Agreed. In a hostage situation you'd expect someone to gather intelligence of the situation before entering the building the hostages are claimed to be in.
For example, heat cameras could be used to make a map of the room and the situation in it.
These actions are emergency response teams, the goal is to stamp down the situation as quickly as possible then assess.
You can't exactly have a bloke ringing in at the door and asking if there's really an active shooter/hostage situation, that would render the concept worthless.
Though at this point one can easily wonder whether SWAT rapid response is such a good idea, it would be interesting to compile SWAT emergency response actions, see if the emergency response was actually necessary (versus sending a beat cop ringing the door or whatever) and weigh that against swatting abuse.
This has happened enough times that there really needs to be some kind of process in place to verify what the fuck is actually going on at the 'swatted' address. It is pathetically stupid and laughable that the same police force can be hoaxed so many times without setting up some kind of response to future hoaxes. If it was a new phenomenon, I could understand, but this has been happening since streaming became a thing around 2004/5 (or earlier, but that's going back as far as I know).
I understand and agree with this, although I'd like to add a bit of context.
SWAT teams were initially designed to de-escalate already violent situations, not bring overwhelming violence to a peaceful situation. Sure, overwhelming violence may in many times be needed. In many times, however, it is not.
This is why we recon before we act. Unless it's an active shooter situation (the responding officers can hear gunfire and/or explosions), then it's not evidently clear that there is a violent situation that needs de-escalating.
We've seriously lost our way with SWAT. I used to say we need better training, but I'm not so sure that dismantling the moniker "SWAT" and establishing some new brand name and certification system isn't required. SWAT just means "Rambo" to too many people, laymen and LE alike.
> SWAT teams were initially designed to de-escalate already violent situations
No, SWAT teams were initially designed to end already violent situations (armed robberies, riots, hostage situations, …), however they were designed to be called in after threat assessment and tentative deescalation (by regular police units or negotiators)
> We've seriously lost our way with SWAT.
I couldn't agree more.
SWAT teams were never designed for "first response" but for "overwhelming response", they're police's special ops/SMU, but nowadays they're just a cowboy unit being sent on any trouble without any sort of situational awareness or threat assessment, better training of the SWAT units would be unlikely to help. Not to mention with the militarisation of US police (hands-me-down army and the like) having a "SWAT team" and using it for any and every thing has become a mark of rank/pride for every fucking podunk town sheriff or police office.
Back in 2014 there were ~80000 SWAT actions per year in the US, and only about 7% even remotely had anything to do with the original purpose of SWAT teams (hostage situations, barricades, significant armed robbery, …): https://www.aclu.org/blog/another-day-another-124-violent-sw...
I hate to quibble with somebody I'm agreeing with so much, and perhaps I'm just mincing words, but I don't think you're right with your statement that SWAT teams were formed solely to "end already violent situations"
Yes, that's part of their job. But surveillance is also part of their job -- which doesn't involve violence at all. They should be adept at performing normal policing activities in unusual environments, like hanging from the side of a building, or in an NBC environment. The point is that there just isn't a "weapons" part of SWAT; there's also a "Tactics" side. And tactics is a lot more than no-knock raids.
SWAT teams are not supposed to be shock troops, some half-assed version of Delta or DEVGRU. They're supposed to be expert in various policing activities that require unusual weapons or tactics.
As an aside, there are a lot of soldiers returning from overseas with tons of counter-insurgency training. A vast majority of this training is not applicable to domestic police work. But I'll bet you twenty bucks it ends up being part of it anyway, whether we need it or not.
This is pretty exploitable though. Someone could just spam the police with fake reports to waste their resources. I remember that once someone reported a bomb on a railway station - but he didn't say which railway station, so they closed and search all of them (in a 10 mil country), lol.
Millions of innocent people are at risk of having their home invaded, being beaten, shot, even killed by this small private army after a prank phone call and you talk about wasting resources?
In various other countries half of the swat company would be in prison after this.
I remember that happened not too long ago, lots of schools getting fake bomb threats. The problem is that you can't ignore the threat, just in case one of them is correct.
That's why I think terrorism isn't nearly as big a problem as people claim it to be. It's relatively simple to create bombs; a malicious actor could first bomb a lot of places already, but also send bomb threats for weeks on end until nobody believes them anymore, then do the real thing.
So IMO, either terrorism isn't that big a deal, OR, all of the security measures and secret services are actually working and defusing (ha) the situations before they can act; the only recent terrorist attacks were ad-hoc things (grabbing a truck and driving through people) or from unexpected angles (the occasional school shooting).
Frankly, terrorism both isn't that big a deal and they're clearly not particularly smart. If it was a big deal and they were smart, there'd be a lot of escalating fear by combining lots of fake threats with a certain, low, proportion of actual attacks: Enough attacks that every threat causes fear and contributes to a siege mentality, and exploiting fake threats as a threat multiplier.
I think part of the reason we're not seeing that is that a large proportion of the attacks we see are not the work of terrorist "masterminds" pulling strings, but mentally unhinged people who decide tying their murder-suicide to a political cause makes it "mean something". Because it'd be easy to multiply the fear in various ways if they were planning this out properly.
What's more disturbing is that there reportedly was contact/a conversation between the SWAT team and the residents, which the team then ignored:
Officers reportedly ignored his father, Tom, and his cousin telling
them there was no hostage situation and that the so-called hostage taker
was actually asleep.
Of course police ignored that; if they'd listened they'd have lost their chance to play 007 or soldier or whatever else they like to think of themselves as.
The response to this cannot in good conscience be "oh well, that's how it's supposed to work and there isn't any other way". It's only a matter of time before people get killed this way, and if you're one of the people who say that's an acceptable risk, you're just wrong.
