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> Cops showing up expecting something where there is nothing should not result in anybody dying, it should result in confused cops and little more. I completel

by mcny 7y ago

> Cops showing up expecting something where there is nothing should not result in anybody dying, it should result in confused cops and little more. I completely agree. I also think the man who "hired deadly swatting" should be immediately released with an apology from the society.

saagarjha 7y ago
The person who did this clearly did something that they knew was wrong, and that ended in somebody dying.
- mcny 7y ago
  > The person who did this clearly did something that they knew was wrong, and that ended in somebody dying. Whether they did it knowingly or not does not matter in this case. I still think this exposes a systemic problem that we need to address at a systems level. This feels like monkey patching if (x !== null) {} to "fix" a null pointer exception on something that should never have been null in the first place. In this case. there should have been no shots fired at all. I am not even saying the officer who shot should go to prison. I am just saying maybe the officer who shot shouldn't have had a gun or been there in the first place. They clearly didn't have proper training. Sending the person who made the phone call to prison solves nothing. We have blameless postmortems for us. Why can't we have blameless postmortems in these cases which are more life and death? We don't live in an "eye for an eye" society, do we?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > We don't live in an "eye for an eye" society, do we? I disagree strongly with your characterization of this. The caller clearly knew what he was doing wrong (we can argue whether it was reasonable to assume that it would be responded to with lethal force, but that is not what you’re discussing). Likewise, the reaction of the police officer in this situation may have been a problem, but again it’s not relevant to the issue of willfully lying about a hostage situation to, at the minimum, waste the time of law enforcement and the SWATed person. Consider, for example, a residential street where the speed limit is 5 mph: it’s pretty hard for anyone to get seriously injured in an accident if vehicles follow the rules. But if a car decides to barrel down the road at highway speeds, I’m not off the hook if I push you in front of the it. I can’t just say “I’m innocent, because you couldn’t have died if everyone followed the rules” and get out of it. I’d probably still be liable if I didn’t see the car coming. Just because someone may have done something illegally that made my actions worse does not absolve me from wrongdoing; it just makes it so there are two problems to deal with.
    - mcny 7y ago
      » Consider, for example, a residential street where the speed limit is 5 mph: it’s pretty hard for anyone to get seriously injured in an accident if vehicles follow the rules. But if a car decides to barrel down the road at highway speeds, I’m not off the hook if I push you in front of the it. I can’t just say “I’m innocent, because you couldn’t have died if everyone followed the rules” and get out of it. I’d probably still be liable if I didn’t see the car coming. Just because someone may have done something illegally that made my actions worse does not absolve me from wrongdoing; it just makes it so there are two problems to deal with. This is still treating a symptom and not the root of the problem. I don't care so much about "justice" for the victim as much as I care about the systems problem. In your example, why was someone driving well over the speed limit? Could we make it less likely or even impossible to speed that much? What can we do to make these events less likely to happen in the future?
- wayneftw 7y ago
  Jaywalking is wrong. Should you get 15 months or even 20 years for it? I doubt that either the guy who made the call or the guy who hired him wanted to kill someone. Having been around a number of cops and military personal though, I've seen plenty that are just in it to harm others.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Jaywalking is wrong. There’s discussion about whether this was criminalized by the auto lobby, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > Should you get 15 months or even 20 years for it? In any case, it’s a minor crime and the punishment, if any, is usually quite light. > I doubt that either the guy who made the call or the guy who hired him wanted to kill someone. In any case, I think we can agree that the people who were involved in making the call knew they were doing something wrong. At the very least, they were wasting police time and harassing an innocent person, which is a medium-level crime even if nobody got hurt. In this case we have a tragedy: I think it’s reasonable that the caller knew that this was a possible outcome and the results would make the case one for “accomplice to murder” or something similar. If we accept that the caller did not have an intention or expect for armed police to show up and start shooting (which is somewhat unlikely considering what he called for) this could be a manslaughter charge. (FWIW, I am not providing an opinion on what the sentencing for something like this should be, or whether the police officer should be charged with murder, as those are separate issues.)

