8 ms·

Regardless of how it started, the article makes it sound like the man was shot immediately upon exiting his front door. Will be interesting to see the body / da

Regardless of how it started, the article makes it sound like the man was shot immediately upon exiting his front door. Will be interesting to see the body / dash cam footage, so that we can have another 3 days of outrage over police action in the US and then return to the status quo.

Raphmedia 9y ago
All it takes is for that person to reach in its pockets or to carry a long black stick for such an accident to happen. SWAT isn't regular police, they are trained to deal with active shooters. If such a situation happen, you are to exit with your hands in the air (when asked) and then get on the ground without resisting as they restrain you. Anything else will put your life in danger. They came in with the following information: "a call that someone had an argument with their mother, that the father had been shot in the head and the shooter was holding his mother, brother and sister hostage." It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. It was not a trigger happy cop reacting badly to a traffic stop. It was officers that acted on information that were planted by a malicious individual. The prankster is the one that needs to go to jail for this. --- Edit: Yes, the situation wasn't right. That doesn't mean that the officers on the ground were in the wrong. There is a more systematic issue going on, you can't put all the blame on the door kickers. Quoting @matt_wulfeck's comment on another comment thread as he made the same point as I did but with better wording: "Adrenaline and poor training lead to situations like this. The department should be held responsible even though it was an individual who made the fatal mistake. As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder."
- newintellectual 9y ago
  Your belief is the sort of total idiocy that apologizes and sanctions every completely idiotic murderous police action that happens in the country that has, by far, the highest rate of police killings per capita on the planet.
- jdanp 9y ago
  It's crazy that as a citizenry we allow our police to operate in this manner. Kansas is a constitutional carry state, in which all adult citizens are legally allowed to carry a pistol on their person without a permit. Why should the presence of a firearm, or the reach for a pocket or "long black stick", be a death sentence for a citizen? Why do we allow state actors to behave in this way at all?
  - davidw 9y ago
    I know this sounds weird, but it's almost as if there were some kind of correlation between a populace having a shitload of guns, and more gun deaths.
    - foxhound6 9y ago
      The top 3 safest states are all constitutional carry states. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/the-10-safest-states-in-america?slide=9 https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/the-10-sa...
      - overtpb949 9y ago
        From what I can tell, looking at Wikipedia: Five states with lowest rates of gun death: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_United_States_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_Uni...) States with constitutional carry: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho (residents only), Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota (residents only; concealed carry only), Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#U.S._jurisdictions_that_have_constitutional_carry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#U.S._juri...)
        foxhound6 9y ago
        And more cars = more car accidents and more multi-story homes = more people falling down the stairs. As a society, we're concerned with overall safety and reducing overall violence and crime metrics.
- larrik 9y ago
  What if the person exiting the house was a released/escaping hostage? Should the cops just shoot everyone they see in the house?
  - notheguyouthink 9y ago
    Depends on the country. Sadly.
- macintux 9y ago
  The police are, or absolutely should be, better trained to deal with a swatting situation than civilians. I refuse to absolve the police of all blame here.
- hrktb 9y ago
  Perhaps police/swat should be able to step back and confirm information before engaging difficult situations. Even if it wasn’t a prank, imagine them getting the wrong address. Or the caller being in good faith but mistaken. People killed on false grounds shouldn’t be summarized in “those officers did nothing wrong”
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- avtar 9y ago
  “A male came to the front door,” Livingston said. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.” Regardless of the information they had their actions seem way beyond reckless. The fact that some people think that nothing is wrong with how this scenario, and I'm sure lots others, played out is mindnumbing.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. I'm sorry to be so direct, but your belief is based on zero facts. We should all withhold judgement until more facts come to light. Your advice is probably right - I think what chafes us, myself included, is that it's even necessary for us to have to keep that sort of thing in mind; that SWAT teams can be weaponized for personal feuds in this manner.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    Even better, SWAT teams can be weaponized by enemies of the US. North Korea, ISIS, whoever - just call up the US and cause havoc.
    - ryanlol 9y ago
      These calls require just a few words, it'd be trivial for a single determined individual to cause a mess across the country by simply making these calls in bulk in an automated manner.
- smileysteve 9y ago
  > It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. It was not a trigger happy cop reacting badly to a traffic stop. It was officers that acted on information that were planted by a malicious individual. The prankster is the one that needs to go to jail for this. [Bad] Information. But if the 911 system is subject to malicious intent, no authentication, no verification, and incomplete signals then police need to act on that information accordingly. If you place no blame on the police reading signals incorrectly, then there is no reason to waste money on hiring a killer to do the bloody work. There is a < 100% chance of going to prison either way and a greater chance of being successful with the police.
  - smileysteve 9y ago
    Note: I'm front Atlanta. Home of an informant giving bad information and a swat team tossing a flashbang in an airbnb traveling couple's baby's crib.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- icebraining 9y ago
  If the SWAT is the unthinking killing machine you're describing, then it can't be allowed to be deployed by an anonymous phone call, any more than the Army can leave armed RPGs on public sidewalks. Information has to be verified before you can act on it with deadly consequences. Hell, I doubt if some prankster called your boss and said you were sleeping with his SO, and your boss fired you, you'd just say "no hard feeling, you are just acting on information planted by a malicious individual."
