They need to get sued _hard_ and lose millions, as well as have cops put in jail before real change happens. I feel sorry for this kid but he's doing the right thing.
Taxpayers will just foot the bill. These cops need their personal funds taken, and before they blow it all on legal bills defending themselves from criminal charges.
Come to think of it, this is America dammit. Cops should be licensed, bonded and insured, and if their training or records aren't up to standards they don't get covered. We have higher standards for plumbers and pest control than we do police.
This. If truck drivers have to maintain safety records, if firefighters require certification and training, cops do too. To hell with this implied immunity bullshit, either they are correct in enforcing the law or they aren’t.
If it's one cops fault, charge the cop. If it's multiple cops fault, charge them AND the department. This makes it fiscally prudent to make sure cops in the department are well trained and educated on enforcing the laws and respecting rights.
I don't get the taxpayer line. It's a democracy. The taxpayers are the ones deciding what kind of policing we get.
If they don't want to foot the bills for police misconduct, maybe the taxpayers should elect someone who actually holds the police accountable and doesn't just blindly approve any policing budget and look the other way when the police wrongfully harms someone?
Right. The real justice comes from treating this incident like you would if there were no municipal coffers at play, and simply punish criminals for criminal action.
Real justice when it comes to swatting is multi-faceted.
Sure, the person making the bogus call to police should suffer some consequences vis a vis jail time.
However, swatting only works because police regularly take a shoot first and ask questions later stance. They go from an anonymous tip about an ongoing crime at an address to shooting up said address in short order without any effort to verify a crime is actually taking place, perhaps in no small part due to the fact that qualified immunity ensures they'll never see any consequences for any property damage and/or casualties which occur as a result.
I'd liken it to initiating a gang hit, except at least in the gang hit, the gang members responsible for carrying it out have a chance at facing some accountability.
Cops need to face the possibility of (at minimum) termination and even jail time for recklessly endangering civilians, and cop training needs to be fundamentally changed to eliminate this "us vs. them" mentality seen in so many of those in blue.
I am as horrified by the outcome here as the next person, but what exactly do you imagine police should do when responding to a call about an active shooter where they encounter a suspect armed with a handgun?
They could start by verifying the address of the house they're raiding. Way too often this doesn't happen and the police murder someone because they got the wrong house. They should identify the occupants of the house. The victim in this case had been swatted before and he had already warned the police that could happen. The swat team should have been skeptical going into this situation and taken the time to verify what was going on first. The call they got in this case claimed to be from the victim who said his father had shot his sister and he was hiding in another room. Even if the 911 call had been legit, the police would have shot the person who called for help and not the father, because they didn't bother to identify who they were shooting or who else was around when they sprayed bullets around the room from outside. They should have identified themselves as police. There's no reason not to. They should have at least attempted to use their big boy words before they started shooting up the place.
The very smart and obvious thing to do would be to announce themselves loudly on arrival; all squad cars have very loud speakers on them and most police departments have at least one armored vehicle specially for high risk situations. Breaking in through a bathroom window and then running around the house with guns drawn is a recipe for disaster. If this kid had had good pistol skills (not that unusual unusual in the US) it might just as easily have ended with one or both of the cops getting shot.
Police in many jurisdictions will just walk onto your property in pursuit of a suspect and get mad at you if you open a window or door to see what the hell is going on outside your home.
Identify themselves as LE, and of course physically represent as such, unambiguously, then demand the person put down the firearm. "Active Shooter" has no meaning just because the word is used. Also consider what everyone long forgot and few pay attention to; officers are paid, not volunteers. Risk is part of the job. You cannot shoot everything you think might be a threat. One can also question the quality of the system that handles emergency calls, or that responds to them. There are lots of guns in America. And lots of people who can say the words "active shooter". And often enough, phones and other objects are conveniently interpreted as guns, so I am not convinced that is the most important variable. Did he point it at the officers? If so, were the officers in proper uniform?
Now, if I were to answer your question, I would say it first depends on circumstances. I have encountered many people with guns. But if I was and active officer and encountered someone with a gun, I would do my best so that the encounter was arranged in a manner that gave me some advantage and at least a second or two to think before acting. Sometimes, mistakes are made though, and they always will be made. But the fact someone had a gun is no excuse.
This guy needs to be compensated for his pain and suffering, his economic losses due to his disability, and for the care he'll need for the rest of his life. Jailing the people whose negligence is responsible for his injuries doesn't help him.
There's quite a bit more negligence going on here than a typical murder—unless you've got some information that the cops were out to intentionally harm the victim.
The public would probably be served by the shooters not carrying a badge anymore, but it doesn't take jail to accomplish that.
There needs to be insurance for police, just like there is for doctors. Once an individual cop has repeated judgements against them they won’t be insurable, instead of the current result of them moving to a different city.
I like your way better. I like your way a lot better.
A: It’s actual justice, and
B: Otherwise it just becomes another way for insurance companies to make money - in this case by charging swingeing fees that will come out of public coffers.
> Otherwise it just becomes another way for insurance companies to make money - in this case by charging swingeing fees that will come out of public coffers.
I believe doctors pay out of pocket (At least the ones that setup their own private practice do), so it would incentivize them to keep costs low so they can pocket the money.