> You can't exactly have a bloke ringing in at the door and asking if there's really an active shooter/hostage
In the context of having just a random phone call to go on, with no other sign that anything may be wrong, yes: you absolutely need to have a bloke ringing the door and asking. If you don't want to send a bloke to check on the situation, there are plenty of equivalent measures available - especially if you're a militarized police force. You can send probes, you can use thermal imaging, you can ring the phones in the house, you can even use a megaphone.
It's clear that storming in and shooting anything that moves without even so much as a thought wasted on assessing whether the individual is a danger shows a blatant disregard for human life, even the lives of hostages.
> You can't exactly have a bloke ringing in at the door and asking if there's really an active shooter/hostage situation, that would render the concept worthless.
"can't" by virtue of "didn't"? That's not sound logic. It makes no sense to even send in a SWAT team when a situation is not first assessed. And for that, you have to communicate.
I'm just as worried, maybe more worried, that the first response to a hostage situation with explosives involved is to breach and clear with no apparent surveillance / investigation.
Which makes me wonder when we'll see the first terrorist attack involving bundling a bunch of hostages in a house, rigging it to explode, and calling a swat team for maximum effect.
"Taking the threat seriously, armed police then raided Mr Dobbs’ home and shot the 20-year-old between the eyes and in the chest with rubber bullets, breaking bones in his face and bruising his lungs. Images taken after the incident show him with a heavily swollen, bruised and cut face."
UK resident: my memories of seeing television reports of rubber bullets used in Northern Ireland during the troubles suggest that the bullets were designed to be bounced off ground or wall first. That they were primarily a riot control round.
When did the police start using them as direct ammunition? Is that generally regarded as OK?
In france at least, they started to outfit many police departments with them, as tit sounds better in the news to say they are "sub-lethal" weapons instead of real guns. It is illegal for them to aim at the upper body or fire below the 7 meters range, though they do it constantly (and even though people already died due to them and lose eyes every year; a rubber bullet going at 360km/h can be quite lethal).
If you are breaching a building rather than controlling a street, isn't your training going to be to shoot someone directly? Since officers are acting on training rather than reflection, isn't expecting them to bounce bullets rather foolish?
Assuming it's the same kind of "rubber bullets" used to neutralize riots, it's completely unsuitable for breaching houses. The min-range is impossible to keep to start with.
Yes, and it's wildly inaccurate as well (even without taking into account that police training is often kept to a minimum so most of them can't aim that well).
Are you saying police are being trained to directly shoot people with equipment designed to be used indirectly? Or are you saying they aren't being trained to use their equipment as it's intended to be used at all? I'm not clear what your point is.
My point is that if someobe gets training on how to breach and secure buildings, either in SWAT, or in their previous career in the military, then they will have training which teaches them to aim for center-mass of anyone they perceive as a threat.
Swapping out the type of ammunition isnt going to erase that training and so they would fall back to it in a stressful situation.
Video evidence of several black people being arbitrarily and unnecessarily gunned down, and that's just the ones I've seen in the last year or so without actually going looking.
sure. we can look at the history that lead us here[1][2][3] or we can look at more recent examples.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] or we can get pedantic about the word murder. your call.
”as this is the same police force that murders black people for sport”
Oh come on. I generally support the blm movement but spouting off such nonsense is not helpful to anyone. It's comments like this one that prevents us from having a serious conversation on the issues.
The moral distinction between what commenter said, and the actual reality in many cases, is small enough that I think the phrasing is called for. It's not meant to be exactly accurate - it's meant to be a wake up call about the comparative disregard for life.
How accurate can you be with them when you have to bounce them first though? In an emergency situation, you need to be damn sure that the bullet will hit the target after the bounce.
That being said, they should have assessed this situation better and have realised it wat not an emergency situation.
Rubber bullets introduced by the RUC in NI were designed to be ricocheted off the ground to strike legs and knees. They weren't accurate enough for much else.
Later replaced with plastic baton rounds which were fearsomely accurate and were used in direct-fire. Forbidden to aim at head but instead aimed at stomach and let bullet-drop do its thing. Given the majority gender of the 'opposition' you can guess the results.
There was a minimum range ( 25 metres or so ) which could only be violated to save life. Absolutely not permitted indoors.
Note that in Northern Ireland, when the army killed civilians, individuals responsible were put on trial and even sometimes convicted. The anti-insurgency force was less lethal and more legally constrained than some US police forces.
(Remember that as a UK resident our TV coverage of NI was subject to state censorship, though. "Gerry Adams' words are spoken here by an actor" etc.)
It's good they caught the callers, but whoever dispatched the SWAT team was negligent, allowing the team to be used as a weapon. The SWAT team itself was also negligent, not adequately assessing the situation on the ground.
Control of SWAT should really not be at the local police level, but at the state level. The fact that SWATing is a thing shows just how broken the current model is. The use of SWAT should be extremely rare.
"SWAT team use has spiked from around 3,000 strikes per year in 1980 to as many as 80,000 raids a year now. A battering ram or other forced-entry device is used in two-thirds of these raids, nearly 80 percent of which target private homes. The great bulk of SWAT raids are in service of the drug war, though nearly four out of 10 find no contraband at all." https://theweek.com/articles/531458/troubling-rise-swat-team...
40% is a fairly high success rate though, I think. Of course, it's probably usually just small amounts, a small bag of something or another here and there.
Would the success rate be significantly lower if normal police procedures were followed instead? To count as a 'success' fro SWAT they would need to show that SWAT methods were appropriate and necessary.
It's even worse, as to count as a success, they would also need to show not just that they find something in more cases than without swat, but that the extra disturbance they cause when they don't find anything is worth it too.
