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

> Let's do the Devils advocate. You are the cop standing there. You are almost certain he will pull a gun on you or your colleague. What would you do?

-Fair question. IMHO there will be situations where the police are justified in firing on suspects. I just think that bar is currently (apparently) way too low - and that much can be done BEFORE a situation goes as far as the one in the parent story.

I would expect that SOP at 911 dispatch when receiving a call like the one triggering this death would be to seek more information as the team dispatched; why didn't they call the neighbours? Why didn't they call the house the call supposedly originated from? Why didn't they floodlight the entrance to the house as they ordered the victim to come out? He wouldn't see a thing with a couple of lights in his face, and it wouldn't matter one iota whether he had a gun or not.

My point isn't that police never are justified in exerting violence on us; my point is that they could do a lot more to avoid ending up in situations where deadly force is the only apparent solution in the first place.

I hope I didn't dodge your question.

Here's that quoted section without weird formatting:

>

There is plenty of reason to restrict the use of SWAT teams, but not to abolish them. They are needed now and then, when there is an actual hostage situation or an armed gang that tries to shoot it's way out. They should never be used for routine search or arrest warrants. That not only endangers the possibly innocent target of the raid, but it undermines the team's training – they become used to tearing up houses where no one is resisting. There's a dashboard video of the Jose Guerena raid. My drill instructor would have said they looked "like a monkey fucking a football" – and I was in the Air Force, ground tactics weren't even on the curriculum. I've seen considerably more forceful comments from Army and Marine Corps infantrymen who actually have had to break into a house against armed defenders. They milled around, exposed themselves to possible fire through the open door, and got into each others line of fire. They did NOT identify themselves as police that I can hear on the audio track, so Guerena was justified in hunkering down in a defensive position with a rifle. If Guerena (a former Marine) hadn't been far more professional than any of the cops and not fired without identifying his targets, several cops would have been down.

Then there are the SWAT members that "accidentally" (that is, negligently) fired a round and killed an unresisting, unarmed suspect because they tripped or bumped their elbow – an accident that can only happen if you are in violation of the two most important rules of gun safety: don't put your finger on the trigger until you have decided to shoot, and don't point the muzzle near anything that you do not intend to shoot. We know they were running around with their finger on the trigger – in a situation where there was clearly no need for shooting – because modern firearms in good working order just don't fire unless the trigger is pulled. The military just doesn't tolerate that. If a non-police civilian in my state had done this, he could have been sentenced to life for manslaughter. But if you are a cop, you can recklessly kill someone and the prosecutor will throw the case…

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

The police is also under an immense pressure when they are assigned to a hostage situation.

Yes, I suppose much of that comes from their own feeling that they must achieve a quick resolution to a distressing situation, and if they are not well trained, not experienced and do not have the right incentives to work in a professional way, this kind of tragedies will happen.

In my country of 5 million people, the police force (8000 policemen) often uses less than 10 bullets in action per year, per the whole force (including warning shots but excluding ammunition used in training), but on the other hand, police officers being killed in the line of duty is also extremely rare, so they can usually approach most situations without being too aggressive.

(This is not because we wouldn't have a lot of guns in the country - we do. We just don't have violent subcultures that would shoot each other or the police.)

Americans are all about freedom and equality, but having a police force who can almost arbitrarily kill you and with little consequence sounds like neither. In fact, it's not very different from how the Chinese government can disappear or jail you without retribution if you criticize the CCP, although Americans will undoubtedly loathe the comparison. The Chinese system sounds worse because it's lawful evil if you will, but at least there's a simple if degrading mechanism to avoid being a casualty, while the chaotic evilness of the US system means you could be dead tomorrow by no fault of your own just like the father of two—no, sorry, the "male", better term to convey aggression and justify the shooting—in this story.

As you said, this is part of the American culture, and part of a circle of violence that includes NRA lobbying, widespread gun ownership, mass incarceration, macho cop culture, politically motivated toughness on crime, the War on Drugs, etc. This will take decades to unravel at best, so I'm not holding my breath, just like I'm not holding my breath for the CCP to allow free speech anytime soon.

What's rendered weird specifically, on your system?

I'm always very puzzled when I have to do HN quoting/bullet points, so I thought 80-columns code would fit well (evidently, it doesn't).

I also wonder why HN doesn't improve formatting, which has at least a couple of very common problems (the mentioned code and bullet points rendering).