At this point with how the police use their unions to support the lawlessness and casual violence the police engage in repeatedly, I think most precincts would benefit from pulling a Camden and firing all the fuckers to replace with actual competent officers who aren’t toeing the line of rebelling against the state or oppression of the people.
Could also just give the death penalty for any attempted or successful swats (though finding the perpetrator might be difficult). And maybe improve legislation and technology related to it.
VPN service providers might be thrilled if using a VPN for gaming became mandated by law. Game developers less so if P2P becomes outlawed.
The kind of people who don’t want to become police officers because they’re worried about being held accountable for their actions? Those are exactly the kind of people who should never be allowed become police officers. If we were really interested in Justice we’d build the system specifically to eliminate those kinds of people before they got anywhere near badge and a gun.
I'd say that by the time you're considering jail, it's too late—these situations are better avoided than rectified.
Per the article, one of the officers was evidently particularly stupid—he failed police academy once and was disciplined for entering a women's restroom because of crimes he imagined could be happening in there. No one wanted to say "you're too stupid to be making high-stakes judgment calls", so they let him keep trying until he was running into an alleged emergency "with no plan," where he shot an innocent person eight times...and then handcuffed him...
I think actuaries have a way of employing statistical realities that would, in a legislative context, precipitate too much defensiveness and bickering to ever be the basis of a rule. Like I think it was quite a while before neuroscience could fully explain why insurance companies wouldn't cover rental car drivers under 25, instead of 16 or 18.
An insurance company would give departments a reason to say "anyone who has ever failed police academy gets pepper spray and that's it." Departments can decide how to deploy that person.
(Ideally that person wouldn't be a cop at all, but departments will probably always be pushing to hire. This way the argument is between departments and the comparatively highly-informed insurance market, and not voters)
I think judges are often overlooked, they are the barrier stopping an internet troll from sending a small military on to your property on a whim. Too many false swatting should lead to a judge mandatorily stepping down, especially if there are casualties.
Police generally do not need a warrant in exigent circumstances. If they get a call saying a shooting or similarly grave crime is going down right now at 123 ABC street, they don't start filling out paperwork for a warrant, they just despatch units there. Warrants are for investigations, not emergencies.
You mean QUALIFIED IMMUNITY isn’t enough? Give me a break. Their job is literally safer than being a garbage collector. Go ahead, I’ll wait while you look it up.
I've long promoted this idea as well. They should be insured, backed by the union's pension plan. They have zero skin in the game.
The other thing that would help immensely would be to revisit qualified immunity. Conceptually its perfectly understandable -- failures can happen that are not their fault and they should not be on the hook for that.
But in these times, it's just full immunity. They can do whatever they want and only in the most heinous crimes where they didn't have the opportunity to destroy the evidence they only then do time.
One last thing should be noted: the War on Drugs is designed to create crime and is weaponized against the citizenry. "Dangerous" drugs aren't illegal to protect you, they're there so they can fuck you over.
I don't understand why more police agencies aren't being super careful with this stuff, especially if they're being sent to a house / location where no other crimes have been reported. It would be one thing if you have a call to a house that's had domestic violence calls, other shootings, etc. Instead, they're just getting a call and thinking, "Oh no! Danger!" and running in, guns blazing. I love the protection from the police but sometimes I'm afraid they don't think intelligently and instead just react.
Many people have fantasies like that, where a thief (hopefully without a gun) invades their home, and they use their gun collection to heroically "neutralize" the invader and defend their kingdom without legal consequences.
These are the kind of people who shoud be strongly filtered out from jobs that require carrying firearms. They could enlist as infantry in whatever invasion USA is doing that year, but they're actually scared of guns if they can fire back.
> They could enlist as infantry in whatever invasion USA is doing that year, but they're actually scared of guns if they can fire back.
The irony is that soldiers in the US military are usually better trained than the cops, and aren't going to magdump when an acorn hits their patrol car.
Why would they? What downside do they face? Cops get paid bonuses for raiding houses, they get bonuses for seizing money and valuable goods, they get bonuses for charging people with crimes. While they face almost zero consequences for abusing and extorting people, can lie with impunity, and often even get away with straight up cold blooded murder. Corruption within their organization is almost completely ignored and they hire people based on how sociopathic and unempathetic they are and enforce those traits in "training" even more because harsh draconian enforcement brings in the largest amount of money for cops and courts.
Unless you live in a community where the median income is $200K+, the primary funding for cops is through charging people with the easy crimes that they can't afford lawyers to fight, often drugs because they have massively inflated fines and fees. And the next best source of funding they have is special grants and programs which are often doles out based on how "dangerous" an area is, and killing "criminals" makes an area seem more dangerous and deserving of special funds and recognition and fancy armaments and killing toys.
There is something like 50 million police-public encounters annually. Stuff like this is exceedingly rare.
So while Pima PD should be held responsible, and those cops should face criminal charges, it's logically non-nonsensical for this to make you terrified of police (or the other 5-10 similar stories annually). I mean cars are genocidal military dictators by comparison.
The downstream effect of this is people doing incredibly rash and stupid things because they think the cops are just going to start blasting them during a traffic stop ("I need to shot them/run away because I am dead anyway").
You need to control for situations where the person on the other side is trying to kill the police.
