Swatting

[NCA-Paendrag 2,758]

50 minutes ago, Sennex said:

All joking aside, most training silhouettes look like this

 

 

 

 

Ah, they haven't learned to hit anything other than body and head shots.

[Sennex 1,903]

21 minutes ago, NCA-Paendrag said:

 

From a non us citizen it seems the police is way to trigger happy.

 

From a US citizen standpoint, they seem that way as well. 

[NCA-Paendrag 2,758]

1 hour ago, Sennex said:

 

From a US citizen standpoint, they seem that way as well. 

That's actually good to hear

 

[J4MES OX4D 10,023]

16 hours ago, Sennex said:

 

Looks like a cross between something out of Lord of the Rings and someone that's on crack. 

[Sennex 1,903]

DAMN!

http://wtkr.com/2018/01/03/swatting-victims-mother-to-police-please-let-me-see-my-son/

 

‘Swatting’ victim’s mother to police: Please let me see my son

 

Nearly a week after police shot and killed a Kansas man while responding to a prank call, the victim’s mother pleaded with authorities to allow her to see her deceased son.

Lisa Finch wrote in a letter to the Wichita, Kansas, mayor and police chief that she doesn’t know where they’re keeping his body and that she wants to give her son “a proper funeral service and burial.”

She questioned “why Wichita City leadership is compounding our grief and sorrow, by keeping my son from us?”

“Please let me see my son’s lifeless body,” she wrote in a letter dated Tuesday. “I want to hold him and say goodbye. Please immediately return his body to us.”

Her son, Andrew Finch was killed by police last week in his home in a case of swatting. Swatting refers to when a person makes a false report to draw a major police response or SWAT teams to a certain location.

On Thursday, a hoax call was placed to the 911 center in Wichita, with a man saying he’d shot his father and was holding his mother, sister and brother hostage inside a house, authorities said.

Police went to the address they were given, and that’s where Andrew Finch, 28, was shot to death. Police said that the responding officer shot him because he moved his hands toward his waist. Finch was not armed.

A California man, Tyler Barriss, 25, was arrested Friday in connection with the incident after Wichita police issued a fugitive warrant. Police believe he may have placed the fake call. Barriss is expected to have a court hearing in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Barriss’ digital footprint suggests he was familiar with swatting, as a cached copy of his now-suspended Twitter account had multiple references to it. In 2015, he was arrested for calling in fake bomb threats to CNN affiliate KABC, according to Glendale Police. He received a two-year sentence.

A dispute over a video game, that didn’t involve Barriss and Finch, may have led to last week’s swatting call. Lisa Finch said her son didn’t even play video games, and the house where he lived didn’t match the alleged description in the hoax call to police.

Mother: We don’t know where his body is

Lisa Finch said the Wichita Police Department hasn’t been forthcoming with the family about her son’s death.

She listed eight questions for Wichita’s mayor Jeff Longwell and Police Chief Gordon Ramsay. They included why the officer who killed her son hadn’t been identified, why officers placed the family in handcuffs and interrogated them after police shot her son, and the whereabouts of her son’s body.

“When will our family be allowed to see Andy?” she wrote.

She also asked when the police would return their belongings, which include two cell phones and a computer, seized from the house and whether the local district attorney’s office was looking into criminal charges against the officer who shot her son.

Wichita Police Department has said it will not be releasing any comments other than what is released in press conferences or via its social outlets.

Finch had told CNN earlier this week that the police reached out to her for the first time on Sunday when Ramsay visited her and offered condolences.

“He said this should not have happened,” Finch had said.

The officer who opened fire “should be held liable and held accountable for the unjustified shooting of Andrew Finch,” the family’s attorney Andrew M. Stroth told CNN on Tuesday.

“The city of Wichita and the Police Department are liable because of their policies and practices as it relates to this shooting. Swatting is not new, just like prank calling is not new,” Stroth said.

[GazzaGarratt 11,035]

That's disgusting. They need to contain the shitshow before they keep making even more horrible mistakes.

