Aside from that, people who do so are despicable. 20 years is a light sentence. Taking money to put people in situations that could easily become deadly.
Cops kill people on the basis of ludicrous anonymous phone call because they know they'll get away with it when it turns out to be false.
And they like it that way.
There needs to be a few very public cases of entire SWAT teams getting 20 year sentences.
ACAB
If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time. Training only goes so far. After that, you're investigating mistakes versus violent intent.
I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
You’re right, but it is a problem and people who choose to abuse that fact deserve to have the book thrown at them.
In the US, police officer does not even rise to top 10 most dangerous jobs. Groundskeeper is a more dangerous job than being a cop.
The lack of training and toxic culture of policing is far more dangerous to cops than criminals are. The average US citizen simply does not, and should not, trust the average cop.
Swatting victimizes the police as well, they’re responding to a potential hostage situation and do not have the benefit of hindsight. I guarantee these officers are horrified that the man was innocent and frustrated that they were put in this situation.
I encourage everyone who is adamantly “ACAB” to go on a ride along- contact your local department. At best, you get first hand experience to justify your beliefs and can virtue signal even more to your friends. Or you may be able to humanize the police.
> If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
To be clear, your 2nd statement is why ACAB. The police are the people fighting against the open & honest accountability you are asking for. When accountability comes up, they refuse to do their jobs[1], inflate crime numbers & incident severity[2], harass the few cops trying to improve accountability until they quit[3], and actively campaign against accountability[4].
If some cops are bastards, and people who shield those bastards from accountability are also bastards, then all cops are bastards. ACAB is not rough, it exactly describes the situation.
[1] https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...
[2] https://minnesotareformer.com/2020/12/15/the-bad-cops-how-mi...
[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/only-minneapolis-...
[4] https://apnews.com/article/elections-police-minneapolis-a1ce...
The kid should be punished, yes, but a quarter of his lifespan is not exactly a light sentence.
Police mostly act as professional witnesses taking reports and engage in revenue generating law enforcement.
The most high pressure situations they deal with with any regularity involve mediating domestic disputes or wrestling angry drunks.
Police absolutely are not dealing with violent criminals on the daily. And when they do go out of their way to deal with people who many become violent they show up with the kind numerical advantage that would make Stalin proud.
Your average beat cop probably un-holsters their handgun once a month to once a year depending on where and when they patrol. These high stress high stakes split second judgement call situations are not a daily or weekly thing.
>I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
They do accept this and did for decades. The only reason it's no longer being blanked accepted is because the modern media landscape makes it much harder to hide the fact that a huge fraction of these "honest mistakes" were in fact not so honest and not so mistaken.
Basically nobody has a problem with honest mistakes by themselves. What people have a problem with is thug behavior. Spending decades classifying various degrees of thug behavior as honest mistakes is why nobody wants to tolerate honest mistakes.
Which is really impressive for how much time cops spend standing on the side of highways.
Both issues need to be addressed and addressing one doesn’t relate to the other.
This kid shouldn’t get off easy just because his crime shouldn’t be possible. It is possible, and he chose to do it. Most people are good and choose not to do it.
How many cops do you know? They might say they're horrified to the media, but that's not how they operate when no one's watching. There's a reason these SWATting events keep happening: cops enjoy them just as much as the SWATters do. They get to bust out their fun military surplus toys and do their SEAL Team 6 cosplay. If they wanted to stop these SWATting events, they would have found a solution by now.
Check out these highlights (lowlights?) from the Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department:
https://racketmn.com/human-rights-report-mpd-needs-major-ove...
These are not people known for nuance or remorse.
Link to the full investigation report:
https://mn.gov/mdhr/assets/Investigation%20into%20the%20City...
They have to enforce unjust laws and unjust outcomes, and statistically do so more heavily across minority populations.
The institution requires them to be bastards, ACAB is a statement about the institution of police and the people who elect to join that institution.
For instance, several officers have been treated for severe symptoms after coming into contact with fentanyl. Except that there is no way, biochemically speaking, the kind of contact they had with fentanyl could have produced anything resembling those symptoms. It was an entirely psychosomatic reaction, brought on by the police's own utterly false propaganda about how terrifyingly dangerous fentanyl is.
Similarly, so much of their "high stress" is because they expect to be attacked/shot/killed at any given moment even when, by any reasonable analysis, they are 100% safe. Furthermore, a lot of the actual danger to them is manufactured by this exact phenomenon: they expect a physical confrontation, so, in order to ensure they "win" it, they create it, striking preemptively in one fashion or another.
Here is a reference for 3 events in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...).
At least try to be persuasive. There are a myriad of ways that jobs can be stressful without endangering your life, that should not be difficult for you to imagine. Shift work, demands for quotas and metrics (sales people can tell you this), dealing with violent and erratic individuals in the public with sometimes insufficient support, etc.
Correctional Officers face similar circumstances and have a life expectancy of 58-59 years old. High divorce rate too, but people want to content themselves with the truism that "only bad people work these jobs", with no consideration for environmental effects. The divorce rate is higher among medical assistants and some skilled trades, for reasons that can just as easily apply: long hours, on-call, fatigue, etc.
> it would be mitigated by better training and careful psychological filtering.
Only on the conceit that any and all stress is imposed by lack of training and bad psychology.
The problems with American policing aren't merely that the cops have to enforce the law.
It's the qualified immunity, the get-out-of-jail-free cards for their buddies, and the dog shootings.
If the police never shot the wrong guy, always replaced your door after breaking it down, and were polite and apologetic when a mistake was made - people in this thread wouldn't be equating swatting with attempted murder.
I'll grant I didn't cite sources, because this is HN, not a scientific journal, and if you're interested enough you can Google it (or DDG it, or Kagi it) for yourself, but the basis really is right there in my post.
That US 6 month number excludes field training (typically 1 year) whereas the 2-3 year German number includes it (6 months I believe).
This largely stems from a difference in how academies work. In many countries, field training is required to graduate. In the US, field training is required after you graduate in order to get a permanent job. This skews the total training time numbers.
That said, American police are still undertrained by comparison.
Not only do I have zero interest in speaking with SWAT team members, I have very real reasons why I choose wherever possible to not talk to any cops at all.
The fact that you "know a few" SWAT team members immediately makes me strongly suspicious that you are part of the problem, perhaps not directly corrupt yourself, but very likely to be complicit in hiding the misbehaviour of police you know who are corrupt.
ACAB