What exactly is that universal "same procedure" that "civilized countries" (please leave such flamebait out btw) follow?
The primary reason this wouldn't happen like this in most other countries is that it's unlikely that the home owner would turn up with a gun - if they did, police would be pointing theirs too. Really the main missed opportunity here seems to be the call of the neighbor, which could have been used to coordinate, but overall it sounds like the one swatting death which really was a dumb accident.
(1) Regular police (as opposed to SWAT or SWAT-like equipped units) are dispatched for things that are not riots
(2) Police checks and verifies first, as opposed to kicking doors in shooting because a 13 year old made a call.
(3) Police is taught not to be trigger happy, even if there are reports - or actual sighting - of the suspect carrying a gun, knife, etc.
(4) Police doesn't get military surplus equipment fit for war, nor does it use it in civillian cases.
(5) Police doesn't equate a report of someone selling/doing drugs, with a chance to storm the place guns a blazing.
(6) Traffic police doesn't get to shoot you if they stopped your car and you had the audacity to walk out towards them. That's not even a thing.
(7) The police is taught to discern low-risk and high-risk situations, and not e.g. treat a guy with a knife 30 feet away, or a small black boy playing in a park as a threat.
(8) The police is taught to be an aid to the citizen, not to see everybody as a threat.
The entire point here is that almost none of those generic (but very real!) issues really apply in this specific case for once (especially given the call number2 applies a bit, as I already said). "Police responding to a call about a shooter are armed, actually encounter someone with a gun, point guns and tell them to drop it, gun gets dropped, nobody gets shot" sounds like something that could happen in many places and is not a useful example for cops being way to fast to shoot people.
Even specific to this case, the reality of surrounding circumstances and events is significant.
We very recently had country-wide protests on the topic of police brutality with very minimal consequnce.
Those surrounding circumstances almost certainly informed this man's decision to own a firearm and his decision to brandish that firearm while figuring out what was happening on his property.
The assumption here is that the stress of the situation was the cause of his heart attack, and ultimately his death.
What ever happened to giving someone a phone call to assess the situation?
> It's not just that there are fewer guns elsewhere
I'm sorry but it seems to be the main factor though. When the probability of the suspect carrying a gun is very low, you are not that motivated to use yours.
> (many countries have heavy hunting population, and people will use shotguns, close themselves in their house if they're accused, etc).
That's completely different. You can't really hide your hunting weapon in your jacket. People don't walk around with their weapons in the town. The culture is completely different. Even in a country where many people do own weapons (Switzerland) it's very rare that someone would use them for crime.
It wasn’t a dumb accident, and law enforcement isn’t to blame in this case.
The police response was deliberately incited by a group of malicious individuals.
How can minors, who typically are given lighter sentences, be discouraged from “swatting”?
Swatting only seems to exist in the us (afaik?) with a heavily militarized police force full of agro authoritarians trained to prioritize violence and force.
All countries have idiot teenagers…
Maybe we can take the model of other countries that have idiot teenagers but no swatting problem?
Unfortunately the prevalence of guns in America is a seriously mitigating factor on behalf of police blame for swatting here. With ~15,000 gun homicides every year, >20,000 gun suicides, and several tens of thousands of additional shootings, you can’t fault the police for expecting a call about gun violence to actually involve gun violence.
I really really don't think suicides explain or excuse strong aggressive action. The cops themselves are most likely to die or get injured in car accident - due to them being on streets a lot.
America does not have significantly more homicides then other western countries. Most gun homicides are people who know each other shooting each other in dispute. And they are clustered in high violence places making the rest of America safer then average.
The usual argument is that if you exclude gang violence then the number is way lower. However, if you arbitrarily throw away the number one cause of violence in other countries, surprisingly enough, their numbers are also way lower.
The murder may count as gang violence whenever one of person is associated with gang - even if actual event happened due to jealousy or other crap. And being associated with gang can be also just due to who you know.
The point is, gang violence as aggregate is not meaningfully different from other violence.
Where the violence takes place in public, the relationship between the perpetrators and victims, the fact that both parties are usually armed, that bystanders are often caught in crossfire, the motives for the violence being beefs over territory, and the minimal events required to trigger the violence.