[McNasty 260]

On 12/30/2017 at 1:29 PM, NCA-Paendrag said:

Why can't US police shoot at legs or arms. Instead of killing people they just neutralize them?

 

There's no such thing as shoot to injure.  It isn't taught anywhere.  If you make the decision to shoot, then you've made the decision that your life is threatened.  Your goal is to stop the other person completely and as quickly as possible.  If you shoot them in the leg, they can still shoot back.  The shooting isn't the problem, it's the decision to shoot.

[NCA-Paendrag 2,758]

19 minutes ago, McNasty said:

There's no such thing as shoot to injure.  It isn't taught anywhere.  If you make the decision to shoot, then you've made the decision that your life is threatened.  Your goal is to stop the other person completely and as quickly as possible.  If you shoot them in the leg, they can still shoot back.  The shooting isn't the problem, it's the decision to shoot.

And that's the problem.

If you shoot a guy in the leg, he'll go down. If he pulls out a gun after that you do the follow up shot.

If he don't have a gun, you haven't murdered anyone. Everyone wins. Besides muricans love for law suits that is.

[Sennex 1,903]

39 minutes ago, NCA-Paendrag said:

And that's the problem.

If you shoot a guy in the leg, he'll go down. If he pulls out a gun after that you do the follow up shot.

If he don't have a gun, you haven't murdered anyone. Everyone wins. Besides muricans love for law suits that is.

 

Back when I was still a member of the NRA, one of the things they always pointed out was that if you get sued for shooting someone in self defense, you need to aim to kill as the amount you would pay out is lower than if you were to injure them and permanently disable them.

 

I was a pretty hardcore Republican so it made sense to me at the time. Sadly it still makes sense to me

[NCA-Paendrag 2,758]

1 hour ago, Sennex said:

 

Back when I was still a member of the NRA, one of the things they always pointed out was that if you get sued for shooting someone in self defense, you need to aim to kill as the amount you would pay out is lower than if you were to injure them and permanently disable them.

 

I was a pretty hardcore Republican so it made sense to me at the time. Sadly it still makes sense to me

Not surprised to hear that, and that' just fucked up.

It makes sense to me from the shooters pov, but the system is totally screwed.

Money gets more important than human lives.

[Sennex 1,903]

Not a fan of Salon.com typically, but I thought this op-ed was solid.

 

https://www.salon.com/2018/01/06/swatting-didnt-kill-a-man-police-did/

 

“Swatting” didn’t kill a man, police did

Police accountability needs to be a part of the conversation in the shooting of an innocent man after a prank call

 

Andrew Finch, a 28-year-old father of two, was shot and killed after walking out of his front door. The police officer who fired the weapon was part of a SWAT team called out to what they believed was a violent situation that involved a shooting and kidnapping. It turns out the emergency call to authorities was just a hoax, and Finch an innocent victim.

 

The story has been covered widely since it happened on Dec. 28 in Wichita, Kansas. The suspected prankster has been arrested, his criminal background repeatedly cited, and one headline after another has branded “swatting” as a deadly prank. “Swatting” is when someone calls emergency services anonymously to report a fake situation with the intention of getting a SWAT team or large police presence to respond to the address given.

 

But is it the “swatting” that’s deadly, or the police officer who pulled the trigger?

 

“There’s a reason why swatting is such an effective tactic,” said Kade Crockford from the ACLU of Massachusetts in an interview last week for “Salon Now.” “It’s because police departments across the country have largely, in the dark, militarized to the extent that they are really hair-trigger ready to be deployed by a malicious actor like this in a prank that unfortunately, in Kansas, ended in someone’s death."

 

SWAT teams are primarily used in the war on drugs, often in lower income and minority communities. An ACLU study from 2014 found that 80 percent of the raids they analyzed were carried out to execute a search warrant. The allegedly violent incident that police were responding to and the amount of media attention paid to the raid in Kansas makes it an outlier.

 

“This is obviously a very highly publicized SWAT raid that ended very badly. SWAT raids end badly all the time in the United States,” said Crockford.

