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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

#631

Post by always_good »

noncoml wrote: post #587
dingbat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and being woken in the middle of the night, wearing boxers or pajamas with hands in the air, better pray that they don't happen to slip down causing you to instinctively "reach for your waistband" in order to hitch them up

The video leaked online. He is not even trying to reach for his pajamas or something. A cop asks him to move towards them and the next second you hear the shot. It's crazy.

He definitely reached for his shorts. It's a reflex that comes from a whole lifetime of being able to pull up your pants without risk of being shot.

But that's all irrelevant. If the cops were only interested in securing him, they would've made him lie down like a starfish and have someone approach him instead of letting Jigsaw make him play Twister.

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

#632

Post by anonymous231e1 »

dingbat wrote: post #159
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…

and being woken in the middle of the night, wearing boxers or pajamas with hands in the air, better pray that they don't happen to slip down causing you to instinctively "reach for your waistband" in order to hitch them up

Anonymous for obvious reasons...

This happened to me on Wednesday about 5:00am. My wife and I had gotten into a terrible fight. She suffers from terrible alcoholism. This week of Christmas has been absolutely horrible as demons resurface. She awoke me from my sleep about 4am, drunk and outraged because I asked if she was wearing a robe in bed. Things spiraled very quickly out of control, my wife was out of control, and so was I. We both said terrible things and made unwanted body contact. The fight made its way to the driveway and a neighbor called in the disturbance.

About 30 minutes later I was awoken by the doorbell. I knew who it was. I threw on my PJ pants and a hoodie. Fifteen minutes later I was in handcuffs heading to the county jail.

I could have easily been in a very very bad situation if I hadn't followed orders to the letter.

My wife and I are in therapy and she will be entering detox this next week. I hope this event turns into the wake up call that helps her beat this disease with my help all along the way.

Peace.

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

#633

Post by always_good »

kenjackson wrote: post #621
dclowd9901 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst case scenario? I’m pretty sure that is the scenario that played out. Police should be prepared to die wearing the badge, with civilian casualty being an absolute last resort. It works this way for the military. I can’t fathom why it doesn’t work this way with police.

Given it was thought to be a multi person hostage situation, I think the worst case is every hostage gets killed and shootout ensues. As bad as it was, it probably wasn’t the worst case.

Well, that's a case of a branch that never even occurred, so what's the point?

In that case, it's not as bad as if it was a secret ISIS compound and one of the bad guys set off a bomb that blew up the block. That's worse than your worst case. But notice how this adds no value to the discussion.

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

#635

Post by roenxi »

throwaway171230 wrote: post #600
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…

The person making the prank is in the wrong, but so are the officers. How I see it is that the officers of their own freewill took on the role of law enforcement and public service. Fully aware that they would be put in life threatening situations. Their first instinct shouldn't be to fire first to save their own skin, but be trained to take time to assess the situation and risk erring on restraint of force. Most of…

There is actually a slightly more damning view of the situation here than the moral issues around police safety.

The police had complete control over how they approached this. Why then are they even in a position where they feel threatened?

When we look at the outcome here, they just killed some dude for no reason. If this is acceptable to the police force; why not have them call out to the room with a megaphone? What is the worst case scenario then? Hostage gets shot by a criminal instead of a policeperson?

In this day and age, they could just fly in a drone in with a microphone and and a speaker while they sit 200 meters behind a bullet proof screen. Instead they proactivly put themselves in a situation where they felt at personal risk from ... turned out to be some dude sitting in his house. How could they have come up with a worse plan?

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

#636

Post by mindslight »

Mtinie wrote: post #590
mindslight wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cops act like thugs because the overwhelming majority of people they arrest/hassle/shoot are guilty . Period. However, this does not justify any of the collateral damage to the ones who are innocent - the scales of justice are not a probability distribution! The entire point of the rule of law is to have a clear dividing line between the acceptable and the unacceptable - every innocent person assaulted by the police…

> Cops act like thugs because the overwhelming majority of people they arrest/hassle/shoot are guilty. Period. You realize that judging acts is not within their domain and sphere of interest, right? Also, I’d love to see your reference citation(s) to back up this statement.