- Gtwhite90 9y ago
  I don't know if there is enough information to say that the cops did nothing wrong. An anonymous call shouldn't lead to an innocent man getting killed and cops need to investigate these situations more carefully. I agree the prankster needs to go to jail but if the cop really did kill an unarmed innocent man there should be some type of punishment.
- downandout 9y ago
  >It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. And yet I can’t possibly think of something more wrong than trigger happy cops shooting an unarmed person in their own doorway. Swatting isn’t a new thing. It’s one scenario that cops have to consider when they receive a call like this. Unless he had a weapon, the cop that shot him needs to be held accountable. Wearing a badge does not entitle you to execute someone for opening their own door.
- wwalser 9y ago
  I think we can all agree that swatting is an incredibly dangerous and should obviously be a criminal act. I haven't seen anyone defend it as anything other than that. So let's talk about the part that isn't generally agreed upon… > It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. That may be your _assumption_, but going straight to "belief" is a HUGE step considering the lack of information. We don't know that the police identified themselves. We know that the police had an _entire block_ instead of an actual address. For all we know this was a random person stepping outside to see what was, to their mind, happening "across the street". We have near-zero information about how the shooting happened. Why the strong desire to pick a side? I'm not saying that I think you're wrong. I just think it's odd to form a strong opinion _right now_. We know so incredibly little, why bother forming and espousing an opinion at all? Why pick a side now? You don't have to be on a team. You can just… wait. It's possible to not have an opinion — at all. We can all move along with our day. Why the rush? On ending lives. Given that you've formed and shared an opinion despite a near-total lack of information, it seem to me that you're of the more general opinion that cops have the right to end lives with little information. At best, information that they know has a reasonable probability of being incorrect. Cops jobs center around dealing with false information. My question given that world view: In the spectrum between "someone was shot at this address, your life is in danger while near that address" and "there are dangerous people roaming our streets, your life is in danger", where is the line? Should cops be allowed to end the life of any person who places their hands out of sight while in their presence? There are, after all, dangerous people roaming our streets.
  - Raphmedia 9y ago
    I never said that the police were in the were not in the wrong. My point is that you can't put the blame on the officers that responded to the call. A suspect can pull out a weapon in the blink of an eye. For all they knew, it wasn't a swatting prank but suicide by police. As much as it sucks, SWAT isn't trained to ask questions first. Those officers acted as they were trained to and shouldn't be blamed for it. They should't be dealt with harshly but get therapy and counseling for it. Those individual know that they shot an innocent man.
    - 9y ago
- barrkel 9y ago
  Think about it: if you absolve the police, you're permitting terrorists to lever the state's monopoly on force and do their dirty work for them. All ISIS et al need do is sit down with Google maps, a caller ID spoofing setup and an American accent and cause all the havoc in the world, and to your mind, that's fine.
  - always_good 9y ago
    Honestly, I doubt anything will improve until that sort of situation happens to catapult it into media attention.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  You are conflating information and beliefs. A single caller claiming shots have been fired really isn't the same thing as information that shots have been fired. I mean, your reasoning process hands a pretty huge victory to malicious pranksters that want the cops to shoot at someone.
  - aquadrop 9y ago
    Even if shots were really fired, what kind of a strategy is to shoot anyone in sight? How do you know it's a perpetrator and not an escaped hostage?
rhizome 9y ago
I've read your comment several times and I still can't figure out what you were hoping to accomplish with it.
mtgx 9y ago
And it was supposedly a "hostage situation" that the police knew about. How common is it for the police to shoot the first person on sight coming out of a "hostage situation"? Regardless of how reckless the cop was, it's all a matter of how the prosecutor will spin this to the Grand Jury. It's why only 33% of the cops ever get indicted, while the prosecutors otherwise have a indictment success rate of 99% for everyone else and can indict "even a ham sandwich."
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  Adrenaline and poor training lead to situations like this. The department should be held responsible even though it was an individual who made the fatal mistake. As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ams6110 9y ago
    > The department should be held responsible even though it was an individual who made the fatal mistake. Both are culpable, if the facts are as reported here. The cop was either improperly trained or did not have the personality to remain calm in a situation where use of deadly force might be required. Maybe both. That's the department's fault. But the cop is the one who pulled the trigger. > As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder. Reckless or negligent homicide is probably more realistic.
  - watwut 9y ago
    The third factor is legal system that rarely if ever punish officers while being eager to punish anyone else suspect. What incentive the department has to promote training that leads to less violence? It seems to be very little. They have trainings that makes cops more paranoid, more afraid and more aggressive (per Radley Balko reporting). It is not poor training as in "little of it". It might be result.of training itself.
Buldak 9y ago
I'd guess that Wichita police will be relieved to be able to pin some of the blame on the prank, despite the fact that it may have no real bearing on whether their response was justified given the situation and what they knew.
praisewhitey 9y ago
It is entirely likely there will never be any cam footage released.
- Miner49er 9y ago
  http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article192229414.html http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article192229414.html
- dralley 9y ago
  They did release the bodycam footage. It looks like they shined high beams directly in his face, he raised his arm to shield his eyes, and then they shot him.