Not to mention that what they find should be worth found too (e.g. some kid's stash of weed or some guy's coke is not to be counted among the "successes" -- you don't send a SWAT team for that, you send it to major dealers).
To be picky, it means that it's no greater than 60%. I'm not sure that an armed raid which turned up, say, the dog end of a joint or a line's worth of speed should be counted as a success.
I'm sure the other 60% who had their property destroyed and fully automatic weapons shoved in their faces while being forced to the ground and handcuffed will be pleased to hear this news.
SWAT makes a courtesy knock then they ram the door open and throw flashbangs before they burst in with their fingers on the trigger and take you down by force.
If this is the police response you think is appropriate for the vast majority of police calls then I think you should reevaluate your country of residence.
”the vast majority of police calls” you got any statistics to back that claim up? Are you saying that much more then 50 percent of police calls lead to swat raids?
What are we defining as success here? I don't think targeting minority demographics via drug raids is successful no matter how often they find drugs. The success rate isn't what we're concerned with. It's simply used to illustrate the larger problem of an overly militarized police state with little regard over its use of force
Yes, and you're not even mentioning any of the particularly comically-sad, egregious examples, such as last year police using a military helicopter to seize a marijuana plant from an 81 year old woman[1].
The goal of this kind of thing is to condition us to a new-normal.
If you search houses at random, what percent contain no contraband at all? A lot of the counted "successes" could be incidental. Swat receives a tip on a major criminal operation, finds a single joint stashed somewhere, calls it a success.
> The fact that SWATing is a thing shows just how broken the current model is
Hard to think of a better model though; you never know what call is going to be real. Additionally getting local police involved does make a lot of sense, as they should have invaluable knowledge of the area and the people.
This sort of suggestion is usually countered by pointing out how big/unique/different the US is, hence things that work everywhere else in the world just won't cut it.
Which I understand to an extent, but often it sounds more like a cop-out than an actual analysis of the situation.
Which one? And before you answer, you must choose a model from a country with similar demographics to the US. Saying Japan's or Sweden's model works for them isn't going to do us much good.
No, it's not. USA is probably the only western country with such militarized, trigger happy police force and still does worse[0] than any EU country and most Asia countries in controlling crime.
You're comparing apples and oranges. EU and Asian countries are ethnically homogeneous. You need to compare America to other melting pots, like Brazil and Argentina.
I don't think this is the differentiating factor. The EU is very diverse, I think the difference is that Europe has had a far longer time for its inhabitants to resolve or overcome their differences. It was only a little under 150 years ago that people with dark skin in America were still considered property and it was at around the same time that Asian immigrants first came to the country. In Europe, the English and French were on-and-off fighting each other for 600 years.
Plus, the US is extremely individualistic, while European countries tend to be more communal. I think this also contributes to the increased tension between factions in the US.
Finally, the US has far higher gun ownership, so law enforcement in the US has to deal with gun violence while Europe does not.
> Multiple studies and the FBI's own crime statistics prove you wrong.
Cite them, please. Particularly, cite the ones showing that:
- Europe is not diverse.
- Diversity causes increased crime (and is not just correlated, in which case other factors like poverty, which seem to be correlated with diversity in the US, could be a factor).
So it seems likely that crime is correlated with diversity but it also seems (to me) that diversity isn't the cause, poverty is (you can see in the first link that whites in poverty have similar crime rates to blacks in poverty).
> Irrelevant. Not all European countries are communal and some of the highest crime rate countries in the world are communal.
I never said it was a sole factor, I believe it's a contributing factor. Those countries with high amounts of violence are also influenced by other factors, like poverty and lack of stable government.
Those communal countries also tend to be more "socialist", which leads to reduced poverty, reduced income inequality and hence, I believe, reduced crime.
Further, you provide no source to support your assertion that Czech crime is lower because of a culturally homogenous population.
> Do you want to make any other arguments that have been debunked to hell?
Nothing's been debunked so far, I've simply made some suggestions and you've thrown "you're wrong" at me without any evidence to support your assertion. I've now expanded my argument, feel free to show that my evidence or the logic based upon it is flawed.
> I've simply made some suggestions and you've thrown "you're wrong" at me without any evidence to support your assertion.
I haven't quoted the mathematical proof that 2 + 2 = 4 either. Next you'll be asking me for evidence of that as well. The studies I referred to are freely available on the internet. If you want to shore up your faulty arguments, go find them.
I'm not asking you to start from scratch and define a number system, I'm asking you to back up your assertions with evidence so that we can have a constructive dialog.
Look into Australian police tactics if you think racial makeup is the prime driver of militaristic police tactics.
There are much more reasonable ways to enquire about a potential drug situation, and that is all these raids are, very violent enquiries, given little to no evidence past a phonecall exists to pin the household.
If you are going to search the whole house anyway, and surround the perimiter, what good does such an aggressive incursion produce? These aren't military outposts, the element of surprise gets you next to nothing.
> Look into Australian police tactics if you think racial makeup is the prime driver of militaristic police tactics.
Nowhere did I say anything of the sort. At least Australia is a better comparison than the EU or UK. And I agree with you that increased militarization of the police is both unnecessary and counterproductive.
So the question remains: why is the police becoming increasingly militarized when the results are worse across the board?
I live next to a large police building and it is amazing to see the SWAT teams deploy. They drive out in these huge tank like vehicles with members sitting fully outside of the vehicle, holding their rifles and staring down everyone around them.
It really is power projection from a totalitarian state
This episode shows just how dangerous it is to have a militarized police force, behaving as if they were in a war zone. And it's also terrible that the Independent didn't focus it's reporting on the whole militarized police issue.
