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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

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police should be prepared to die wearing the badge, with civilian casualty being an absolute last resort. I disagree. No one should be prepared to die while working a job, a job that one will have all his life.

Then pick a different job. People aren't required to be police officers.

I don't claim to have inside knowledge but often many cops some to become cops because there are no better job prospects. I'm sure they would've picked a factory job or any other trade if it guaranteed life time employment and pension afterward.

But these days such jobs require much studying/preparation/luck.

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

#492

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

Sleep naked

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

#493
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He should got to jail but if any random idiot can get any random person killed by the police that is a Police problem as we can have different training and screening procedures for police officers but we sure as hell can not guarantee that there are no idiots with access to phones.

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…

He caused government to waste resourecs, not a murder, jesus. Are you so biased that you cant blame the police?

Lets say for the sake of argument he is conviced for ordering a murder. Who was the murderer in this case? This person should not be able to be convicted of murder unless the shooting cop is convicted of murder.

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

#494
post #18

Coming from a country where the police spends more time developing people skills than doing gun practice, it never ceases to puzzle me how the solution to any situation appears to be to shoot anything that moves on the flimsiest of assumptions, then figure out what happened afterwards. Now, I appreciate that the police in the US does face a population with more guns on hand than the Norwegian police does; this surely…

To your point about non-lethal weapons: it seems to me that we haven't yet claimed the low-hanging fruit in the US when it comes to this problem. Why not indulge the most base impulses of both silicon valley and police militarization with high tech, non lethal weapons? It will probably introduce new problems, such as even more unnecessary use of force. It addresses absolutely none of the cultural or institutional pro…

Why not indulge the most base impulses

Because indulging such impulses is a good way to get them to proliferate. I see your approach is to treat them as matters of fact and try to redirect them towards some less-lethal-than-guns solution for mutual benefit, but this is just going to give you more of what you don't want.

Right now a police officer in my area is typically equipped with:

baton; taser; pepper spray; knife; handgun

shotgun (in the car); flashlights (high powered, doubles as a club in a pinch)

5 weapons, with others in reserve, is already a lot to carry. Indeed, it's partly because of this proliferation of weapons (and all the training and liability issues that go with them) that many police are under-trained in physical combat (this from undercover and head-of-training officers I've known, whose opinion I'm inclined to take at face value).

So you've got heavily armed individuals who are trained/socialized to maintain a somewhat irrationally elevated perception of danger and most of their training if focused on using weapons to induce coercion. This is a bad combination. not just for the job and the public, but for the police themselves. I know a former police officer who doesn't keep any weapons in the house, but who's also paranoid about crime because he's been rtained to think about all the bad things that could happen to the point that he's afraid to hire someone to clean his house because they might case it on behalf of burglars or home invaders. This despite the fact that he doesn't own anything especially valuable; he lives in an ordinary suburban home and probably has less stuff than most people.

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

#495
post #18

Coming from a country where the police spends more time developing people skills than doing gun practice, it never ceases to puzzle me how the solution to any situation appears to be to shoot anything that moves on the flimsiest of assumptions, then figure out what happened afterwards. Now, I appreciate that the police in the US does face a population with more guns on hand than the Norwegian police does; this surely…

[deleted]

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

#496
post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hollow points are designed to stay in the person you're shooting and stop the threat without over penetrating and hitting an innocent person behind the target. I understand they sound scary to people not familiar with guns but they are the safest option for everyone else around the person you are shooting. Not using hollow points for defensive/police purposes would be insane.

I know nothing about bullets other than what one might deduce from elementary Newtonian physics, so this may be a stupid question. To make a bullet not over penetrate you have to make it so all of its energy is spent in the target (or at least so much is spent in the target that if it does go all the way through it does not have enough left to cause serious injury to whatever it hits on the other side). Hollow points…

The energy transfer into the target is roughly its "stopping power". The goal is to remove an imminent or active threat. Your newtonian physics intuition is correct: lower velocity and/or lower mass is going to lower the energy of the round. If the goal is to stop the individual, you want to be able to deliver as much energy as possible into the target. Lower velocity/lower mass rounds aren't going to be as effective in stopping the target.

