thinking too clearly, let alone when someone hammers on their front door with guns? If the answer to any of those kind of questions are "yes" (and AFAIK in this case *all* of the above were except maybe the two on priors), then the responders need to act with a little more discretion than just assuming any vague switch they don't like is a justification to unload a weapon on centre mass. In this specific case you can maybe blame lack of training/poor information and cut them a *little* slack for that, but that horse has now bolted and the publicity here should have both prompted a review of police procedures and given potential swatters food for thought lest they become the next Tyler Barriss. The next time this happens (and I'm pretty sure it will), then it it shouldn't just be the swatter that gets the face the courts; those that mistakenly pulled the trigger *and* those responsible for the training that led them to do so need their time in court/jail as well.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Other country's police forces don't just charge in, weapons drawn and start shooting people, no matter what the situation.
Hence, there's no real "fun" (if that's why people do it) in SWATting people in other countries. All that will happen is the person you "SWAT" will be investigated, then they'll trace the call back and an unarmed officer will be slapping you in handcuffs for trying to do it.
Seriously, the problem here is training of the person behind the gun. Every country in the world has armed police officers available. They are the ones that respond to armed incidents (or, even, the nearest unarmed officer gets there and assesses what they can before the cavalry arrive). They don't just go shooting people for no reason, and they don't get close enough that they feel at risk from the slightest flinch of the suspect.
Honestly, people in America should watch our equivalent of Cops and see quite how you do things. Literally, guys coming at officers with hammers and you still don't just gun them down. It's not "weakness". It takes a lot bigger man to just stand there, take abuse, risk physical injury and try to calm a guy down than to just pull a trigger "because you were a bit uncomfortable".
Death by policeman is rare outside the US.
Seriously:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
These countries are no different to the US in the incidents of nutters. The difference is in how many ordinary people are armed (and in some countries, everybody carries a weapon because they were all compulsarily conscripted), and how they are dealt with.
Seriously... the UK. 70 million people. NOT ONE DEATH OR SERIOUS INJURY by shooting in 2012/13/14, despite 6000 armed officers, 10,000 incidents in that year. "Incidents where firearms were discharged"... 3 / 4 / 5.
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?
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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.