Yeah. I remember once looking into the military reserves in the U.S. They had a list of occupations, and the civilian jobs the occupation would prepare you for. So, if you're a military base electrician, it prepares you for being a civilian electrician, etc. For infantry, they said that it prepared you well to be a police officer.
So the U.S. government is taking up a large chunk of young people's prime years and teaching them few transferable skills. But they need to pretend like they're not just wasting they're lives, so they tell them that now that they know how to fight a war they know how to be a police officer. Then, unsurprisingly, we get police officers who think they're soldiers.
At least here in EU the SWAT member and whole chain would go through a rigourous disciplinary action to determine why the police was shooting at someone innocent and how to prevent it.
What often happens is that if there is sufficient negative attention, the officer will be placed on paid leave pending an administrative review. Then after the public moves on to something else, the administrative review finds that the officer did nothing wrong and that it was the unarmed victim's fault for being shot.
This article [0] seems to be much more in-depth and explains the situation a bit better (if factually correct).
I'm not so much baffled about actually showing up with a SWAT team before the threat could be identified as a hoax, but rather how an allegedly sleeping man could be shot twice. Once in the face.
The interesting parts are the following:
> Dobbs himself said when police woke him up with a call on his cellphone, he said he told them he would come outside. Dobbs said he walked around the apartment looking for something to put on because it was a cold February night. He said he walked out to the living room, saw the SWAT{ } team, and heard police yelling at him to come out. He said he turned around to go get his girlfriend but was shot. He said he doesn't remember anything after that rubber bullet him in the face.
And:
> Police say Dobbs was shot twice with two rubber rounds to prevent him from reentering the apartment. A Howard County Police Department spokesperson said Dobbs repeatedly refused to obey officer's commands, and also allegedly had his hand in his shirt, though police do not have video evidence of it.
When asked, Dobbs denied having his hand in his shirt, and said he had nothing in his hands at all.
The department said Dobbs was shot in the face as he was "falling forward," according to a written statement to 7 on Your Side.
That's according to the police on the scene who shot him. Also this is not the first time I've seen police claim someone they shot 'had his hands in his shirt'. Of course they can't claim he had something in his had if there's no physical object on the scene, so 'in his shirt' now seems to be the standard go-to phrase.
>I'm not so much baffled about actually showing up with a SWAT team before the threat could be identified as a hoax, but rather how an allegedly sleeping man could be shot twice. Once in the face.
It is actually not baffling. What is happening here is the symptom of an increasingly-authoritarian government which benefits from a trigger-happy, order-obeying-without-questioning-or-critical-thinking-abilities police force. That's why you see this and so much other egregious, unjustified, awful police brutality in America, but it is uncommon in Europe, Scandinavia and East Asia.
How hard is to have a rule stating "every SWAT deployment must include a video-record, and every member of a SWAT team must have an active body camera"?
There's far too much of "do not have video evidence", coupled with far too many incidents where the official record is disproved by third-party video evidence.
The main problem is per se not the hoax call, it is the grotesque accumulation of incompetence from the authorities, and the inability to handle a situation from the SWAT team, due ot a probable lack of proper training. And, also, the impunity security personnel tend to have - shooting someone without reason should be prosecuted as for any regular citizen. What is happening in your so-called free country, dear Americans ?
Exactly - a hoax call should be a nuisance, not potentially lead to violence. As it stands, it's almost surprising that no terrorist group has tried to exploit it, e.g. by calling in large numbers of fake reports to different police departments and sit back and wait for the mayhem.
My conclusion is that the guy had a small stash of pot and was panicking thinking they were there for that. So he was going around his apartment trying to hide it instead of coming out when directed. Police interpreted that as hostility and shot him. They claim the shot to the face was because the guy "fell into" a shot intended for the torso. I really don't know how they said that with a straight face.
The advice in the first link to call your local police if you think someone might try to SWAT you sounds very helpful.
No. That's why he was shot with non-lethal rounds. He suffered serious injuries certainly, and the whole case is deplorable, but it was a fairly reasonable response to his actions at that moment.
The police have a long history of making things up to justify their violence after the fact. Don't get me wrong, they're an important part of our society, but it's a shame we can't seem to get our police to stop acting like this (especially toward black people like Mr. Dobbs).
>the guy "fell into" a shot intended for the torso. I really don't know how they said that with a straight face.
Oh this sort of thing happens all the time. Haven't you seen the documentary, The Matrix?
It is like when Gary Webb exposed a CIA drug running scheme. Died of 2 gunshot wounds to the head. The universe opens itself up to interesting probabilities when police accountability is on the line.
Is groundless mud-slinging like that really necessary? Why even do that? If he had a small stash of pot surely the police would have found it. They had a ton of motivation to find something to pin on him.
Welcome to America - we shoot first, ask questions later.
There really needs to be a complete overhaul of law enforcement training in the US, and the government needs to actually enforce the law against its own agents, too.
America has the police culture it has because the American people wanted it. We wanted aggression in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Drugs. We wanted police to come in, guns blazing, with zero tolerance and take down the evildoers. We voted for prisons and hard time and three strikes and zero tolerance policies in schools. Lawyers and judges run for office touting the number of people they sent to the death chamber, promise more death if elected and get elected.
We can't overhaul law enforcement without overhauling American culture first.
> America has the police culture it has because the American people wanted it.
I disagree. This has been used as a rationale for all sorts of nasty things, like replacing American culture with a globalist culture that's going to be even worse. In any case, no matter what the news may tell you, the American people did not want this.
The politicians saw an opportunity to get more power and money and took it. When both sides of a two party system see an opportunity to increase their power across every level of government (local, state, federal) they take it and the voters don't have much say in the matter. It's one of the biggest flaws of a two party system.
