“Swatting” is when you call the SWAT team on someone as a revenge prank. I have no idea how it started or why it’s a thing but it usually stems from online gaming feuds.
Feud over CoD happened and one person gave the address of a random man as his address and the other person called in a fake story about someone being murdered and held hostage.
The guy who called in the fake swat report is probably on the hook for manslaughter, because if someone dies as a result of you committing a felony, but you didn’t intend to kill them, that’s manslaughter.
I hope they lock up the cop for forever, though. We don’t need to hear another lame story about how the poor little cop was so scared he pulled out his weapon and shot an unarmed person. The rule now seems to be if the cop says he was afraid he gets away with murdering people; that rule needs to change, and soon.
He was ordered by police to keep his hands up. He lowered them to his waist. Put yourself in the place of the officer. The OP’s “quote” leaves out a crucial detail.
He could have been deaf. He could have been not English-speaking. He could have just been slow to realize what’s going on. Who expects the police to try and arrest you when you are in your own house? How did lowering hands to your waist become synonymous with trying to pull a gun? Could they have checked that the call originated from the house, anyway? But why bother, life is cheap and policemen are always right.
I hope that police aren’t trained to start shooting as soon as someone lowers their hands and no weapon is visible. And while that person is standing alone and many police officers are on scene to provide each other support.
I do know that of all the police on the scene, only one guy fired his gun. So in fact there were other cops in that cop’s shoes, and they didn’t fire their weapons.
The problem is that the police, based on the false call stating that the caller had already shot someone and was holding others in the house at the named address hostage, were expecting an armed and dangerous suspect (who spoke English and was not deaf, based on the false call). Whether or not the shooting was inappropriately trigger-happy, it is not hard to see why a police officer would be more prone to pull the trigger in this situation than in many others. It was also at night, so observations (like whether someone was holding a gun) are more likely to be erroneous.
Eventually, they seemed to find the actual source of the false call. It is not clear how quickly the actual source of a false call can be determined if the false call is made with some sort of caller ID spoofing.
Looks like the officers on the east side that Finch was facing did not fire, but an officer on the north side whom Finch was not facing was the one who fired, supposedly believing that Finch had pulled a gun an pointed it as the officers on the east side. I.e. the supposedly threatened officers on the east side did not feel threatened enough to fire, but a different officer did fire.
That account makes it sound like he shouldn’t have raised his hands then, because they thought that was threatening. Then again, had he not raised his hands, it would have been threatening. So he was going to have a very high chance of being shot no matter what he did.
This is a gross exaggeration. You are convicting the cop based on a few news reports. Your mistrust of police may be based on your personal experience but it is not right to extrapolate it to all police situations.
I can’t bring myself to watch the video so someone else can do that.
I’m more scared of these by the day, even knowing the statistical odds of being shot.
I physically cannot hold my hands over my head or hold them up for longer than 20-30 seconds. Down on the ground, I physically cannot put my hands behind my back. Apparently, to too many cops, this is worthy of my death.
Tragic, and pointless. I would be furious if I was the man’s family, and would want both the cop, and especially, the “prankster”, put away for a long time.
Another case of a trigger happy, undertrained cop? Still trying to reconcile the Justine Damond shooting here with anything resembling "serving and protecting".
@ucbalumnus it does sound like he tried but had trouble holding his hands up for more than a short time. I understand officers were expecting an armed man, but 400 cases of swatting a year is not a small number, they should have been prepared for this possibility also.
No, I doubt that he was “trigger happy”, more likely he was unsuited for high pressure situations and making good decisions. Unfortunately, having been in combat, you really have no idea who will be calm, cool, and collected and who will not be. While the police academies probably have psychological testing it really needs to be beefed up if they are going to do a better job trying to prevent this from happening.