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Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

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Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols. This is not accurate. The timeframe is not wrong; it is true that the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s. But saying it evolved from "warehouse guards and slave patrols" is ahistorical. Most modern police forces modeled after London's Metropolitan Police replaced night watch s…

> the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s.

There are some pretty big differences between the UK policing model and the one used in the US.

The UK model was set up against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars (the French police's role included monitoring dissent, suppressing political opposition [1] and even censoring books) and the Peterloo Massacre [2] (where cavalry were set on a peaceful protest campaigning for more than 2% of people to be allowed to vote)

The Peelian model [3] is one of 'policing by consent' where the police focus their efforts on the sorts of crimes the average citizen wants solved - rather than on suppressing political dissent, or censoring books, or launching cavalry charges against protests. Peel's police aren't a military force, which is why very few of them have guns.

If the American police are based on Peelian principles, then an awful lot of the principles have gotten lost in translation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fouch%C3%A9#In_Napoleon... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles#The_nine_pr...

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#262
post #25

Okay so like, genuinely not trying to do a "back in my day" fuckin thing here, but also: what the fuck is wrong with kids? Back when I was coming up, pranking at it's absolute worst was like, filling a dudes shoes with yogurt in the locker room, or like, putting plastic bugs in people's desks n shit. Why the fuck are teenagers trying to get each other murdered by cops!?

Fair question, but I would also like to ask "What the f** is wrong with cops?". Receiving an anonymous call claiming some not-particularly-plausible threat at a particular location probably DOES deserve a police investigation. I see no reason why it impels police to drag people from their house in chains, threaten to shoot them, or actually shoot them. If police responses were reasonable and proportionate to the plau…

The cops are reflective of the system that they operate in. Same as everyone else. Change the system, change behavior.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols. Are we still spouting this nonsense? They do come from the mid 1800s. Modeled after the London Metro Police, where there were so many slaves to catch. American cities soon imitated, based on how many slaves were recovered.

It would be fair to say that early US police were mostly about protecting the interests of the powerful. Over time that diminished and police protected an increasing number of less powerful groups.

During my childhood, it was common for police to defer to husbands regarding domestic abuse. And kids all over knew to not go to the police - for any kind of abuse from authority figures.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I don't pay nearly enough attention or care about police quality outcomes to comment on whether trends have been a disaster, but critiques of militarization are definitely not something that arose out of BLM. A huge amount was coming from Radley Balko and reason.com over 15 years ago. It was a major libertarian talking point for a long time. As soon as Iraq surplus donation programs started giving free MRAPs and full plate personal armor to police, it was making people uneasy. Early justification for beefing up police armament largely came out of the North Hollywood bank robbery shootout in what? 1998? We didn't want police being outgunned by common criminals, but it's never been clear they need to deal with paramilitary insurgencies that exist in active theaters of combat. Nobody was ever putting IEDs in the streets to blow up squad cars in the United States as far as I can remember.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Danger =/= high stress/pressure situations

Even if that were true, and it's not, it would be mitigated by better training and careful psychological filtering.

> and it's not

At least try to be persuasive. There are a myriad of ways that jobs can be stressful without endangering your life, that should not be difficult for you to imagine. Shift work, demands for quotas and metrics (sales people can tell you this), dealing with violent and erratic individuals in the public with sometimes insufficient support, etc.

Correctional Officers face similar circumstances and have a life expectancy of 58-59 years old. High divorce rate too, but people want to content themselves with the truism that "only bad people work these jobs", with no consideration for environmental effects. The divorce rate is higher among medical assistants and some skilled trades, for reasons that can just as easily apply: long hours, on-call, fatigue, etc.

> it would be mitigated by better training and careful psychological filtering.

Only on the conceit that any and all stress is imposed by lack of training and bad psychology.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#266
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only attempted murder because American SWAT is trigger happy, equipped literally like an army and shoots before asking questions or establishing context, that's hardly his fault.

It's his fault if he knows his actions may result in the targets death and does it anyway. "It's hardly my fault the police doused pluc with gasoline, all I did was throw a match"

I agree that he is complicit, but I find it hard to view him as solely culpable for a death. If a child feeds law enforcement false data, and law enforcement then kills someone, both parties should have known better but I have much higher expectations of our law enforcement than a teenager.

The kid needs to be punished, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have a glaring hole in our law enforcement procedures so large that even children can exploit them. That’s insane. Children are always going to do dumb shit, we need to have policies and procedures to guard against that.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Danger =/= high stress/pressure situations

But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves. For instance, several officers have been treated for severe symptoms after coming into contact with fentanyl. Except that there is no way, biochemically speaking, the kind of contact they had with fentanyl could have produced anything resembling those symptoms. It was an en…

> But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves.

This is conjecture with no measurable basis.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While some night watches were public safety distributed among community members, they were often there to protect the goods of merchants rather than protect the ordinary citizens of an area from petty crime. As merchants grew, and their goods became more valuable targets, the merchants would hire on guards, but saw the opportunity to turn the existing night watch systems in place to their favor, essentially insisting…

For the warehouse guards, to summarize, you're saying that night watchmen and city watchmen were de facto warehouse guards before the formation of professional police forces? That seems a far cry from "evolved out of warehouse guards". Police still put resources into protecting property, but this does not make them "warehouse guards" any more than resources put on petty crime make them "cutpurse chasers" unless you'r…

> For the slave patrol point, I would appreciate a single example of this phenomenon

Potter, Gary "The History of Policing in the United States"[1] references Platt, Tony, "Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 18"

1. https://www.academia.edu/30504361/The_History_of_Policing_in...

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#269

The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

> The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Do you mean for the US, rather than the human race? Some of us live in countries where the only weapons most cops carry are truncheons and tasers.

Whats bad for the US is bad for the rest of the world. America uses its outsized influence to impact the entire world

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we still spouting this nonsense? They do come from the mid 1800s. Modeled after the London Metro Police All of the above is true. In the US, slavery enforcement evolved into police forces and police forces were modeled after UK police. Many police forces, many origin stores. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...

The article you point to is explicitly debunking the idea of slave patrols evolving into police forces. > The claim that modern police originated from slave patrols is a dangerous slur designed to delegitimize policing ... Bad policing must be criticized, but we should not do so by resorting to historically flimsy myths, especially myths that unfairly tarnish the reputations of those in law enforcement and cast asper…

It does not matter... he believes it, so it must be true. But it does feel weird to wander among humans, listening to the nonsense being discussed so earnestly.

The truth of the matter is this: if you refuse to believe that modern policing evolved directly from slave patrols, it means you are a racist and you voted for Trump. This is undeniable, and by denying it you prove it true. Nuanced and sophisticated descriptions of how historical circumstances came to be are repressive and the enemy of social justice. Thomas Jefferson ate babies and George Washington stomped on little latinx children.

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