Police brutalize and bloody a man in process of ejecting him from plane:
outcome > corporation to blame
Police shoot, mutilate and nearly kill man sleeping at home during hoax:
outcome > citizen to blame
I'm sure I could go on for a while. The point is, are we not allowed to hold government accountable for illegitimate use of violence? Isn't that... a really big problem?
You can't really blame the "Police Offier" if he is doing his job correctly (following orders). The one to be blamed should be the one giving the orders.
Yes you can. And I feel like we should. Just because you get an order to murder someone doesn't mean you then get to switch off your brain and be absolved of any guilt.
I suggest you have a listen to this video[1]. "Just following orders" is the cause of some of the biggest grief in the world, now and historically.
That's the Nuremberg defense and it doesn't really work. (Of course this isn't exactly war-crime level stuff, but there's at least _some_ culpability on the part of the officers.)
Police officers should be treated, at least, exactly the same as common citizens in cases where common citizens would be arrested for actions the police tend to get away with, such as murder. The position of law enforcement shouldn't give them license to kill - blame them, charge them, jail them if necessary.
Perhaps their willingness to enact violence on behalf of the state should put the police under greater suspicion.
Breaking the bones in a SLEEPING guy's face (over a prank call from another country FFS) is the officers job????
I guess you don't believe police are there to protect and serve which they are sworn to do. Not protect and serve random callers from other nations by the way!
The article does a good job of deflecting blame away from the British hoaxer, which seems to be its goal. So I'm not surprised if anybody initially feels a sense of injustice here, but in this case I think it's misplaced.
While he should be held accountable, you do realize he essentially made a prank call from a foreign country right? Is the prank call the problem or, are the police responding to a prank cal, breaking the bones (in a guy playing video games face) the problem? Seriously, who is more guilty here? I say put them all in prison for a long time.
Swatting is not the moral equivalent of a prank call. The psychological effects on the victim put it closer to terrorism, and the very real risk of injury, even to competent emergency responders, put it closer to assault.
There isn't any information in the article to judge whether the police response was appropriate. For example: was the victim acting suspiciously, or being violent and uncooperative during the incident? The notion that the police overreacted in this case is not a conclusion that is supported by any known facts.
The article also doesn't make the slightest attempt to examine the accusations of police incompetence that it presents, which further fuels the unwarranted sense of outrage.
Why wouldn't you have reason to ignore the warnings from people claiming to be "family" members in a hostage scenario, given they might be criminal accomplices?
Why is it bad to take reports of serious crime at face value, instead of assuming it might be a prank and risking a pattern of ignoring legitimate incidents in future?
Why would you take the expensive and time-consuming step of tracing phone calls before acting, when it risks wasting valuable time that would have saved lives in a real criminal incident?
There are incidents that demonstrate police incompetence and overreaction, or a failed law enforcement system, but this isn't one of them.
You must know that the SWAT team didn't know they were part of a hoax. If there actually had been an armed hostage-taker then I doubt that many people would be saying that shooting him with rubber bullets was illegitimate.
Having said that: 15 of the 17 top-level comments on this thread are explicitly critical of the police in this situation, so I don't know how you you're getting the impression that we aren't allowed to hold them accountable.
"Officers reportedly ignored his father, Tom, and his cousin telling them there was no hostage situation and that the so-called hostage taker was actually asleep."
Of course, it's hard to judge without knowing the whole situation, but this all (military) approach of "shooting first, ask questions later" is not suitable for a local police imho.
Yes, hoaxes especially like this one that end badly should be punished accordingly. At the same time the SWAT team is also responsible. After all, it was them who fired the bullets.
Note that in this case it was multiple bullets not just one as SWAT shot the innocent guy multiple times. It is not just a 'oopsie, we pulled the trigger by mistake, our bad' kind of a situation on their part either.
The most disturbing part about this is that it demonstrates the police will essentially act as hitmen for you, for free. All you have to do is call them up anonymously and tell them your target is a terrorist, and they'll believe it, shooting first and asking questions later.
It's those responsible for ordering and carrying out the raid that deserve the harshest penalty.
Unfortunately this woman walking on the streets of Barcelona and passing by chance next to a manifestation didn't had the same luck. Policemen were found not guilty in 2016.
Illustrates why presumption of innocence is so important: Not just to prevent honest accidents, but also to prevent the justice system from being used as a weapon.
The problem I see is that anyone can just "call" a SWAT team on anyone. Should there not be at least a cursory effort to ascertain whether the threat is genuine before sending people in to do shooting?
In a society that can sometimes have absurd levels of red tape, it’s amazing to me that something like an armed raid is apparently as easy as flipping a switch.
There should be an unbelievable number of forms for these people to fill out before they can issue a raid. They should have to conduct prior investigations and find corroborating evidence of the original claim that requested the raid, etc. They should need multiple signatures from different levels of command. And heck, they should probably require a video recording of an officer walking up and knocking on the door at least once before moving in any troops.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadFor example, heat cameras could be used to make a map of the room and the situation in it.
You can't exactly have a bloke ringing in at the door and asking if there's really an active shooter/hostage situation, that would render the concept worthless.
Though at this point one can easily wonder whether SWAT rapid response is such a good idea, it would be interesting to compile SWAT emergency response actions, see if the emergency response was actually necessary (versus sending a beat cop ringing the door or whatever) and weigh that against swatting abuse.
SWAT teams were initially designed to de-escalate already violent situations, not bring overwhelming violence to a peaceful situation. Sure, overwhelming violence may in many times be needed. In many times, however, it is not.
