6 ms·

A reasonable, mature, and just society will pay very little attention to this person, but pay very much attention to the vulnerability that this person has irre

by jMyles 9y ago

A reasonable, mature, and just society will pay very little attention to this person, but pay very much attention to the vulnerability that this person has irresponsibly disclosed.

walshemj 9y ago
So why are you down playing the deaths this person has caused
- gknoy 9y ago
  I think the GP's point might be that the problem is not so much that someone called SWAT on people, leading to their deaths, but rather that the response infrastructure of our current police sytems leads them to enter a residence with what turns out to be excessive force. SWAT was originally intended to be used for "special" situations, and increasingly (over the past few decades) has been the go-to tool for many police-citizen interactions. If I were playing video games, and my front door exploded and the entryway were flashbanged, my first response would probably be relatively instinctive (get up, maybe to see WTF is happening in my house), and it's _very probable_ that such responses would make the breaching officers fearful enough that they'd shoot me. I don't have any weapons in my house, have no intention of resisting any police action, but the fact that I might stand up out of my chair, or move, or who-knows-what could easily be misconstrued. In the article, they said that the man had "reached for his waist" -- I literally do that every time I get up from my computer chair. I'd much rather that the police did some kind of surveillance first ("oh, hey, looks like a dude playing video games ..."), and verified that the situation matched the emergency described in their dispatch. This isn't intended to detract from the badness of the SWAT-ter's actions: I hope that (if he indeed caused this) there's some serious consequences. However, it would have been a lot more difficult to cause such mayhem if the police were less trigger-happy.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    SWAT teams don't seem to take into account that this situation is highly confusing, especially for innocent people. Following orders may be difficult for most people. A while ago I got T-boned at an intersection. I wasn't injured but clearly very confused. When a cop asked for my driver's license I gave him my credit card several times and simply couldn't process what he was saying. I can imagine if guys with guns broke into my house at night screaming I would also not be able to behave correctly.
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    > I'd much rather that the police did some kind of surveillance first ("oh, hey, looks like a dude playing video games ..."), and verified that the situation matched the emergency described in their dispatch. Every jurisdiction is different with their procedure but in many, this is exactly what they do. They generally want to know where in the house the supposed gunman is, where the hostages are, where the best points of entry/escape are, etc. I get the impression that in this case, the victim saw police assembling outside his house and tried to investigate as they arrived on-scene, which caught them off guard.
awesomepantsm 9y ago
Haha, my sweet child. No one says on 9/11 "Those guys did a great job showing us a vulnerability in our security!" Being indifferent to death of innocent people is the opposite of maturity.
- userbinator 9y ago
  No one says on 9/11 "Those guys did a great job showing us a vulnerability in our security!" ...except that's exactly what happened. Regardless of whether you think the changes are effective, just compare airport security before and after.
  - eberkund 9y ago
    Every little opportunity to murder someone that isn't patrolled by armed guards isn't a "vulnerability", for most sane people this is not something that would cross their minds. The solution for the few outliers isn't to live in underground concrete bunkers.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Although few of the changes made to airport security since 9/11 would have hindered those terrorists. Theoretically the box cutters should have already been stopped by the X-Ray and that hasn't significantly changed. The only substantial difference is that now we lock the door to the cockpit, something we should have been doing since the 80s when airline hijackings were common.
- jMyles 9y ago
  > Haha, my sweet child. This stuff automatically disqualified you from a content-based response in my mind. I'm an adult with substantial experience in these matters.
ggg9990 9y ago
I don't think it needs to be an either or. I would like to see this swatter executed and I would like to see major police tactics reform.
- jMyles 9y ago
  > I don't think it needs to be an either or. In principle, I certainly agree. But in the reality of contemporary American politics, I think that sometimes we need to make decisions about which path to take. Is it a problem that anybody that knows an address can summon a heavily armed, often poorly trained, sometimes mentally ill group of people to break into a home at that address? Or is it a problem that, given the above, people are actually doing it? I want to suggest that we do actually need to choose one or the other in this situation, and that the answer is flatly the former.
- cantrip 9y ago
  > I would like to see this swatter executed Swatting is an abhorrent practice but if a society does execute people (and I don't think that they ever should) you absolutely do not execute them for swatting.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Ok, let's use the cumulative time rule as per felonies. This should add up to about 800 years incarceration.
    - izacus 9y ago
      You would jail someone for life for a prank call... when policemen are running around shooting innocent people?
      - jMyles 9y ago
        I too find this reaction very, very difficult to understand. There is an incredible urge to lower the standard for behavior for agents of the state to that of idiot kids using racial slurs on CoD.
mikeash 9y ago
Would you say the same thing if the murderer had merely shot his victim from a car, or set fire to the victim's house in the middle of the night, or poisoned his coffee?
- jMyles 9y ago
  Yes, I think that the state providing free, anonymous, harass-and-maybe-murder-as-a-service is a problem, regardless of the methods involved.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    I think pretty much everyone will agree that it's a problem. Where we disagree is your minimization of the role of the murderer.
    - jMyles 9y ago
      I've lost track of what we're talking about here. This article isn't about a murder. Are you talking about Andrew Finch? In that case, sure, the police officer who shot him is very much in the wrong. Is that what you're wanting hear? I also think in a such militarized environment, that police officers who might never have imagined themselves murdering anyone are now, yes, murderers. And that's a shame. We don't really need SWAT teams in the USA at all, and certainly not thousands of deployments of them every year.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        Sure it's about a murder. When I say "the murderer," I'm referring to the person who made the false emergency call, thought to be Tyler Raj Barriss. I.e. the "this person" you said we should pay very little attention to. The officer who actually fired the weapon probably deserves the label too.
        jMyles 9y ago
        Ahh, I misunderstood then. Well, yeah, I don't that the person who made the call, while culpable for involvement in homicide is guilty of murder in the traditional sense. Something more like involuntary manslaughter. The murderer is unambiguously the person who killed.
AJ007 9y ago
It is a feature, not a vulnerability.
- jMyles 9y ago
  From the perspective of the state, I believe that you are absolutely right. However, the divergence of the interests of the state from those of the planet and its people are quickly becoming more visible. My sense is that, in order to do away with warfare generally (and SWAT teams specifically), we'll need to deprecate the state in favor of more compassionate approaches to, inter alia, emergency response.
debt 9y ago
As the police become more miltarized, using this militarization against itself is a very strange bug in the system. The innocent people caught in the middle are living proof of the seriousness of the flaw. Like in software though, this bug will likely be haphazardly fixed, rather then fixing the underlying problem: the militarization of our police force.
electric_sheep 9y ago
Are you speaking purely with regard to the swatting, and not to the scores of bomb threats? Regardless of the issues around policing, surely we can agree that this individual has caused tremendous societal cost, not just due to the disruption of valuable services or the resources wasted investigating his claims but also due to the fear he's created and the doubt he's cast over such claims in the future, which could lead to slower and less effective responses to true threats. He's also been to jail for this before, and appears to have gone right back to work when he got out. He's a serial offender, without much apparent motive besides pure misanthropy. Again, regardless of what you think about policing in America, can we please agree that this is the kind of person who belongs in prison? Perhaps you do, in which case apologies for the long response -- just thought it was worth clarifying given the thread's focus on the police reaction.

