In fact, this has happened:
And in 2017 the “reasonable person” standard should tell you that provoking a confrontation with police under the pretext of someone being presumed armed, IS putting lives in real danger.
Swautistic also claimed to be the guy who phoned in the bomb threat to the FCC a few weeks ago. I would think that would run afoul of federal bomb threat threats laws, but maybe I’m wrong.
absolutely, I’d rather ten police were killed than one innocent member of the public.
On the upside, I have no doubt this jerkoff will be scrambling to cast the blame on whoever hired him.
Did “Swautistic” give an address that he knew was real, or did he really think he’d made one up?
My BFF and his family live in Wichita. I’ll have to ask them what they know about it.
Doesn’t the 911 dispatch center know where the call was originating from? How is it that SWAuTistic didn’t end up with the SWAT team on his own doorstep?
Several years ago, someone (or more than someone) got the home addresses of some teen stars, including (among others) Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus, and did this to them. :eek: In at least one case, the celebrity was at home when it happened.
Cell phones. A person can have a cell phone from another state but be in Kansas.
There are many crimes with devastating impact on victims that have penalties that do not come close to addressing the cost of the consequences. Punishment and penalties should be a deterrent to crime, but often aren’t enough to stop bad behavior.
Like the drunk driver who got no prison time after killing a young boy. He had many offenses before, but the judge decided that since the drunk’s son had the same name as the dead boy, the drunk would be punished enough by guilt. He either felt no guilt from earlier offenses, or tried to drink it away.
If someone calls 911 for the purposes of SWATing someone, there should be huge penalties. Jail time if anyone got hurt, and even if no lasting harm was done, the entire cost of the operation should be paid for by the caller.
As **JRDelirious **pointed out in the Controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians thread, what if it had been a real hostage situation, and the hostage taker sent one of the hostages to answer the door? Is the expectation that the hostage would have the presence of mind to completely and accurately follow shouted police instructions?
You know, everyone’s talking about the militarization of police, but would it hurt the police to actually learn something useful from the military? Stuff like the importance of conducting reconnaissance and gathering intelligence.
My comment was in response to
What are they supposed to do, walk up, ring the bell, put their hands in their pockets & kick the dust on the porch & say, "Gee, Mrs. Cleaver, can you ask the Beav to come out so we can talk to him?
I’m not defending the shooting - could the guy hear & understand them? Were they using a bullhorn/megaphone or just screaming commands? Were multiple cops screaming at the same time, making it hard to understand any one of them? Does the party at the door understand English? Is he hard of hearing? Had he complied with any of their commands up to that point, which means he can hear & understand them?
Luckily these are still rare enough that they make headlines, which also means the first thought in the cops mind is this is a BS call & I can go in with my guard down.
If what I heard is correct, the police swat team were normal police officers that were dual hatted. Perhaps it might be better if the individual states took a page out of Englands book, and assigned the task to the National Guard for locations that can’t afford or need a full time swat team. It would entail keeping at least a platoon of guardsmen on ready alert, but between Iraq and Afganistan the military seem to have a better track record with securing a possibly armed home and hostile residents.
Luckily these are still rare enough that they make headlines, which also means the first thought in the cops mind is not this is a BS call
One missed word. :smack:
Placing the call via VoIP and spoofing the caller ID, like telemarketers do. It would be a tough decision to delay dispatch while “running a scan” (Hollywood lingo) on a VoIP call, if such technology is even available or feasible in an emergency timeframe.
I mean, if the government could realtime detect when I’m getting spammed by some asshole from India appearing to be in my area code, I imagine they’d already be doing that.
It’s pretty simple. Keep themselves safe and don’t shoot anybody unless they absolutely ascertain that they are doing so to save their own lives or the lives of others. That’s it. If they have no way to do that they should just stay outside and wait. If that results in someone dying that’s really sad, but that death wound not be the fault of the police. There is nothing they should do in the name of preventing crime that results in people being injured. It is the fault of the police that someone died in this case. And no one would have died if they were following a sensible set of procedures.
According to what I’ve heard, it’s actually not that hard to spoof your location in these types of systems. And that is exactly what happened.
Where the system falls down for sure is that they were still on the line with the guy at the time of the shooting. But this was not communicated to the police. Furthermore, as you say, he was holding people hostage, meaning the guy who came out showed something hinky was going on.
As for the situation, my understanding is that he put his hands up, but then accidentally put them down for some reason, but then remembered that they were supposed to be up. And the quick movement was seen by one of the cops as someone possibly him pulling a gun.
Note, I’m basing this on this video by an actual lawyer. He also goes over some of the criminal charges that could be on the table.
This. The dipshit was malicious, but it’s the fault of the police that someone was killed.
I think the police should be held to a higher standard of “don’t be twitchy” than random members of the public who may be confused, hard of hearing, or even crazy. The police are paid, and supposedly trained, to deal with high stress situations. Most random civilians aren’t. Heck, most random civilians shouldn’t qualify for the police force.
And the possibility that the person they are ordering around is deaf, or doesn’t speak English, or is physically unable to comply with their commands, or…
This incident reflects really badly on the police department. The officers should be placed on administrative leave and retrained. The department should examine their procedures and make changes to avoid this sort of thing.
Yeah, charge the asshole “informant” with something. But fixing a police department that kills random people is a higher priority.
Here’s what the police should do:
- Respond to the scene.
- Establish a perimeter.
- Recon the situation.
- Evacuate any civilians.
- Open communications with the suspect.
- Identify themselves as police.
- Order the suspect to surrender himself by coming out unarmed.
- Keep the possibility of force open in case it’s necessitated by the suspect’s actions.