This is why we recon before we act. Unless it's an active shooter situation (the responding officers can hear gunfire and/or explosions), then it's not evidently clear that there is a violent situation that needs de-escalating.
We've seriously lost our way with SWAT. I used to say we need better training, but I'm not so sure that dismantling the moniker "SWAT" and establishing some new brand name and certification system isn't required. SWAT just means "Rambo" to too many people, laymen and LE alike.
No, SWAT teams were initially designed to end already violent situations (armed robberies, riots, hostage situations, …), however they were designed to be called in after threat assessment and tentative deescalation (by regular police units or negotiators)
> We've seriously lost our way with SWAT.
I couldn't agree more.
SWAT teams were never designed for "first response" but for "overwhelming response", they're police's special ops/SMU, but nowadays they're just a cowboy unit being sent on any trouble without any sort of situational awareness or threat assessment, better training of the SWAT units would be unlikely to help. Not to mention with the militarisation of US police (hands-me-down army and the like) having a "SWAT team" and using it for any and every thing has become a mark of rank/pride for every fucking podunk town sheriff or police office.
Back in 2014 there were ~80000 SWAT actions per year in the US, and only about 7% even remotely had anything to do with the original purpose of SWAT teams (hostage situations, barricades, significant armed robbery, …): https://www.aclu.org/blog/another-day-another-124-violent-sw...
Yes, that's part of their job. But surveillance is also part of their job -- which doesn't involve violence at all. They should be adept at performing normal policing activities in unusual environments, like hanging from the side of a building, or in an NBC environment. The point is that there just isn't a "weapons" part of SWAT; there's also a "Tactics" side. And tactics is a lot more than no-knock raids.
SWAT teams are not supposed to be shock troops, some half-assed version of Delta or DEVGRU. They're supposed to be expert in various policing activities that require unusual weapons or tactics.
As an aside, there are a lot of soldiers returning from overseas with tons of counter-insurgency training. A vast majority of this training is not applicable to domestic police work. But I'll bet you twenty bucks it ends up being part of it anyway, whether we need it or not.
That's a really bad thing for all involved.
And was there an actual emergency? The fire department also has emergency response teams, but if there's no fire, the water cannon doesn't come out.
In various other countries half of the swat company would be in prison after this.
That's why I think terrorism isn't nearly as big a problem as people claim it to be. It's relatively simple to create bombs; a malicious actor could first bomb a lot of places already, but also send bomb threats for weeks on end until nobody believes them anymore, then do the real thing.
So IMO, either terrorism isn't that big a deal, OR, all of the security measures and secret services are actually working and defusing (ha) the situations before they can act; the only recent terrorist attacks were ad-hoc things (grabbing a truck and driving through people) or from unexpected angles (the occasional school shooting).
I think part of the reason we're not seeing that is that a large proportion of the attacks we see are not the work of terrorist "masterminds" pulling strings, but mentally unhinged people who decide tying their murder-suicide to a political cause makes it "mean something". Because it'd be easy to multiply the fear in various ways if they were planning this out properly.
> You can't exactly have a bloke ringing in at the door and asking if there's really an active shooter/hostage
In the context of having just a random phone call to go on, with no other sign that anything may be wrong, yes: you absolutely need to have a bloke ringing the door and asking. If you don't want to send a bloke to check on the situation, there are plenty of equivalent measures available - especially if you're a militarized police force. You can send probes, you can use thermal imaging, you can ring the phones in the house, you can even use a megaphone.
It's clear that storming in and shooting anything that moves without even so much as a thought wasted on assessing whether the individual is a danger shows a blatant disregard for human life, even the lives of hostages.
"can't" by virtue of "didn't"? That's not sound logic. It makes no sense to even send in a SWAT team when a situation is not first assessed. And for that, you have to communicate.
No can't by the virtue of can't, the entire idea is a rapid response to a possible threat.
What you can do is scrap the entire concept, but don't pretend to keep it and make it completely useless by removing the one idea at the root of it.
UK resident: my memories of seeing television reports of rubber bullets used in Northern Ireland during the troubles suggest that the bullets were designed to be bounced off ground or wall first. That they were primarily a riot control round.
When did the police start using them as direct ammunition? Is that generally regarded as OK?
Swapping out the type of ammunition isnt going to erase that training and so they would fall back to it in a stressful situation.
the police have somewhat successfully shifted the public narrative around rubber bullets to a positive one of "non-lethal" force.
as this is the same police force that murders black people for sport, it's a "relief" they used the rubber bullets -- that's how low the bar is here.
citation needed
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol (proto-police)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_brutality_in_the_United...
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Oscar_Grant
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Walter_Scott
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Ezell_Ford
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Terence_Crutcher
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Akai_Gurley
Travon was not shot by police.
Oh come on. I generally support the blm movement but spouting off such nonsense is not helpful to anyone. It's comments like this one that prevents us from having a serious conversation on the issues.
That being said, they should have assessed this situation better and have realised it wat not an emergency situation.
In Northern Ireland.
Later replaced with plastic baton rounds which were fearsomely accurate and were used in direct-fire. Forbidden to aim at head but instead aimed at stomach and let bullet-drop do its thing. Given the majority gender of the 'opposition' you can guess the results.
There was a minimum range ( 25 metres or so ) which could only be violated to save life. Absolutely not permitted indoors.
This is all public-domain.
I had forgotten the batton rounds development.
(Remember that as a UK resident our TV coverage of NI was subject to state censorship, though. "Gerry Adams' words are spoken here by an actor" etc.)
Control of SWAT should really not be at the local police level, but at the state level. The fact that SWATing is a thing shows just how broken the current model is. The use of SWAT should be extremely rare.