It's something like 1000 people killed by police annually, but it's childishly dishonest (or ignorant) to ignore that ~995 of those are people actively trying to kill the police.
I wouldn't call shooting out your back window because you're getting pulled over "mundane".
Also, if each drive is ~20 miles, you have around a 1% chance of dying. That's 500x greater than even the dishonest 1 in 50k stat. Just further driving my point home for me, thanks.
IIRC "To serve and protect" was originally from a movie. Cops don't have a duty to protect you, and there in fact many cases of a cop not intervening during a violent crime due to concerns for their own safety, even when the asailant only had a knife.
> "To Serve and Protect," is a phrase made famous by the Los Angeles Police Department and adopted, in various forms, by law enforcement agencies across the United States.
> In February 1955, the Los Angeles Police Department, through the pages of the internally produced BEAT magazine, conducted a contest for a motto for the police academy. The conditions of the contest stated that: “The motto should be one that in a few words would express some or all the ideals to which the Los Angeles police service is dedicated. It is possible that the winning motto might someday be adopted as the official motto of the Department.”
> The winning entry was the motto, “To Protect and to Serve” submitted by Officer Joseph S. Dorobek.
> On November 4, 1963, the Los Angeles City Council passed the necessary ordinance and the credo has now been placed alongside the City Seal on the Department’s patrol cars.
That's because the Supreme Court has ruled that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens.
Special note: that includes cases where protective orders like restraining orders are concerned. The Castle Rock v. Gonzales ruling specifically states that police have no obligation to enforce them.
We could easily create a duty at the state or local level if we wanted to. The US Constitution is pretty silent on a lot of issues that are remanded to the states.
[1] This rhyme only works in certain dialects of British English. For most English speakers, it won’t. It’s a bit like that Nickelback song Never Made It As A Wise Man when he rhymes “story” with “sorry”. Nickelback didn’t realize he developed a moat, an uncompetitive advantage, and nobody would be able to sing his wonderful songs. Nobody, except him.
A lot of police departments in the US pay to send their officers to seminars where speakers tell them that they’re Literally Warriors. Cops with Punisher tattoos aren’t being ironic, they think about finishing a shift of playing Temple Run on their phones like catching the last helicopter out of Saigon.
This happened to me in 2021 minus the being shot part. Called local PD to inform them; still had a full police response, luckily was renovating house but still.
whoa. feel bad for the people of tuscon, because they didn't do anything wrong, but holy shit this case looks absolutely awful for the city and i hope they lose. big.
Police agencies arent the only ones alone to take blame here, the judges who on a whim sign these warrants should face liability or be removed from their position if there are casualties as a result of a false report.
I don't think judges and warrants are involved in these swatting incidents.
The whole point of swatting is to make up a dangerous scenario where the threat to life is so high and immediate that the police are allowed to forgo many procedures and processes that would prevent accidental injury or death.
This sounds like an exception to the third amendment that should be reconsidered if police don't improve their approach to these types of calls. If you cannot prove before you send a whole military to a house that what is claimed in a phone call is actually happening in a residential home, then you should not go in guns blazing.
While I was incarcerated on a bogus Felony charge, a Corrections Officer made a false report to a neighboring Police Department that I had been “bragging about Swatting people” in that city. Totally false claim. Got a visit from Detectives while in my cell. They recorded the whole thing.
The Thin Blue Line is real. I’ve moved on with my life. Mostly because there’s no way to hold them accountable so why try?
> Melendez did grab a "legal, registered" gun once he heard the glass shatter, Sethi said, but he ducked behind a partially closed door.
It's horrible what happened to this boy, and the police should be sued/charged, but this is (yet another) reason why you're better off _not_ having a gun in your house. (You're statistically more likely to die from a gun in your own household than someone else's.)
SWATing is a very common thing so police depts should be aware there's always a risk of it happening
Take the call seriously, but be prepared it's not what you think it is, especially if you see a shocked gamer sitting at their computer monitor with no apparent hostages
Time to start a new company, Swatly.ai, which listens in on 911 calls and warns police if they may be responding to a SWATting attempt. Working on integrating into their firearms so they won't fire unless the AI thinks it's load-bearing.
More sensibly, their insurance could just toss a clause in and charge higher premiums to cover for this, while adding some conditions to help prevent it.
It explicitly said in the article that he pulled out a gun. He shouldn't have been swatted, obviously. That said, if you pull out a gun when police are responding to what they believe is an active shooter, the chances of you being shot are extremely high.
Additionally consider what would have happened if this had been an active shooting and they simply disregarded the phone call.
> It explicitly said in the article that he pulled out a gun.
A gun that he legally owned and had every right to have on his person as an unknown individual was breaking into his home. If police don't identify themselves they should expect an armed population to meet them with guns in hand. It's their responsibility to assess the situation, understand who the occupants are, and respond appropriately. Smashing a bedroom window with a shovel and then "indiscriminately" firing into it is not a reasonable response.
Good to see HN has changed their tune on gun ownership and defense. Until we see bodycam footage we're all basing our opinions entirely on what his lawyer is saying. Video will come out with a FOIA, but everyone will have moved on.