Raphmedia 9y ago

All it takes is for that person to reach in its pockets or to carry a long black stick for such an accident to happen. SWAT isn't regular police, they are trained to deal with active shooters. If such a situation happen, you are to exit with your hands in the air (when asked) and then get on the ground without resisting as they restrain you. Anything else will put your life in danger. They came in with the following information: "a call that someone had an argument with their mother, that the father had been shot in the head and the shooter was holding his mother, brother and sister hostage." It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. It was not a trigger happy cop reacting badly to a traffic stop. It was officers that acted on information that were planted by a malicious individual. The prankster is the one that needs to go to jail for this. --- Edit: Yes, the situation wasn't right. That doesn't mean that the officers on the ground were in the wrong. There is a more systematic issue going on, you can't put all the blame on the door kickers. Quoting @matt_wulfeck's comment on another comment thread as he made the same point as I did but with better wording: "Adrenaline and poor training lead to situations like this. The department should be held responsible even though it was an individual who made the fatal mistake. As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder."

newintellectual 9y ago
Your belief is the sort of total idiocy that apologizes and sanctions every completely idiotic murderous police action that happens in the country that has, by far, the highest rate of police killings per capita on the planet.
jdanp 9y ago
It's crazy that as a citizenry we allow our police to operate in this manner. Kansas is a constitutional carry state, in which all adult citizens are legally allowed to carry a pistol on their person without a permit. Why should the presence of a firearm, or the reach for a pocket or "long black stick", be a death sentence for a citizen? Why do we allow state actors to behave in this way at all?
- davidw 9y ago
  I know this sounds weird, but it's almost as if there were some kind of correlation between a populace having a shitload of guns, and more gun deaths.
  - foxhound6 9y ago
    The top 3 safest states are all constitutional carry states. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/the-10-safest-states-in-america?slide=9 https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/the-10-sa...
    - overtpb949 9y ago
      From what I can tell, looking at Wikipedia: Five states with lowest rates of gun death: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_United_States_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_Uni...) States with constitutional carry: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho (residents only), Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota (residents only; concealed carry only), Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#U.S._jurisdictions_that_have_constitutional_carry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#U.S._juri...)
      - foxhound6 9y ago
        And more cars = more car accidents and more multi-story homes = more people falling down the stairs. As a society, we're concerned with overall safety and reducing overall violence and crime metrics.
larrik 9y ago
What if the person exiting the house was a released/escaping hostage? Should the cops just shoot everyone they see in the house?
- notheguyouthink 9y ago
  Depends on the country. Sadly.
macintux 9y ago
The police are, or absolutely should be, better trained to deal with a swatting situation than civilians. I refuse to absolve the police of all blame here.
hrktb 9y ago
Perhaps police/swat should be able to step back and confirm information before engaging difficult situations. Even if it wasn’t a prank, imagine them getting the wrong address. Or the caller being in good faith but mistaken. People killed on false grounds shouldn’t be summarized in “those officers did nothing wrong”
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
avtar 9y ago
“A male came to the front door,” Livingston said. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.” Regardless of the information they had their actions seem way beyond reckless. The fact that some people think that nothing is wrong with how this scenario, and I'm sure lots others, played out is mindnumbing.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. I'm sorry to be so direct, but your belief is based on zero facts. We should all withhold judgement until more facts come to light. Your advice is probably right - I think what chafes us, myself included, is that it's even necessary for us to have to keep that sort of thing in mind; that SWAT teams can be weaponized for personal feuds in this manner.
- barrkel 9y ago
  Even better, SWAT teams can be weaponized by enemies of the US. North Korea, ISIS, whoever - just call up the US and cause havoc.
  - ryanlol 9y ago
    These calls require just a few words, it'd be trivial for a single determined individual to cause a mess across the country by simply making these calls in bulk in an automated manner.
smileysteve 9y ago