If a bullet passes through an individual, it hasn't delivered all of its energy to the individual. It's still going, so this is inefficient and dangerous: you're less likely to have stopped the target, and you're more likely to hit something unintended.

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you've ever been a soldier. Sure the average private or corporal is in their twenties but when I was in Afghanistan the average NCO was in their thirties. Even higher ranked people with office jobs weren't immune from danger. Rocket attacks on KAF and the FOBs was a regular occurrence. Soldiers can easily get a lot more than one year of combat time. How many full time soldiers only do a single tour in I…

No I've never been a soldier but I know a USAF graduate who spent I think 6 month long tour in Iraq. And he did mention being in mortar attack a few times. But it didn't last years. And I agree with what you said about even older/higher ranked people being in danger. But the point is how long has war been going on? And how many of US soldiers are actually in combat zone. But for US cops, any chance encounter on the s…

A 30 year cop (presumably) isn't going to spend the ENTIRE career working as a beat cop on the graveyard shift in the worst parts of Baltimore or Chicago. They also rank up and/or change positions to be detectives, special investigations, expert witnesses for prosecutors, bosses or administrative police staff.

Meanwhile SWAT details (particularly in medium sized cities with more toys than mandatory training) are going to consistently attract the worst of the so called "bad apples" from the greater ranks of police. Individuals that joined up specifically because the rough and tumble stuff appealed to them.

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

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my immediate reaction. My guess is that the blame and punishment will all be laser focused on the caller, in an attempt to avoid a public outcry for the actual shooter’s head. That cop shouldn’t be on administrative leave, he should be in jail for murder.

Should cops have to wait until they are actually being gunned down before they can use force to protect themselves? What happened was an absolute tragedy, and every measure should be taken to avoid anything like that ever happening again. The shooting was not justified, and cops need better training, non-lethal options must be expanded, penalties for this kind of "prank" must be made harsher. Everyone agrees on that.…

this is the standard most millitary forces follow IN ACTUAL WARZONES, so no, I think it is 100% reasonable to ask the police to follow the same standard.

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

#499
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So - the demonstrations following some police shootings aside, is there any significant push in the US to drive the police towards less lethal encounters with the public it is to serve and protect? I'm from the southern US, which is historically more conservative than the rest of the country. I'm not in any way claiming that the following viewpoints are universal and accepted in this region, but a large enough port…

Sorry but almost all the blame is on the person who pulls the trigger. Swatting is possible because of police militarization. Frankly while the idiot who made the call certainly shares some responsibility, our police policies of shoot first and ask questions later are the problem. When police are trained to respond to citizens, even violent ones, like enemies in war, we get the outcomes of police killings that we hav…

Nothing they said contradicts what they said.

It’s important to understand though how the (rest of) US thinks about situations like these. Throwing. Your arms up and declaring the moral high ground instead of being a apart of pragmatic conversations reminds me of the stance R.M.S would take on things.

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

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as people slag off the "thin blue line" mentality it does mean something. You put that uniform on and you are the meat-shield between order and chaos, between civilization and lawlessness. You're performing a grim but necessary service , and there's no shame in retiring to civilian life if you can't or won't accept this duty. This is why soldiers are taught that they are outranked by any civilian. Every offic…

The one time I was arrested (for illegal use of a roadway during a protest), during the post arrest search of my belongings, the cop searching made some comment about something in my bag and I turned my head (I was facing a wall) to reply, for which he immediately shoved my face back into the wall and said "You're not allowed to move - my safety is more important than yours". Keep in mind, this is in a police station…

>"You're not allowed to move - my safety is more important than yours”

This is exactly the problem, and darkly colors mottos such as ‘To protect and serve’

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