There are arguments to be made about regulations and the problems we face because of the number of guns in this country, but as long as we have a right to own them the possession of one can't be used as an excuse to execute someone
I assumed everyone also read the article if they're commenting on it, but I fail to see what additional that context that adds; I can't imagine he was pulling it out because it was time to oil it. Police were responding to an active shooter call, and this guy pulled out a gun.
The implication of your original post is that he behaved negligently, when clearly the additional context shows that he did not. You're writing in bad faith.
The article suggests that he wasn't aware it was the police that broke into his house, and indeed having called the police and told them he was at risk of swatting it was logical to assume it would not be the police. I am unclear why police decided to coverly break in via a bathroom window rather than the more usual procedure of shining lights into the front windows and telling people to come out of the house.
> I assumed everyone also read the article if they're commenting on it, ...
You must be new to The Internet. :-)
> I fail to see what additional that context that adds
You may not have intended it sound like that, but your comment felt like classic victim blaming, which is all too common in the cases of police incompetence.
When you have violent intruders breaking into your house through the window, it's reasonable that "these must be police officers, here to arrest me over a misunderstanding, and I should calmly cooperate with them so I won't be hurt" might not be the first thought which comes to mind.
No. You are beyond wrong. Personal firearm ownership is a constitutionally protected right, just as protection from unreasonable search (as this was). Arming oneself when someone breaks into your house is beyond reasonable. Police should expect residents to be armed and shouldn't be breaking into residences.
Nobody is calling your facts wrong. They are criticizing your post. You wrote as if criticizing the victim for their decision to pull a gun. If you did not mean to do that, you should simply state that. If you did mean to do that, then you are ignoring what people are saying in favor of pretending they are denying the simple facts of your post. You are being evasive in both cases - whichever it is.
Why are there so many guns in this God-forsaken country? Why did local cops respond to an active shooting call? Why did they enter the house, instead of waiting for a specially trained team? Why did the victim have a gun?
>Why are there so many guns in this God-forsaken country?
Surplus arms after World War 2 led to the creation of the gun industry in the US, and thanks to the Second Amendment and the power of the gun lobby, its relationship with the Republican Party, and decades of popular media making them cool, that's a guaranteed untouchable industry.
> Why did they enter the house, instead of waiting for a specially trained team?
What "specially trained team?" That was the specially trained team. They're specially trained to break down doors and shoot people.
Americans get the policing they vote for, and they consistently vote for tacticool cowboys with Punisher tattoos and against... anything less than more of that.
There is probably a relationship between this and the first question.
>Why did the victim have a gun?
Self defense, presumably, as is his Constitutional right.
> What "specially trained team?" That was the specially trained team.
Weren’t they some local cops? In my country there is a handful of police teams specialised in hostage situations and the like. In case of an "active shooting", local cops would typically establish a perimeter until these guys come and handle the situation (without deaths if possible, although they are sharp shooters).
They need to get sued _hard_ and lose millions, as well as have cops put in jail before real change happens. I feel sorry for this kid but he's doing the right thing.
Taxpayers will just foot the bill. These cops need their personal funds taken, and before they blow it all on legal bills defending themselves from criminal charges.
Come to think of it, this is America dammit. Cops should be licensed, bonded and insured, and if their training or records aren't up to standards they don't get covered. We have higher standards for plumbers and pest control than we do police.
This. If truck drivers have to maintain safety records, if firefighters require certification and training, cops do too. To hell with this implied immunity bullshit, either they are correct in enforcing the law or they aren’t.
If it's one cops fault, charge the cop. If it's multiple cops fault, charge them AND the department. This makes it fiscally prudent to make sure cops in the department are well trained and educated on enforcing the laws and respecting rights.
I don't get the taxpayer line. It's a democracy. The taxpayers are the ones deciding what kind of policing we get.
If they don't want to foot the bills for police misconduct, maybe the taxpayers should elect someone who actually holds the police accountable and doesn't just blindly approve any policing budget and look the other way when the police wrongfully harms someone?
> cops put in jail
Right. The real justice comes from treating this incident like you would if there were no municipal coffers at play, and simply punish criminals for criminal action.
Real justice when it comes to swatting is multi-faceted.
Sure, the person making the bogus call to police should suffer some consequences vis a vis jail time.
However, swatting only works because police regularly take a shoot first and ask questions later stance. They go from an anonymous tip about an ongoing crime at an address to shooting up said address in short order without any effort to verify a crime is actually taking place, perhaps in no small part due to the fact that qualified immunity ensures they'll never see any consequences for any property damage and/or casualties which occur as a result.
I'd liken it to initiating a gang hit, except at least in the gang hit, the gang members responsible for carrying it out have a chance at facing some accountability.
Cops need to face the possibility of (at minimum) termination and even jail time for recklessly endangering civilians, and cop training needs to be fundamentally changed to eliminate this "us vs. them" mentality seen in so many of those in blue.
I am as horrified by the outcome here as the next person, but what exactly do you imagine police should do when responding to a call about an active shooter where they encounter a suspect armed with a handgun?