 

Watch the full interview with Crockford in the video below to hear more about the ACLU's findings

 

The government doesn’t keep across-the-board statistics on SWAT raids, but a New York Times investigation found that at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in raids of this kind from 2010 through 2016, with many others maimed or wounded.

 

“We really have to look at police department policies and procedures with respect to what happens after those SWAT teams are deployed,” said Crockford. “We have to ask, as a society, what are we doing or not doing at a systemic level that enables these kinds of mistakes to take place.”

 

Despite a renewed national focus on excessive police force, thanks in large part to the Black Lives Matter movement, courts have shown that the law usually sides with the officers involved if they believed their lives were in danger.

 

Radley Balko has written extensively about police militarization and no-knock raids. In his latest article at the Washington Post about the Kansas incident, he wrote about the conditioning of police to believe they are increasingly under attack, despite statistics showing the opposite to be true. “It puts lives at unnecessary risk. It increases the chances that a police officer will see an innocent gesture as a furtive one,” wrote Balko.

 

As much as “swatting” is a waste of public resources and an atrocious prank that deserves attention, it’s irresponsible and disingenuous to leave police accountabilityout of the conversation about the case in Kansas.

[The3rdWalker 1,269]

I hope they find these fuckers and jail them forever
 
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/unarmed-kan-man-killed-cops-victim-swatting-prank-article-1.3726171
 
An unarmed Kansas man shot to death by police earlier this week might have been the victim of a misdirected online gaming prank known as "swatting," authorities said Friday. 
 
The victim, identified as Andrew Finch, was gunned down on Thursday night after cops received a disturbing 911 call from a man who claimed he had shot his father and was holding his mother and younger brother hostage. 
 
"I shot him in the head and he's not breathing anymore," the caller said, according to a recording released by the Wichita Police Department. 
The caller then added, "I might just pour gasoline all over the house, I might just set it on fire."  
 
But investigators say the disturbing tale was made up by a "prankster" who carried out a "swatting" hoax to get a SWAT team to descend on an address. As it turned out, the caller gave cops Finch's address, reportedly believing it belonged to a person he had gotten into a heated argument with over a $1 or $2 "Call of Duty" wager.    
 
"Due to the actions of a prankster we have an innocent victim," Wichita deputy police chief Troy Livingston said during a press conference Friday night. 
Cops rushed to Finch's house after the unnerving phone call, expecting an ongoing hostage situation. Instead, an unarmed and unsuspecting Finch came to the front door. 
 
Officers screamed at Finch to put his hands in the air, but Livingston said the 28-year-old moved a hand toward his waistband. An officer, fearing Finch was reaching for a gun, fired a single shot. Finch died minutes later. 
 
The “swatting” suspect has not been identified and cops said no arrests had been made as of Friday night.
 
A series of Twitter posts screenshotted by the Wichita Eagle suggests that cops responded to Finch’s house after the targeted “Call of Duty” gamer gave the hoax caller a fake address. 
 
“Someone tried to swat me and got an innocent man killed,” a since-deleted tweet from the gamer reads.
 
The gamer who supposedly made the call that led to Finch's death later tweeted: "I DIDNT GET ANYONE KILLED BECAUSE I DIDNT DISCHARGE A WEAPON AND BEING A SWAT MEMBER ISNT MY PROFESSION."
 
The potentially devastating prank method has gained particular traction among gaming communities in recent years and the FBI estimates that some 400 cases occur annually. But Thursday's tragic hoax might be the first time anyone has been killed as a consequence. 
 
Finch's devastated mother, Lisa Finch, told reporters that her son wasn't a gamer and didn't own any guns. 
 
"What gives cops the right to open fire?" she asked. "That cop murdered my son over a false report in the first place."  
 
The officer who fired the fatal shot is a seven-year veteran with the Wichita department. He has been placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation.

http://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/22063038/tyler-barriss-charged-manslaughter-fatal-swatting-incident

Manslaughter, reporting a false alarm and interfering with a LEO.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Sennex 1,903]

Manslaughter makes sense. I hate it, but it makes sense.