Not to mention that what they find should be worth found too (e.g. some kid's stash of weed or some guy's coke is not to be counted among the "successes" -- you don't send a SWAT team for that, you send it to major dealers).
If this is the police response you think is appropriate for the vast majority of police calls then I think you should reevaluate your country of residence.
I'm sure you could go state by state and find similar percentages.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-knock_warrant
The goal of this kind of thing is to condition us to a new-normal.
1 - https://www.rt.com/usa/361982-marijuana-pensioner-police-hel...
Hard to think of a better model though; you never know what call is going to be real. Additionally getting local police involved does make a lot of sense, as they should have invaluable knowledge of the area and the people.
Which I understand to an extent, but often it sounds more like a cop-out than an actual analysis of the situation.
No, it's not. USA is probably the only western country with such militarized, trigger happy police force and still does worse[0] than any EU country and most Asia countries in controlling crime.
0. https://www.numbeo.com/crime/gmaps_rankings_country.jsp
Plus, the US is extremely individualistic, while European countries tend to be more communal. I think this also contributes to the increased tension between factions in the US.
Finally, the US has far higher gun ownership, so law enforcement in the US has to deal with gun violence while Europe does not.
Good for you. Multiple studies and the FBI's own crime statistics prove you wrong.
> Plus, the US is extremely individualistic, while European countries tend to be more communal.
Irrelevant. Not all European countries are communal and some of the highest crime rate countries in the world are communal.
> Finally, the US has far higher gun ownership, so law enforcement in the US has to deal with gun violence while Europe does not.
Czech republic has just as high a gun ownership rate as the US, but much lower crime. The reason? Homogeneous population.
Do you want to make any other arguments that have been debunked to hell? I haven't heard you use the word 'racism' yet.
Cite them, please. Particularly, cite the ones showing that:
- Europe is not diverse.
- Diversity causes increased crime (and is not just correlated, in which case other factors like poverty, which seem to be correlated with diversity in the US, could be a factor).
To provide some evidence of my own, here's some evidence that violent crime in the USA is heavily correlated with poverty: https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137
And here's some more evidence showing that poverty is associated with being a minority ethnicity: https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf
So it seems likely that crime is correlated with diversity but it also seems (to me) that diversity isn't the cause, poverty is (you can see in the first link that whites in poverty have similar crime rates to blacks in poverty).
> Irrelevant. Not all European countries are communal and some of the highest crime rate countries in the world are communal.
I never said it was a sole factor, I believe it's a contributing factor. Those countries with high amounts of violence are also influenced by other factors, like poverty and lack of stable government.
Those communal countries also tend to be more "socialist", which leads to reduced poverty, reduced income inequality and hence, I believe, reduced crime.
To provide some evidence, it seems that people on the lowest end of the income spectrum in most of Europe have more income than their counterparts in the USA: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/01/05/america_s_poo...
> Czech republic has just as high a gun ownership rate as the US, but much lower crime. The reason? Homogeneous population.
No it doesn't. Wikipedia puts the number of license holders (and note that a license is required) at 300k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_Czech_Republic
The population of the Czech Republic is 10m, that puts gun ownership at ~3%.
This puts gun ownership in the US at ~22%, over 6x higher: http://www.guns.com/2016/09/20/how-many-guns-owned-by-how-ma...
Further, you provide no source to support your assertion that Czech crime is lower because of a culturally homogenous population.
> Do you want to make any other arguments that have been debunked to hell?
Nothing's been debunked so far, I've simply made some suggestions and you've thrown "you're wrong" at me without any evidence to support your assertion. I've now expanded my argument, feel free to show that my evidence or the logic based upon it is flawed.
I haven't quoted the mathematical proof that 2 + 2 = 4 either. Next you'll be asking me for evidence of that as well. The studies I referred to are freely available on the internet. If you want to shore up your faulty arguments, go find them.
There are much more reasonable ways to enquire about a potential drug situation, and that is all these raids are, very violent enquiries, given little to no evidence past a phonecall exists to pin the household.
If you are going to search the whole house anyway, and surround the perimiter, what good does such an aggressive incursion produce? These aren't military outposts, the element of surprise gets you next to nothing.
Nowhere did I say anything of the sort. At least Australia is a better comparison than the EU or UK. And I agree with you that increased militarization of the police is both unnecessary and counterproductive.
So the question remains: why is the police becoming increasingly militarized when the results are worse across the board?
Translation: "We need a militarized police because we have a lot of black people."
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...
It really is power projection from a totalitarian state
So the U.S. government is taking up a large chunk of young people's prime years and teaching them few transferable skills. But they need to pretend like they're not just wasting they're lives, so they tell them that now that they know how to fight a war they know how to be a police officer. Then, unsurprisingly, we get police officers who think they're soldiers.
Is this going to be the case in UK as well?
The UK angle is that the guy who made the false report lives in the UK and made the call from the UK.
(+) in practice, a different one for each of the four nations
I'm not so much baffled about actually showing up with a SWAT team before the threat could be identified as a hoax, but rather how an allegedly sleeping man could be shot twice. Once in the face.
The interesting parts are the following:
> Dobbs himself said when police woke him up with a call on his cellphone, he said he told them he would come outside. Dobbs said he walked around the apartment looking for something to put on because it was a cold February night. He said he walked out to the living room, saw the SWAT{ } team, and heard police yelling at him to come out. He said he turned around to go get his girlfriend but was shot. He said he doesn't remember anything after that rubber bullet him in the face.
And:
> Police say Dobbs was shot twice with two rubber rounds to prevent him from reentering the apartment. A Howard County Police Department spokesperson said Dobbs repeatedly refused to obey officer's commands, and also allegedly had his hand in his shirt, though police do not have video evidence of it. When asked, Dobbs denied having his hand in his shirt, and said he had nothing in his hands at all. The department said Dobbs was shot in the face as he was "falling forward," according to a written statement to 7 on Your Side.