They could start by verifying the address of the house they're raiding. Way too often this doesn't happen and the police murder someone because they got the wrong house. They should identify the occupants of the house. The victim in this case had been swatted before and he had already warned the police that could happen. The swat team should have been skeptical going into this situation and taken the time to verify what was going on first. The call they got in this case claimed to be from the victim who said his father had shot his sister and he was hiding in another room. Even if the 911 call had been legit, the police would have shot the person who called for help and not the father, because they didn't bother to identify who they were shooting or who else was around when they sprayed bullets around the room from outside. They should have identified themselves as police. There's no reason not to. They should have at least attempted to use their big boy words before they started shooting up the place.
The very smart and obvious thing to do would be to announce themselves loudly on arrival; all squad cars have very loud speakers on them and most police departments have at least one armored vehicle specially for high risk situations. Breaking in through a bathroom window and then running around the house with guns drawn is a recipe for disaster. If this kid had had good pistol skills (not that unusual unusual in the US) it might just as easily have ended with one or both of the cops getting shot.
Police in many jurisdictions will just walk onto your property in pursuit of a suspect and get mad at you if you open a window or door to see what the hell is going on outside your home.
Identify themselves as LE, and of course physically represent as such, unambiguously, then demand the person put down the firearm. "Active Shooter" has no meaning just because the word is used. Also consider what everyone long forgot and few pay attention to; officers are paid, not volunteers. Risk is part of the job. You cannot shoot everything you think might be a threat. One can also question the quality of the system that handles emergency calls, or that responds to them. There are lots of guns in America. And lots of people who can say the words "active shooter". And often enough, phones and other objects are conveniently interpreted as guns, so I am not convinced that is the most important variable. Did he point it at the officers? If so, were the officers in proper uniform?
Now, if I were to answer your question, I would say it first depends on circumstances. I have encountered many people with guns. But if I was and active officer and encountered someone with a gun, I would do my best so that the encounter was arranged in a manner that gave me some advantage and at least a second or two to think before acting. Sometimes, mistakes are made though, and they always will be made. But the fact someone had a gun is no excuse.
Cops has to be trained. If they are trigger happy fools and shoots everything what moves, they should end up in jail.
Notice that swatting is problem almost exclusively to USA. In Europe cops will just check what is going on first before bringing the big guns.
This guy needs to be compensated for his pain and suffering, his economic losses due to his disability, and for the care he'll need for the rest of his life. Jailing the people whose negligence is responsible for his injuries doesn't help him.
By that logic we shouldn't lock up murderers either. After all, it won't help the person who's already dead.
There's quite a bit more negligence going on here than a typical murder—unless you've got some information that the cops were out to intentionally harm the victim.
The public would probably be served by the shooters not carrying a badge anymore, but it doesn't take jail to accomplish that.
Jail isn’t about helping victims.
> kid
The man is 24 years old.
Not done growing until 26. The law says you’re an adult at 18, but that’s not even a little true. 18 year olds are children.
What are 12 year olds according to this criteria? Babies?
There needs to be insurance for police, just like there is for doctors. Once an individual cop has repeated judgements against them they won’t be insurable, instead of the current result of them moving to a different city.
How about firing them and sending them to jail?
I like your way better. I like your way a lot better.
A: It’s actual justice, and
B: Otherwise it just becomes another way for insurance companies to make money - in this case by charging swingeing fees that will come out of public coffers.
> Otherwise it just becomes another way for insurance companies to make money - in this case by charging swingeing fees that will come out of public coffers.
I believe doctors pay out of pocket (At least the ones that setup their own private practice do), so it would incentivize them to keep costs low so they can pocket the money.
What’s the salary difference between doctors and cops of similar experience levels on average in the US?
Surprisingly on par, some of the guys are making more than faang engineers
https://cthrupayroll.mass.gov/#!/year/2022/full_time_employe...
I don't know and it's not the point of my comment? I'm only talking about how it aligns inscentives.
At this point with how the police use their unions to support the lawlessness and casual violence the police engage in repeatedly, I think most precincts would benefit from pulling a Camden and firing all the fuckers to replace with actual competent officers who aren’t toeing the line of rebelling against the state or oppression of the people.
For reference for anyone who hadn’t heard of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_County_Police_Departmen...
Then no one would want to be a police officer.
Could also just give the death penalty for any attempted or successful swats (though finding the perpetrator might be difficult). And maybe improve legislation and technology related to it.
VPN service providers might be thrilled if using a VPN for gaming became mandated by law. Game developers less so if P2P becomes outlawed.
The kind of people who don’t want to become police officers because they’re worried about being held accountable for their actions? Those are exactly the kind of people who should never be allowed become police officers. If we were really interested in Justice we’d build the system specifically to eliminate those kinds of people before they got anywhere near badge and a gun.
> Could also just give the death penalty for any attempted or successful swats
Nope, because innocent people would then inevitably get framed for it.
Just fix the real problem which is the out-of-control police response
I'd say that by the time you're considering jail, it's too late—these situations are better avoided than rectified.
Per the article, one of the officers was evidently particularly stupid—he failed police academy once and was disciplined for entering a women's restroom because of crimes he imagined could be happening in there. No one wanted to say "you're too stupid to be making high-stakes judgment calls", so they let him keep trying until he was running into an alleged emergency "with no plan," where he shot an innocent person eight times...and then handcuffed him...
