Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

It should really not be possible for a single anonymous phone call to dispatch a heavily armed response team to break down someone's door.

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.

It wouldn't be a problem, if the "heavily armed response team" was properly held to account when they killed innocent people.

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

While the acab is kind of rough, I'm absolutely with you on police accountability.

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.

> The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time.

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.

Danger =/= high stress/pressure situations

But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves.

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.

> But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves.

This is conjecture with no measurable basis.

....It is supported by specific facts in the rest of my post.

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.