> It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. It was not a trigger happy cop reacting badly to a traffic stop. It was officers that acted on information that were planted by a malicious individual. The prankster is the one that needs to go to jail for this. [Bad] Information. But if the 911 system is subject to malicious intent, no authentication, no verification, and incomplete signals then police need to act on that information accordingly. If you place no blame on the police reading signals incorrectly, then there is no reason to waste money on hiring a killer to do the bloody work. There is a < 100% chance of going to prison either way and a greater chance of being successful with the police.
- smileysteve 9y ago
  Note: I'm front Atlanta. Home of an informant giving bad information and a swat team tossing a flashbang in an airbnb traveling couple's baby's crib.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
icebraining 9y ago
If the SWAT is the unthinking killing machine you're describing, then it can't be allowed to be deployed by an anonymous phone call, any more than the Army can leave armed RPGs on public sidewalks. Information has to be verified before you can act on it with deadly consequences. Hell, I doubt if some prankster called your boss and said you were sleeping with his SO, and your boss fired you, you'd just say "no hard feeling, you are just acting on information planted by a malicious individual."
Gtwhite90 9y ago
I don't know if there is enough information to say that the cops did nothing wrong. An anonymous call shouldn't lead to an innocent man getting killed and cops need to investigate these situations more carefully. I agree the prankster needs to go to jail but if the cop really did kill an unarmed innocent man there should be some type of punishment.
downandout 9y ago
>It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. And yet I can’t possibly think of something more wrong than trigger happy cops shooting an unarmed person in their own doorway. Swatting isn’t a new thing. It’s one scenario that cops have to consider when they receive a call like this. Unless he had a weapon, the cop that shot him needs to be held accountable. Wearing a badge does not entitle you to execute someone for opening their own door.
wwalser 9y ago
I think we can all agree that swatting is an incredibly dangerous and should obviously be a criminal act. I haven't seen anyone defend it as anything other than that. So let's talk about the part that isn't generally agreed upon… > It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. That may be your _assumption_, but going straight to "belief" is a HUGE step considering the lack of information. We don't know that the police identified themselves. We know that the police had an _entire block_ instead of an actual address. For all we know this was a random person stepping outside to see what was, to their mind, happening "across the street". We have near-zero information about how the shooting happened. Why the strong desire to pick a side? I'm not saying that I think you're wrong. I just think it's odd to form a strong opinion _right now_. We know so incredibly little, why bother forming and espousing an opinion at all? Why pick a side now? You don't have to be on a team. You can just… wait. It's possible to not have an opinion — at all. We can all move along with our day. Why the rush? On ending lives. Given that you've formed and shared an opinion despite a near-total lack of information, it seem to me that you're of the more general opinion that cops have the right to end lives with little information. At best, information that they know has a reasonable probability of being incorrect. Cops jobs center around dealing with false information. My question given that world view: In the spectrum between "someone was shot at this address, your life is in danger while near that address" and "there are dangerous people roaming our streets, your life is in danger", where is the line? Should cops be allowed to end the life of any person who places their hands out of sight while in their presence? There are, after all, dangerous people roaming our streets.
- Raphmedia 9y ago
  I never said that the police were in the were not in the wrong. My point is that you can't put the blame on the officers that responded to the call. A suspect can pull out a weapon in the blink of an eye. For all they knew, it wasn't a swatting prank but suicide by police. As much as it sucks, SWAT isn't trained to ask questions first. Those officers acted as they were trained to and shouldn't be blamed for it. They should't be dealt with harshly but get therapy and counseling for it. Those individual know that they shot an innocent man.
  - 9y ago
barrkel 9y ago
Think about it: if you absolve the police, you're permitting terrorists to lever the state's monopoly on force and do their dirty work for them. All ISIS et al need do is sit down with Google maps, a caller ID spoofing setup and an American accent and cause all the havoc in the world, and to your mind, that's fine.
- always_good 9y ago
  Honestly, I doubt anything will improve until that sort of situation happens to catapult it into media attention.
maxerickson 9y ago
You are conflating information and beliefs. A single caller claiming shots have been fired really isn't the same thing as information that shots have been fired. I mean, your reasoning process hands a pretty huge victory to malicious pranksters that want the cops to shoot at someone.
- aquadrop 9y ago
  Even if shots were really fired, what kind of a strategy is to shoot anyone in sight? How do you know it's a perpetrator and not an escaped hostage?