I think actuaries have a way of employing statistical realities that would, in a legislative context, precipitate too much defensiveness and bickering to ever be the basis of a rule. Like I think it was quite a while before neuroscience could fully explain why insurance companies wouldn't cover rental car drivers under 25, instead of 16 or 18.
An insurance company would give departments a reason to say "anyone who has ever failed police academy gets pepper spray and that's it." Departments can decide how to deploy that person.
(Ideally that person wouldn't be a cop at all, but departments will probably always be pushing to hire. This way the argument is between departments and the comparatively highly-informed insurance market, and not voters)
There should be a national license that can be revoked making officers ineligible to hold any position in law enforcement anywhere in the country.
I think judges are often overlooked, they are the barrier stopping an internet troll from sending a small military on to your property on a whim. Too many false swatting should lead to a judge mandatorily stepping down, especially if there are casualties.
Judges are not involved in a police response to a call.
You cannot swat someone without a warrant, they absolutely are in the loop. Every single time. Did you forget the third amendment exists?
If police are doing this without a warrant or hard evidence, then that's part of the problem.
Police generally do not need a warrant in exigent circumstances. If they get a call saying a shooting or similarly grave crime is going down right now at 123 ABC street, they don't start filling out paperwork for a warrant, they just despatch units there. Warrants are for investigations, not emergencies.
You mean QUALIFIED IMMUNITY isn’t enough? Give me a break. Their job is literally safer than being a garbage collector. Go ahead, I’ll wait while you look it up.
I've long promoted this idea as well. They should be insured, backed by the union's pension plan. They have zero skin in the game.
The other thing that would help immensely would be to revisit qualified immunity. Conceptually its perfectly understandable -- failures can happen that are not their fault and they should not be on the hook for that.
But in these times, it's just full immunity. They can do whatever they want and only in the most heinous crimes where they didn't have the opportunity to destroy the evidence they only then do time.
One last thing should be noted: the War on Drugs is designed to create crime and is weaponized against the citizenry. "Dangerous" drugs aren't illegal to protect you, they're there so they can fuck you over.
I don't understand why more police agencies aren't being super careful with this stuff, especially if they're being sent to a house / location where no other crimes have been reported. It would be one thing if you have a call to a house that's had domestic violence calls, other shootings, etc. Instead, they're just getting a call and thinking, "Oh no! Danger!" and running in, guns blazing. I love the protection from the police but sometimes I'm afraid they don't think intelligently and instead just react.
A lot of them _want_ to be able to go in guns blazing and not having to be careful. They're living out a Warrior fantasy.
Many people have fantasies like that, where a thief (hopefully without a gun) invades their home, and they use their gun collection to heroically "neutralize" the invader and defend their kingdom without legal consequences.
These are the kind of people who shoud be strongly filtered out from jobs that require carrying firearms. They could enlist as infantry in whatever invasion USA is doing that year, but they're actually scared of guns if they can fire back.
> They could enlist as infantry in whatever invasion USA is doing that year, but they're actually scared of guns if they can fire back.
The irony is that soldiers in the US military are usually better trained than the cops, and aren't going to magdump when an acorn hits their patrol car.
Why would they? What downside do they face? Cops get paid bonuses for raiding houses, they get bonuses for seizing money and valuable goods, they get bonuses for charging people with crimes. While they face almost zero consequences for abusing and extorting people, can lie with impunity, and often even get away with straight up cold blooded murder. Corruption within their organization is almost completely ignored and they hire people based on how sociopathic and unempathetic they are and enforce those traits in "training" even more because harsh draconian enforcement brings in the largest amount of money for cops and courts.
Unless you live in a community where the median income is $200K+, the primary funding for cops is through charging people with the easy crimes that they can't afford lawyers to fight, often drugs because they have massively inflated fines and fees. And the next best source of funding they have is special grants and programs which are often doles out based on how "dangerous" an area is, and killing "criminals" makes an area seem more dangerous and deserving of special funds and recognition and fancy armaments and killing toys.
There is something like 50 million police-public encounters annually. Stuff like this is exceedingly rare.
So while Pima PD should be held responsible, and those cops should face criminal charges, it's logically non-nonsensical for this to make you terrified of police (or the other 5-10 similar stories annually). I mean cars are genocidal military dictators by comparison.
The downstream effect of this is people doing incredibly rash and stupid things because they think the cops are just going to start blasting them during a traffic stop ("I need to shot them/run away because I am dead anyway").
There are hundreds of billions of person-to-person encounters annually and almost all of them end just fine, yet people feel the need to:
1. Come up with a beautiful story about how they need to have guns to defend themselves.
2. Come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who improperly uses violence in such encounters.
Encountering a cop is one of the most dangerous 'mundane' things that can happen to you. ~One in 50,000 encounters ends with someone dead.
Going on 50,000 drives is unlikely to send you to the morgue.
You need to control for situations where the person on the other side is trying to kill the police.
It's something like 1000 people killed by police annually, but it's childishly dishonest (or ignorant) to ignore that ~995 of those are people actively trying to kill the police.
I wouldn't call shooting out your back window because you're getting pulled over "mundane".
Also, if each drive is ~20 miles, you have around a 1% chance of dying. That's 500x greater than even the dishonest 1 in 50k stat. Just further driving my point home for me, thanks.
Some protection!