Except for those and more, it's just like any other violence.
I think the argument is usually in the context of "it's mostly people involved with gangs, it doesn't change much for the murder risk for a 'normal citizen'"
That said, I wouldn't consider those countries directly comparable as far as their position in the world, and how their culture is affected by that position. Russia is probably it's most direct peer, and is comparably closer when looking at wealth inequality and homicide rate.
We also have a much higher per-capita rate of incarceration regardless. Perhaps it isn't that we have a lot more murders because of guns, but because we're a culture that likes to solve problems with violence following our government's example.
Think about this number 5 for a moment. Using a simplistic statistical model it means that you have a ~0.4% risk of getting murdered by a gun over a 80 year lifetime. That's not far off of COVID as an unvaccinated individual. Now compare how people react about that news...
I'm aware of the difference, but it just means a different probability distribution. COVID's is likely very spikey, i.e. only there for a couple of years until you've successfully vaccinated, which we potentially already have, or until efficient treatment is found. Gun violence is there to stay with you throughout your life until society changes. Good luck.
We're doing something about COVID though. Even if some people are shouting "it's my right to have COVID", the vast majority of the population won't accept that stance. That's simply not the case with gun control.
Herring approached the police with a gun drawn. That's how things happen in America. In any case, showing a dominant amount of force is imperative for safety in this country where guns are common.
That's just the facts. If we want the police to disarm, we need to first disarm the population. We shouldn't be sending police into armed situations with inferior weapons.
I would argue that showing a dominant amount of force is the norm not an imperative.
Police justify many actionsl/systems/norms based on the fact that their job is dangerous. However they have also, in doing so, created a situation where anything they do to reduce risk to themselves is valid. That hits a limit at some point
You could insist that police behave in a way that actually puts them at some risk…i.e., not presume they will be attacked or to be unarmed. We could decide that that risk is worth it as a society and insist upon it just as we insist that essential workers put themselves at risk during covid to feed us.
If potential risk is always used to justify force, eventually the risk will be gone because force will be the default.
So lets take a step back. There's two sides to this encounter. It is common for Americans, when they feel like they're in danger, to approach situations with a gun drawn.
Police, knowing that other Americans will approach them with guns drawn (since criminals see Police as a threat), will also approach with guns drawn.
And guess what? The gun advocate will point out that everyone acted as an adult in this situation. No gunfire was exchanged. The heart attack was unfortunate, but this is actually one of the better situations.
Compare / Contrast instead with say: Breonna Taylor. The Police begin to knock down the door, someone gets confused and shoots at them. The Police shoot back killing Breonna Taylor.
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You can't deny that the job that Police do and put themselves in means that Police are expected to get shot at. Changing this expectation will require more than just changing how Police operate, it also means changing America's culture to not have so many freaking guns.
Police are much less likely to be shoot at then rumor has it. Including by "criminals" which is quite wide category.
I also find it ridiculous that a country that says it is OK to defend your house with gun, also says it is OK for police to create situation in which people think they are attacked by violent strangers - where those strangers are cops.
Only tasers are worse at killing people. They're perfectly adequate for their intended use; allowing an officer to halt a person who presents a real danger to the officer, when alternatives are not available.
You are right that the homicides are highly clustered, but that doesn't mean there aren't more of them than in other countries.
However, what is happening is that most of those homicides are criminals killing other criminals and aren't very relevant to non-criminals. This greatly changes the balance of value vs risk to the average American.
The typical self-defense use of a gun is simply showing it and making some scumbag run away.
So if someone calls in to the UK police that there's been a shooting and a murder and the person has a gun, the cops don't show up with weapons and ready to shoot? How does that work?
The article clearly says it was the first such occurrence. Also, it’s not clear this really was swatting, in that nobody was endangered: the police didn’t storm the house.
The use of armed police there is a big deal though. My friend is a police officer in the UK and has a firearm and riot gear for armed responses, and they very rarely use it. When it is used, there's loads of reporting to ensure its use was justified.
I think you would be surprised at the amount of reporting that happens after similar events in the US.