by jMyles 9y ago

A reasonable, mature, and just society will pay very little attention to this person, but pay very much attention to the vulnerability that this person has irresponsibly disclosed.

walshemj 9y ago

So why are you down playing the deaths this person has caused

gknoy 9y ago
I think the GP's point might be that the problem is not so much that someone called SWAT on people, leading to their deaths, but rather that the response infrastructure of our current police sytems leads them to enter a residence with what turns out to be excessive force. SWAT was originally intended to be used for "special" situations, and increasingly (over the past few decades) has been the go-to tool for many police-citizen interactions. If I were playing video games, and my front door exploded and the entryway were flashbanged, my first response would probably be relatively instinctive (get up, maybe to see WTF is happening in my house), and it's _very probable_ that such responses would make the breaching officers fearful enough that they'd shoot me. I don't have any weapons in my house, have no intention of resisting any police action, but the fact that I might stand up out of my chair, or move, or who-knows-what could easily be misconstrued. In the article, they said that the man had "reached for his waist" -- I literally do that every time I get up from my computer chair. I'd much rather that the police did some kind of surveillance first ("oh, hey, looks like a dude playing video games ..."), and verified that the situation matched the emergency described in their dispatch. This isn't intended to detract from the badness of the SWAT-ter's actions: I hope that (if he indeed caused this) there's some serious consequences. However, it would have been a lot more difficult to cause such mayhem if the police were less trigger-happy.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  SWAT teams don't seem to take into account that this situation is highly confusing, especially for innocent people. Following orders may be difficult for most people. A while ago I got T-boned at an intersection. I wasn't injured but clearly very confused. When a cop asked for my driver's license I gave him my credit card several times and simply couldn't process what he was saying. I can imagine if guys with guns broke into my house at night screaming I would also not be able to behave correctly.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  > I'd much rather that the police did some kind of surveillance first ("oh, hey, looks like a dude playing video games ..."), and verified that the situation matched the emergency described in their dispatch. Every jurisdiction is different with their procedure but in many, this is exactly what they do. They generally want to know where in the house the supposed gunman is, where the hostages are, where the best points of entry/escape are, etc. I get the impression that in this case, the victim saw police assembling outside his house and tried to investigate as they arrived on-scene, which caught them off guard.