In San Francisco the cop cars don't say "To serve and protect" they say "Safety with respect" lmfao
cuts to 6 cops beating a guy with clubs
IIRC "To serve and protect" was originally from a movie. Cops don't have a duty to protect you, and there in fact many cases of a cop not intervening during a violent crime due to concerns for their own safety, even when the asailant only had a knife.
> "To Serve and Protect," is a phrase made famous by the Los Angeles Police Department and adopted, in various forms, by law enforcement agencies across the United States.
https://www.policemag.com/articles/to-serve-and-protect-v2
> In February 1955, the Los Angeles Police Department, through the pages of the internally produced BEAT magazine, conducted a contest for a motto for the police academy. The conditions of the contest stated that: “The motto should be one that in a few words would express some or all the ideals to which the Los Angeles police service is dedicated. It is possible that the winning motto might someday be adopted as the official motto of the Department.”
> The winning entry was the motto, “To Protect and to Serve” submitted by Officer Joseph S. Dorobek.
> On November 4, 1963, the Los Angeles City Council passed the necessary ordinance and the credo has now been placed alongside the City Seal on the Department’s patrol cars.
https://www.lapdonline.org/lapd-motto/
I don't know what film you're referring to, but it's been a motto since the 50's, and made official since the 60's.
Huh, yeah you're right. I swear I remember hearing about this on an NPR radio piece about how police really don't need to do anything to protect you.
Police are under no legal obligation to protect you.
That's because the Supreme Court has ruled that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens.
Special note: that includes cases where protective orders like restraining orders are concerned. The Castle Rock v. Gonzales ruling specifically states that police have no obligation to enforce them.
We could easily create a duty at the state or local level if we wanted to. The US Constitution is pretty silent on a lot of issues that are remanded to the states.
They got rid of the clubs since Rodney thing in the 90s. They were much safer IMHO. Bruised but alive!
A mere concuss is never sus!
Maybe a little blood and puss.
Don’t be a wuss![1]
[1] This rhyme only works in certain dialects of British English. For most English speakers, it won’t. It’s a bit like that Nickelback song Never Made It As A Wise Man when he rhymes “story” with “sorry”. Nickelback didn’t realize he developed a moat, an uncompetitive advantage, and nobody would be able to sing his wonderful songs. Nobody, except him.
A lot of police departments in the US pay to send their officers to seminars where speakers tell them that they’re Literally Warriors. Cops with Punisher tattoos aren’t being ironic, they think about finishing a shift of playing Temple Run on their phones like catching the last helicopter out of Saigon.
This is currently down-voted to gray for me, but it's a pretty well-documented phenomenon.
To anyone unfamiliar with the concept of warrior cops, it may behoove you to start with the following Harvard Law Review article: https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-128/law-enforcements-...
They aren't being super careful because there's no cost to being careless.
This happened to me in 2021 minus the being shot part. Called local PD to inform them; still had a full police response, luckily was renovating house but still.
whoa. feel bad for the people of tuscon, because they didn't do anything wrong, but holy shit this case looks absolutely awful for the city and i hope they lose. big.
Don’t feel bad for them. It’s not something to feel bad about. We pay taxes specifically for instances including when something goes wrong.
Feel mad if this is a pattern and the citizens don’t do anything about it.
Police agencies arent the only ones alone to take blame here, the judges who on a whim sign these warrants should face liability or be removed from their position if there are casualties as a result of a false report.
I don't think judges and warrants are involved in these swatting incidents.
The whole point of swatting is to make up a dangerous scenario where the threat to life is so high and immediate that the police are allowed to forgo many procedures and processes that would prevent accidental injury or death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance
This sounds like an exception to the third amendment that should be reconsidered if police don't improve their approach to these types of calls. If you cannot prove before you send a whole military to a house that what is claimed in a phone call is actually happening in a residential home, then you should not go in guns blazing.
I assume you meant the fourth amendment, which is the search and seizure one.
Yeah I typod, I was saying fourth in my head too.
It really seems like something that could be fixed with proper training and protocol, when police forces the world over don't have this issue.
It's a problem elsewhere too, albeit less violent, you just don't hear about it.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-dev-swatte...
While I was incarcerated on a bogus Felony charge, a Corrections Officer made a false report to a neighboring Police Department that I had been “bragging about Swatting people” in that city. Totally false claim. Got a visit from Detectives while in my cell. They recorded the whole thing.
The Thin Blue Line is real. I’ve moved on with my life. Mostly because there’s no way to hold them accountable so why try?
> Melendez did grab a "legal, registered" gun once he heard the glass shatter, Sethi said, but he ducked behind a partially closed door.
It's horrible what happened to this boy, and the police should be sued/charged, but this is (yet another) reason why you're better off _not_ having a gun in your house. (You're statistically more likely to die from a gun in your own household than someone else's.)
The need to find out who did the swatting and give him life in jail.
That creates the reverse problem, whereby someone can eventually get framed for it.
Just fix the real problem which is the disproportionate police response.
SWATing is a very common thing so police depts should be aware there's always a risk of it happening
Take the call seriously, but be prepared it's not what you think it is, especially if you see a shocked gamer sitting at their computer monitor with no apparent hostages
176M is not enough for such an atrocity. It needs to be at least 10x more, i.e. 1.76B.