I am an investigative reporter covering US law enforcement and crime. Let me know if you'd like to see some examples of the documentation I am referring to.
as someone who typically is very proactive about citing my comments (see my post history) I'm going to claim 'afaik' - as far as I know - as a citation in this case because I'm clearly indicating a nonauthorative claim here.
This would be a case where you're asking me to prove the negative...can you find instances of Swatting occurring with similar resulting violence in, lets say, Japan or Western Europe?
> law enforcement isn’t to blame in this case. The police response was deliberately incited by a group of malicious individuals.
If a system can be easily manipulated from the outside to produce negative results, the outsider is easily to blame the first time it happens.
Swatting has been a problem for over a decade[0]. If the system remains vulnerable to the same attack for that long, the system administrator is at fault for failing to resolve the issue.
>How can minors, who typically are given lighter sentences, be discouraged from “swatting”?
People will call the cops with BS accusations and fake threats (e.g. bomb threats, etc) all over the world, including calling them on people.
SWATing however only (or 99%) happens in the US, where the police charges like bulls, is trigger happy, puts their own "safety" over anything else in comical degree, gets military surplus equipment in bulk, and has the impression they are in an action movie...
The news popularized SWATting as a something that in the US leads to the target's death, because those cases are more "newsworthy". There are probably many more cases that end up with no deaths or injuries but still a lot of psychological trauma. But this still means that SWATting in the US can be used to good effect with the intention of getting the target killed or at the very least seriously harmed. You can view it as a combination between contract killing (the caller) and manslaughter (the shooter).
But the Police needs to pay for overreacting, not for showing up like in this case. The Police showed up and "admirably" defused the situation, probably only because the target was white. But if you incriminate showing up in force the initial response will be to stop showing up, and much later to do it in a more peaceful fashion, like with 1-2 people at the door and the rest of the platoon in military gear being hidden.
Quotation marks [0]. Because I wasn't trying to express my own opinion about the newsworthiness of reporting on SWATting incidents that result in deaths compared to those which don't. So I quoted the term used most often with regard to this kind of news.
Why assume the scare? And how did the rest of my comment imply it? Absent any reason to infer that particular meaning how do you support your decision to take the least charitable interpretation?
Well, in part because the your comment is questioning news practices. The point of scare quotes is to signal irony, uncertainty, or skepticism. Your very next sentence implicitly questions the "news popularization" of swatting as something that leads to the target's death on the basis of its greater "newsworthiness" vs. incidents leading to psychological trauma.
That, and because you were not actually quoting anyone or anything specific.
When quotation marks are used in a questioning context and the text being quoted is not an actual quote, the assumption is scare quotes. The writer is trying to draw attention to the language rather than actually quote someone's words.
Impossible to reach all minors with so many absent parents.
Sometimes these events are like getting struck by lightning, and all we can do is install lightning rods to lessen the statistics.
In this case that might look like further anonymity or public service announcements explaining to people that if you share your address some crazy person may end up killing you (somehow).
> What exactly is that universal "same procedure" that "civilized countries" (please leave such flamebait out btw) follow?
Flamebait language beyond, US cops deploy SWAT teams on regular warrants and non-violent crimes. US cops seem to love their swat teams.
> The primary reason this wouldn't happen like this in most other countries is that it's unlikely that the home owner would turn up with a gun - if they did, police would be pointing theirs too.
Like, it is legal to own the gun, but if you have one cops are free to shoot you?
As I understand it, SWAT teams are seen as very prestigious by both police officers and departments. IMO it stems from the fetishization of all things ‘tactical’ which is common in American culture. Many cops say their goal is to join SWAT rather than the normal progression of detective, captain, etc.
Anyway, I suspect this leads to SWAT teams wanting to justify their existence by responding to as many situations as possible.
It is a complicated issue, though. In a country where many people own assault rifles that massively outgun a cop’s pistol, SWAT teams are kind of a necessity.
The primary reason this wouldn't happen like this in most other countries is that it's unlikely that the home owner would turn up with a gun - if they did, police would be pointing theirs too. Really the main missed opportunity here seems to be the call of the neighbor, which could have been used to coordinate, but overall it sounds like the one swatting death which really was a dumb accident.