awesomepantsm 9y ago

Haha, my sweet child. No one says on 9/11 "Those guys did a great job showing us a vulnerability in our security!" Being indifferent to death of innocent people is the opposite of maturity.

userbinator 9y ago
No one says on 9/11 "Those guys did a great job showing us a vulnerability in our security!" ...except that's exactly what happened. Regardless of whether you think the changes are effective, just compare airport security before and after.
- eberkund 9y ago
  Every little opportunity to murder someone that isn't patrolled by armed guards isn't a "vulnerability", for most sane people this is not something that would cross their minds. The solution for the few outliers isn't to live in underground concrete bunkers.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Although few of the changes made to airport security since 9/11 would have hindered those terrorists. Theoretically the box cutters should have already been stopped by the X-Ray and that hasn't significantly changed. The only substantial difference is that now we lock the door to the cockpit, something we should have been doing since the 80s when airline hijackings were common.
jMyles 9y ago
> Haha, my sweet child. This stuff automatically disqualified you from a content-based response in my mind. I'm an adult with substantial experience in these matters.

ggg9990 9y ago

I don't think it needs to be an either or. I would like to see this swatter executed and I would like to see major police tactics reform.

jMyles 9y ago
> I don't think it needs to be an either or. In principle, I certainly agree. But in the reality of contemporary American politics, I think that sometimes we need to make decisions about which path to take. Is it a problem that anybody that knows an address can summon a heavily armed, often poorly trained, sometimes mentally ill group of people to break into a home at that address? Or is it a problem that, given the above, people are actually doing it? I want to suggest that we do actually need to choose one or the other in this situation, and that the answer is flatly the former.
cantrip 9y ago
> I would like to see this swatter executed Swatting is an abhorrent practice but if a society does execute people (and I don't think that they ever should) you absolutely do not execute them for swatting.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Ok, let's use the cumulative time rule as per felonies. This should add up to about 800 years incarceration.
  - izacus 9y ago
    You would jail someone for life for a prank call... when policemen are running around shooting innocent people?
    - jMyles 9y ago
      I too find this reaction very, very difficult to understand. There is an incredible urge to lower the standard for behavior for agents of the state to that of idiot kids using racial slurs on CoD.

mikeash 9y ago

Would you say the same thing if the murderer had merely shot his victim from a car, or set fire to the victim's house in the middle of the night, or poisoned his coffee?

jMyles 9y ago
Yes, I think that the state providing free, anonymous, harass-and-maybe-murder-as-a-service is a problem, regardless of the methods involved.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I think pretty much everyone will agree that it's a problem. Where we disagree is your minimization of the role of the murderer.
  - jMyles 9y ago
    I've lost track of what we're talking about here. This article isn't about a murder. Are you talking about Andrew Finch? In that case, sure, the police officer who shot him is very much in the wrong. Is that what you're wanting hear? I also think in a such militarized environment, that police officers who might never have imagined themselves murdering anyone are now, yes, murderers. And that's a shame. We don't really need SWAT teams in the USA at all, and certainly not thousands of deployments of them every year.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Sure it's about a murder. When I say "the murderer," I'm referring to the person who made the false emergency call, thought to be Tyler Raj Barriss. I.e. the "this person" you said we should pay very little attention to. The officer who actually fired the weapon probably deserves the label too.
      - jMyles 9y ago
        Ahh, I misunderstood then. Well, yeah, I don't that the person who made the call, while culpable for involvement in homicide is guilty of murder in the traditional sense. Something more like involuntary manslaughter. The murderer is unambiguously the person who killed.

AJ007 9y ago

It is a feature, not a vulnerability.

jMyles 9y ago
From the perspective of the state, I believe that you are absolutely right. However, the divergence of the interests of the state from those of the planet and its people are quickly becoming more visible. My sense is that, in order to do away with warfare generally (and SWAT teams specifically), we'll need to deprecate the state in favor of more compassionate approaches to, inter alia, emergency response.

debt 9y ago

As the police become more miltarized, using this militarization against itself is a very strange bug in the system. The innocent people caught in the middle are living proof of the seriousness of the flaw. Like in software though, this bug will likely be haphazardly fixed, rather then fixing the underlying problem: the militarization of our police force.

electric_sheep 9y ago

Are you speaking purely with regard to the swatting, and not to the scores of bomb threats? Regardless of the issues around policing, surely we can agree that this individual has caused tremendous societal cost, not just due to the disruption of valuable services or the resources wasted investigating his claims but also due to the fear he's created and the doubt he's cast over such claims in the future, which could lead to slower and less effective responses to true threats. He's also been to jail for this before, and appears to have gone right back to work when he got out. He's a serial offender, without much apparent motive besides pure misanthropy. Again, regardless of what you think about policing in America, can we please agree that this is the kind of person who belongs in prison? Perhaps you do, in which case apologies for the long response -- just thought it was worth clarifying given the thread's focus on the police reaction.