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LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

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Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#351

Post by rdiddly »

Hasz wrote: post #329
rdiddly wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be too blunt, but that's why they call it law enforcement. What's causing all the cognitive dissonance is the fact that law enforcement was summoned inappropriately -- i.e. on a an innocent person in a situation where no laws were broken and no enforcement was needed. If the drug-lord whose assassins raped and killed your sister is confused and groggy in the middle of the night and gets shot accidentally or ev…

I have a huge conflict in my mind. I am a firm believer is due process and equal protection under the law for all. What you are suggesting is far from it, and a far cry from the ideal. SWAT teams, as heavily armored as they are, are still police, serving under the motto of protect and serve. If armor and automatic weapons are necessary to fulfill that goal, so be it. But SWAT teams are fundamentally not an extrajudic…

Actually I agree, and I think most cops would agree with that too. One thing hindering that ideal is how police officers are trained to have a chickenshit mentality where no risk to an officer's safety is tolerated ever. In that philosophy the balance is tilted too far in favor of officer safety and away from public safety. Scour the news for any "hero" story. A hero never displays concern for his own safety, he acts out of concern for someone else's safety. (Remember heroes/heroism? So quaint!)

Nonetheless, and maybe I'm just jaded here, if the police show up anywhere, be it an Occupy protest or a carjacking, there is likely to be mayhem and bloodshed. They're a blunt tool with a single purpose. It's only after the smoke clears and the cuffs are on, that someone gets a formal legal proceeding. Cops always stand between you and a courtroom, in other words. Not sure I like it that way, but that's how it is.

Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#352

Post by viraptor »

kbar13 wrote: post #326
valuearb wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't they prepare for the most likely scenarios, i.e. it's a bogus call or misrepresented whats happening, or that the perp just wants to surrender? How often do these calls turn out to be actually dangerous? One in a dozen? A hundred? Should cops wearing body armor use sniper rifles to shoot someone on their porch several hundred feet away just on the off chance they might have a pistol in their waistband?

if you worked a job where your life is legitimately at risk then you would know that you prepare for the worst every time.

Multiple policemen killing random unarmed people is not the worst?

Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#353

Post by thatcat »

rdiddly wrote: post #332
computerex wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea this answer is total and utter crap. We aren't asking law enforcement to be super human, we want them to be educated and competent. The fact that the U.S is both lacking in training and competence is a well established fact. Law enforcement in the United States has proven itself to lack training and discipline by firing on innocent unarmed citizens many many times. I don't believe any other country in the world h…

Actual solution or alternative: You and tons more people like you, should apply for jobs in law enforcement, work your way up into leadership, and change policy.

How is this the solution? Wouldn't the selection process of any bureaucracy be designed specifically to 'weed out' people like this?

Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#354

Post by throwaway30yo »

IgorPartola wrote: post #328
throwaway7312 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know what it is? You seem quite confident. Americans have 101 guns per 100 citizens. Finns have 34.2 guns per 100 citizens. Icelanders have 30.3 guns per 100 citizens. America has 110x the murder rate than Finland has. America has 13,000x the murder rate Iceland has. Whatever the cause is, 3x the guns ≠ 110x the murder rate (or 13,000x the murder rate). A more interesting comparison might be to examine countrie…

> We know it's not guns. So what's the cause? You misspelled “I want to believe it’s not guns.” I am from Ukraine originally. Poverty is the reason there. So yeah let’s have that proper safety net instead. But when we are talking about this, let’s break it down a bit between different types of violence where guns are used: police shooting suspects, gang violence, run of the mill murder, and acts of terrorism. You don…

Even with all the technology police + military has. I don't think it would be an easy win if the gun owning population decided to revolt. There would be millions of deaths. The government may end up on top, but the consequences would be dire.

Not an American. Canadian here. I actually wish we had American gun laws, even with their consequences.

Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#355

Post by JudasGoat »

gaius wrote: post #274
freedomben wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Problem is that they typically lack the proper training and the discipline required, and act too hastily. What you are asking them to be is super human, indeed even better than a computer could in the same situation. No amount of "proper training" or "discipline" can prepare you to make perfect decisions based on imperfect data (your sensory perception, plus all the data that isn't present such as must be read from…

What you are asking them to be is super human Here is a cop being fired for NOT shooting someone https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/09/12/...

That would be more relevant if it happened on the scale of the Police shooting unarmed people. That is a one off story that you are giving the same weight as something that happens every day in the US.

Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#356

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

rdiddly wrote: post #332
computerex wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea this answer is total and utter crap. We aren't asking law enforcement to be super human, we want them to be educated and competent. The fact that the U.S is both lacking in training and competence is a well established fact. Law enforcement in the United States has proven itself to lack training and discipline by firing on innocent unarmed citizens many many times. I don't believe any other country in the world h…

Actual solution or alternative: You and tons more people like you, should apply for jobs in law enforcement, work your way up into leadership, and change policy.

My brother, quite an intelligent person, attempted to do just that at least three times but no law enforcement agency would admit him (clean record). I am assuming this is because he made comments that to them seemed subversive in interviews.

Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#357

Post by IgorPartola »

throwaway30yo wrote: post #354
IgorPartola wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We know it's not guns. So what's the cause? You misspelled “I want to believe it’s not guns.” I am from Ukraine originally. Poverty is the reason there. So yeah let’s have that proper safety net instead. But when we are talking about this, let’s break it down a bit between different types of violence where guns are used: police shooting suspects, gang violence, run of the mill murder, and acts of terrorism. You don…

Even with all the technology police + military has. I don't think it would be an easy win if the gun owning population decided to revolt. There would be millions of deaths. The government may end up on top, but the consequences would be dire. Not an American. Canadian here. I actually wish we had American gun laws, even with their consequences.

See, I want to send my kids to school and be reasonably sure that some idiot can’t go down the street, buy a couple of rifles, and murder them and their classmates. Being able to go to the gun range once in a while and post on /r/guns is sorta secondary to that. Different priorities I guess.

Edit: and funnily enough the above scenario doesn’t happen in the developed world, except in the US, where it happens multiple times a year. Here we don’t tolerate things like weed, or abortions, or refugees because the societal price for those is too high, but mass child murder is cool because otherwise how would we prove our manliness?

Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#358

Post by Spooky23 »

ivanhoe wrote: post #175
WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #100

What bothers me about these situations is just the entire idea of "SWAT" as practiced. You are a cop with 5+ other cops. You all pull your guns. Someone comes to the door, groggy in the middle of the night. They may or may not understand you are police. They may or may not believe you are the police. They are definitely confused/frightened/angry by your presence. We now begin the dice rolling process. Since every pol…

They have to approach the situation prepared for the worst case scenario. Problem is that they typically lack the proper training and the discipline required, and act too hastily. There's also a huge problem with the whole that macho, gun loving, power-tripping culture, it just makes things worse, wrong profile of people gets that kind of job.

It’s a great example of why these SWAT units shouldn’t be in every small cities police department. Paramilitary tactics should come with military discipline.

Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#359

Post by guiambros »

Malician wrote: post #78
guiambros wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is: idiots with access to phones that do idiotic things should pay for the consequences of their acts -- regardless of how good or bad the police force is. In this case, an idiot caused the murder of an innocent man, and should pay for it, full stop. There's no ifs or buts. Of course this doesn't precludes police from making honest mistakes - or also doing idiotic things - but hopefully will remove the incen…

That's not the root cause. The root cause is that if the police show up they might open fire and kill someone. There are always going to be reasons for the police (or SWAT) to show up, especially with the war on drugs. And with the current environment, that means people dying. Of course, since most of the time it wasn't a SWAT call, and the person in question probably did have drugs, it's easier to totally blame the…

> The root cause is that if the police show up they might open fire and kill someone.

So how do you reduce the number of times the police shows up randomly at your doorstep? Four hundred times per year, more precisely?

That's the definition of "root cause".

I get it, this is HN after all, and most here feel outraged by police brutality, particularly in the US - myself included. But instead of putting the blame on police officers - who are trying to decide in a fraction of a second if their lives is at risk or it's just another stupid case of CoD gamers pranking each other - to me the blame should go squarely to the idiots causing it.

Re: LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

#360

Post by StavrosK »

MikkoFinell wrote: post #341
StavrosK wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.5 per 100k (most of which are suicides), gun culture isn't big here.

That's why it seems a bit unreasonable to compare how the police in your country would react to how American police unfortunately reacted in this scenario. Because the situations those officers face on a daily basis is completely different. American cops can reasonably expect to regularly deal with armed and hostile psychos, unlike the cops in many other countries. Again, that's not to say that the shooting was in an…

Yes, that's another good point, and a big factor in why the police there acts the way it does. Yet, even with all the needless deaths, gun culture remains widespread.
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