by mcny 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago

The person who did this clearly did something that they knew was wrong, and that ended in somebody dying.

mcny 7y ago
> The person who did this clearly did something that they knew was wrong, and that ended in somebody dying. Whether they did it knowingly or not does not matter in this case. I still think this exposes a systemic problem that we need to address at a systems level. This feels like monkey patching if (x !== null) {} to "fix" a null pointer exception on something that should never have been null in the first place. In this case. there should have been no shots fired at all. I am not even saying the officer who shot should go to prison. I am just saying maybe the officer who shot shouldn't have had a gun or been there in the first place. They clearly didn't have proper training. Sending the person who made the phone call to prison solves nothing. We have blameless postmortems for us. Why can't we have blameless postmortems in these cases which are more life and death? We don't live in an "eye for an eye" society, do we?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > We don't live in an "eye for an eye" society, do we? I disagree strongly with your characterization of this. The caller clearly knew what he was doing wrong (we can argue whether it was reasonable to assume that it would be responded to with lethal force, but that is not what you’re discussing). Likewise, the reaction of the police officer in this situation may have been a problem, but again it’s not relevant to the issue of willfully lying about a hostage situation to, at the minimum, waste the time of law enforcement and the SWATed person. Consider, for example, a residential street where the speed limit is 5 mph: it’s pretty hard for anyone to get seriously injured in an accident if vehicles follow the rules. But if a car decides to barrel down the road at highway speeds, I’m not off the hook if I push you in front of the it. I can’t just say “I’m innocent, because you couldn’t have died if everyone followed the rules” and get out of it. I’d probably still be liable if I didn’t see the car coming. Just because someone may have done something illegally that made my actions worse does not absolve me from wrongdoing; it just makes it so there are two problems to deal with.
  - mcny 7y ago
    » Consider, for example, a residential street where the speed limit is 5 mph: it’s pretty hard for anyone to get seriously injured in an accident if vehicles follow the rules. But if a car decides to barrel down the road at highway speeds, I’m not off the hook if I push you in front of the it. I can’t just say “I’m innocent, because you couldn’t have died if everyone followed the rules” and get out of it. I’d probably still be liable if I didn’t see the car coming. Just because someone may have done something illegally that made my actions worse does not absolve me from wrongdoing; it just makes it so there are two problems to deal with. This is still treating a symptom and not the root of the problem. I don't care so much about "justice" for the victim as much as I care about the systems problem. In your example, why was someone driving well over the speed limit? Could we make it less likely or even impossible to speed that much? What can we do to make these events less likely to happen in the future?
wayneftw 7y ago
Jaywalking is wrong. Should you get 15 months or even 20 years for it? I doubt that either the guy who made the call or the guy who hired him wanted to kill someone. Having been around a number of cops and military personal though, I've seen plenty that are just in it to harm others.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Jaywalking is wrong. There’s discussion about whether this was criminalized by the auto lobby, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > Should you get 15 months or even 20 years for it? In any case, it’s a minor crime and the punishment, if any, is usually quite light. > I doubt that either the guy who made the call or the guy who hired him wanted to kill someone. In any case, I think we can agree that the people who were involved in making the call knew they were doing something wrong. At the very least, they were wasting police time and harassing an innocent person, which is a medium-level crime even if nobody got hurt. In this case we have a tragedy: I think it’s reasonable that the caller knew that this was a possible outcome and the results would make the case one for “accomplice to murder” or something similar. If we accept that the caller did not have an intention or expect for armed police to show up and start shooting (which is somewhat unlikely considering what he called for) this could be a manslaughter charge. (FWIW, I am not providing an opinion on what the sentencing for something like this should be, or whether the police officer should be charged with murder, as those are separate issues.)