> You realize that judging acts is not within their domain and sphere of interest, right?

Wat? Judging acts is in the "domain and sphere of interest" of any person.

Please note (if you can avoid shooting from the hip) that I'm making this point to criticize police overreach - even a perfectly "clean slate" cop with no peer pressure will develop a bias towards thinking of everybody as a criminal! Similarly, a cop that lives in a White community and works in a Black neighborhood is going to find it awfully hard to not develop a bias of thinking Black people are more likely to be dangerous. (and, in case it's not clear, vice-versa)

If you cannot bear to entertain thoughts like the above, then you really aren't interested in analyzing the problem. Because all of the "training" in the world isn't going to counteract a bias that is reinforced every single day!

What is needed are actual real incentives to not murder people, but fortunately this is a pretty old problem. Apart from responding to a rare overt attack (eg aiming a gun or charging the cop), any cop that shoots someone is themselves committing a crime (somewhere between voluntary manslaughter and second degree murder) - undermining that very "law and order" that police purport to uphold! The routine and casual corruption that allows these crimes to go unpunished needs to be rooted out.

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

#637

Post by Mtinie »

jack9 wrote: post #628
Mtinie wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cops act like thugs because the overwhelming majority of people they arrest/hassle/shoot are guilty. Period. You realize that judging acts is not within their domain and sphere of interest, right? Also, I’d love to see your reference citation(s) to back up this statement.

Do one ride along. It's not hard to arrange.

A ride-along is easy to arrange, that’s true. I’ve had the chance to take advantage of the opportunity a few different times. Twice with officers from the LAPD (Rampart and Olympic divisions), and once after I moved back to the East Coast when I spent three hours riding with officers from the Loudoun County Sheriff’s department.

Perhaps my experiences were exceptional examples and everywhere else across the United States, a majority of LE interactions are between officers and “guilty” people, but that’s not what I saw.

I’m open to the possibility, of course, but I’d still like to see a citation backing up the statement I was responding to.

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

#638

Post by learc83 »

ams6110 wrote: post #610
alkonaut wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is just one way this isn’t a massive police screwup, and that’s if the person SWATed reacted in a way that was (very) threatening, such as grabbing a gun, or something that is reasonable the police could believe was a gun. My hunch here is that, just like you are suggesting, Swat teams are used incorrectly as first response in unconfirmed situations. No investigation by anyone has confirmed the threat. At the e…

In some cases an unarmed person can present a deadly threat. Though not from across the street.

This is almost never the case when there are multiple armed and armored police present.

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

#639

Post by scoot »

nwjtkjn wrote: post #502
danso wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to me to be what happened in the Daniel Shaver case, who was drunk and in his pajamas when police (responding to a report of a brandished gun being spotted in his motel room window) confronted him. He was facedown and yelled at for ~4 minutes before being shot when officers mistook him pulling up his waistband for reaching for a weapon: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/09/us/police-shooting-vid... The of…

That video is sickening. That man was murdered.

Technically not murder, as that requires premeditation. However it is apparent that this is a no-win situation for the victim, the officer is clearly intent on creating a situation for a "justifiable" homicide.

What's just as horrifying is that the jury acquitted.

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

#640

Post by learc83 »

ams6110 wrote: post #611
StavrosK wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the person most at fault here is the one who lied and called in SWAT in the first place. It completely mystifies me how people can think that people with guns were justified in fatally shooting someone with no guns . That kind of thing should just never happen, either subdue them or let them get away, why are you shooting them? What could they possibly have done, short of ran to the kitchen to get a knife and t…

> How can you mistake anything someone unarmed does for a deadly threat? A person's bare hands can represent a deadly threat if he is close enough. Not that that was the case in this situation.

Not to multiple trained, armed, and armored men it doesn't, which is normally the case with police shootings.
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