rhizome 9y ago

I've read your comment several times and I still can't figure out what you were hoping to accomplish with it.

mtgx 9y ago

And it was supposedly a "hostage situation" that the police knew about. How common is it for the police to shoot the first person on sight coming out of a "hostage situation"? Regardless of how reckless the cop was, it's all a matter of how the prosecutor will spin this to the Grand Jury. It's why only 33% of the cops ever get indicted, while the prosecutors otherwise have a indictment success rate of 99% for everyone else and can indict "even a ham sandwich."

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
Adrenaline and poor training lead to situations like this. The department should be held responsible even though it was an individual who made the fatal mistake. As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ams6110 9y ago
  > The department should be held responsible even though it was an individual who made the fatal mistake. Both are culpable, if the facts are as reported here. The cop was either improperly trained or did not have the personality to remain calm in a situation where use of deadly force might be required. Maybe both. That's the department's fault. But the cop is the one who pulled the trigger. > As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder. Reckless or negligent homicide is probably more realistic.
- watwut 9y ago
  The third factor is legal system that rarely if ever punish officers while being eager to punish anyone else suspect. What incentive the department has to promote training that leads to less violence? It seems to be very little. They have trainings that makes cops more paranoid, more afraid and more aggressive (per Radley Balko reporting). It is not poor training as in "little of it". It might be result.of training itself.

Buldak 9y ago

I'd guess that Wichita police will be relieved to be able to pin some of the blame on the prank, despite the fact that it may have no real bearing on whether their response was justified given the situation and what they knew.

praisewhitey 9y ago

It is entirely likely there will never be any cam footage released.

Miner49er 9y ago
http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article192229414.html http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article192229414.html
dralley 9y ago
They did release the bodycam footage. It looks like they shined high beams directly in his face, he raised his arm to shield his eyes, and then they shot him.