Time to start a new company, Swatly.ai, which listens in on 911 calls and warns police if they may be responding to a SWATting attempt. Working on integrating into their firearms so they won't fire unless the AI thinks it's load-bearing.
More sensibly, their insurance could just toss a clause in and charge higher premiums to cover for this, while adding some conditions to help prevent it.
And then on the side they sell "metadata" to insurance companies and anyone else willing to pay...
[dead]
It explicitly said in the article that he pulled out a gun. He shouldn't have been swatted, obviously. That said, if you pull out a gun when police are responding to what they believe is an active shooter, the chances of you being shot are extremely high.
Additionally consider what would have happened if this had been an active shooting and they simply disregarded the phone call.
> It explicitly said in the article that he pulled out a gun.
A gun that he legally owned and had every right to have on his person as an unknown individual was breaking into his home. If police don't identify themselves they should expect an armed population to meet them with guns in hand. It's their responsibility to assess the situation, understand who the occupants are, and respond appropriately. Smashing a bedroom window with a shovel and then "indiscriminately" firing into it is not a reasonable response.
Good to see HN has changed their tune on gun ownership and defense. Until we see bodycam footage we're all basing our opinions entirely on what his lawyer is saying. Video will come out with a FOIA, but everyone will have moved on.
There are arguments to be made about regulations and the problems we face because of the number of guns in this country, but as long as we have a right to own them the possession of one can't be used as an excuse to execute someone
It also says that he heard glass breaking, thought they were criminals, grabbed a gun and hid behind a door.
If you’re going to mention the gun fact, why not provide the whole context?
I assumed everyone also read the article if they're commenting on it, but I fail to see what additional that context that adds; I can't imagine he was pulling it out because it was time to oil it. Police were responding to an active shooter call, and this guy pulled out a gun.
The implication of your original post is that he behaved negligently, when clearly the additional context shows that he did not. You're writing in bad faith.
The article suggests that he wasn't aware it was the police that broke into his house, and indeed having called the police and told them he was at risk of swatting it was logical to assume it would not be the police. I am unclear why police decided to coverly break in via a bathroom window rather than the more usual procedure of shining lights into the front windows and telling people to come out of the house.
> I assumed everyone also read the article if they're commenting on it, ...
You must be new to The Internet. :-)
> I fail to see what additional that context that adds
You may not have intended it sound like that, but your comment felt like classic victim blaming, which is all too common in the cases of police incompetence.
Details matter, and details like "he pulled out a gun" are not inconsequential.
> he pulled out a gun" are not inconsequential.
Yes, you already mentioned that?
When you have violent intruders breaking into your house through the window, it's reasonable that "these must be police officers, here to arrest me over a misunderstanding, and I should calmly cooperate with them so I won't be hurt" might not be the first thought which comes to mind.
I suspect he pulled it out because he heard someone breaking into his house.
From TFA:
> Melendez did grab a "legal, registered" gun once he heard the glass shatter, Sethi said, but he ducked behind a partially closed door.
> He believed someone connected to the hackers was breaking in, Sethi added.
No. You are beyond wrong. Personal firearm ownership is a constitutionally protected right, just as protection from unreasonable search (as this was). Arming oneself when someone breaks into your house is beyond reasonable. Police should expect residents to be armed and shouldn't be breaking into residences.
And please, stop blaming the victim.
It is factually accurate that he pulled out a weapon when police were responding to an active shooter call.
Nobody is calling your facts wrong. They are criticizing your post. You wrote as if criticizing the victim for their decision to pull a gun. If you did not mean to do that, you should simply state that. If you did mean to do that, then you are ignoring what people are saying in favor of pretending they are denying the simple facts of your post. You are being evasive in both cases - whichever it is.
Why are there so many guns in this God-forsaken country? Why did local cops respond to an active shooting call? Why did they enter the house, instead of waiting for a specially trained team? Why did the victim have a gun?
>Why are there so many guns in this God-forsaken country?
Surplus arms after World War 2 led to the creation of the gun industry in the US, and thanks to the Second Amendment and the power of the gun lobby, its relationship with the Republican Party, and decades of popular media making them cool, that's a guaranteed untouchable industry.
> Why did they enter the house, instead of waiting for a specially trained team?
What "specially trained team?" That was the specially trained team. They're specially trained to break down doors and shoot people.
Americans get the policing they vote for, and they consistently vote for tacticool cowboys with Punisher tattoos and against... anything less than more of that.
There is probably a relationship between this and the first question.
>Why did the victim have a gun?
Self defense, presumably, as is his Constitutional right.
> What "specially trained team?" That was the specially trained team.
Weren’t they some local cops? In my country there is a handful of police teams specialised in hostage situations and the like. In case of an "active shooting", local cops would typically establish a perimeter until these guys come and handle the situation (without deaths if possible, although they are sharp shooters).
OK I assumed it was a SWAT team, I didn't read the article closely enough, my fault. I'll take the hit for that.
But if it had been... the result still would have been the same. American police aren't trained to de-escalate, SWAT less so.
Which also, is literally not a crime. Don't blame the victim.
> Which also, is literally not a crime
I believe that the person you are responding to is arguing wisdom, not legality.