[0] http://wjla.com/features/7-on-your-side/fbi-says-swatting-is...
> ...refused to obey...
Zero tolerance, zero patience.
It is actually not baffling. What is happening here is the symptom of an increasingly-authoritarian government which benefits from a trigger-happy, order-obeying-without-questioning-or-critical-thinking-abilities police force. That's why you see this and so much other egregious, unjustified, awful police brutality in America, but it is uncommon in Europe, Scandinavia and East Asia.
There's far too much of "do not have video evidence", coupled with far too many incidents where the official record is disproved by third-party video evidence.
Wow, this is disturbingly similar to Chicago's PD saying that the United victim "fell" and knocked himself unconscious!
http://wjla.com/features/7-on-your-side/fbi-says-swatting-is...
The police statement on the issue has additional detail that, if true, puts the victim in a slightly different light.
https://www.scribd.com/document/271698829/Howard-County-Poli...
My conclusion is that the guy had a small stash of pot and was panicking thinking they were there for that. So he was going around his apartment trying to hide it instead of coming out when directed. Police interpreted that as hostility and shot him. They claim the shot to the face was because the guy "fell into" a shot intended for the torso. I really don't know how they said that with a straight face.
The advice in the first link to call your local police if you think someone might try to SWAT you sounds very helpful.
In the face - not his legs or torso (Not that he should have been shot at all).
Oh this sort of thing happens all the time. Haven't you seen the documentary, The Matrix?
It is like when Gary Webb exposed a CIA drug running scheme. Died of 2 gunshot wounds to the head. The universe opens itself up to interesting probabilities when police accountability is on the line.
Seriously? Was he levitating when they busted in gun blazing?!
There really needs to be a complete overhaul of law enforcement training in the US, and the government needs to actually enforce the law against its own agents, too.
We can't overhaul law enforcement without overhauling American culture first.
These all seem like things that were lobbied for by police unions rather than the people electing the representatives enacting these policies.
I disagree. This has been used as a rationale for all sorts of nasty things, like replacing American culture with a globalist culture that's going to be even worse. In any case, no matter what the news may tell you, the American people did not want this.
The politicians saw an opportunity to get more power and money and took it. When both sides of a two party system see an opportunity to increase their power across every level of government (local, state, federal) they take it and the voters don't have much say in the matter. It's one of the biggest flaws of a two party system.
Would you please not post grandiose political/national rhetoric to HN? It's unsubstantive and evokes worse.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095966 and marked it off-topic.
Police shoot, mutilate and nearly kill man sleeping at home during hoax: outcome > citizen to blame
I'm sure I could go on for a while. The point is, are we not allowed to hold government accountable for illegitimate use of violence? Isn't that... a really big problem?
Of course the one giving the orders should take an even higher blame.
Yes you can. And I feel like we should. Just because you get an order to murder someone doesn't mean you then get to switch off your brain and be absolved of any guilt.
I suggest you have a listen to this video[1]. "Just following orders" is the cause of some of the biggest grief in the world, now and historically.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYR9qGVtBXQ
Perhaps their willingness to enact violence on behalf of the state should put the police under greater suspicion.
I guess you don't believe police are there to protect and serve which they are sworn to do. Not protect and serve random callers from other nations by the way!
There isn't any information in the article to judge whether the police response was appropriate. For example: was the victim acting suspiciously, or being violent and uncooperative during the incident? The notion that the police overreacted in this case is not a conclusion that is supported by any known facts.
The article also doesn't make the slightest attempt to examine the accusations of police incompetence that it presents, which further fuels the unwarranted sense of outrage.
Why wouldn't you have reason to ignore the warnings from people claiming to be "family" members in a hostage scenario, given they might be criminal accomplices?
Why is it bad to take reports of serious crime at face value, instead of assuming it might be a prank and risking a pattern of ignoring legitimate incidents in future?
Why would you take the expensive and time-consuming step of tracing phone calls before acting, when it risks wasting valuable time that would have saved lives in a real criminal incident?
There are incidents that demonstrate police incompetence and overreaction, or a failed law enforcement system, but this isn't one of them.
Having said that: 15 of the 17 top-level comments on this thread are explicitly critical of the police in this situation, so I don't know how you you're getting the impression that we aren't allowed to hold them accountable.
Of course, it's hard to judge without knowing the whole situation, but this all (military) approach of "shooting first, ask questions later" is not suitable for a local police imho.
Note that in this case it was multiple bullets not just one as SWAT shot the innocent guy multiple times. It is not just a 'oopsie, we pulled the trigger by mistake, our bad' kind of a situation on their part either.
Prank calls are a fact of life (and people doing them can be charged, provided they can even be tracked).
Sending a whole SWAT team for a prank call, and having it get to the point to shoot people without any actual threatening situation is unacceptable.
It's those responsible for ordering and carrying out the raid that deserve the harshest penalty.
Unfortunately this woman walking on the streets of Barcelona and passing by chance next to a manifestation didn't had the same luck. Policemen were found not guilty in 2016.
http://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/Absueltos-acusados-reventar...
Somebody that try to shoot you a rubber ball in the face 'by error' is not different to somebody that try to stab you in the face 'by error'.
There should be an unbelievable number of forms for these people to fill out before they can issue a raid. They should have to conduct prior investigations and find corroborating evidence of the original claim that requested the raid, etc. They should need multiple signatures from different levels of command. And heck, they should probably require a video recording of an officer walking up and knocking on the door at least once before moving in any troops.