Swatting is downstream of a culture that allows police to respond to every situation with maximum force and excuses every trigger-happy panic shooting. If you don't discipline cops who don't treat their jobs with the patience and care armed response requires, this is what you get.
Very long NYT op-ed on swatting that does not reckon with the idea that maybe "anonymous callers can dispatch gullible policemen to assassinate you based on lies" is the problem. Instead:
it's actually great and normal that all our political, governing, and news media institutions treat the police as dangerous predatory wild animals who must also be allowed to follow their instincts
Cops are increasingly framed like wild tigers that roam our streets, except even then you'd have people demanding animal control step in and do something. This is like "we've tried nothing and we're out of ideas: people being murdered in the streets by tigers is just a way of life now".
one of my favorite jokes from Mike Birbiglia: "I used to think the thing I was most scared of in the world was bears, but now I think it's cops. Because at least if you get killed by a bear people will be mad *at the bear*"
'Look, wild tigers don't just attack anyone. Their instincts are triggered by guilt pheromones. That guy he mauled must have been doing *something* wrong even if it looked like he was carrying groceries home from the corner store. Law enforcement red in tooth & claw.'
'The problem is we don't have enough tigers and the tigers who maul the most people often get punished and disrespected by getting several weeks vacation with all they can eat meat. My bill would put 10 more tigers on the streets in every city.'
There's a comic series called Maniac of New York where the whole premise is there's a slasher who just shows up at times in NYC and goes on a killing rampage and nobody can be bothered to do the work to actually stop him. Being put on the case is considered a career-dead end. I see parallels...
Some people have looked at me as crazy for suggesting that calling cops for non-violent altercations is always a bad idea. Sure, let's invite an armed person to defuse a conflict, that could never turn out poorly.
They are literally trained to meet any opposition with one step higher. As said professional escalators. If you talk back, they yell. If you ball your fist, they tase. Then they wonder why things get out hand.
I’m honestly shocked that there isn’t more desire on the part of cops to phase out these no-knock SWAT raids, considering how often cops themselves get shot during them
They don't get blamed for one of them getting shot. It's all blamed on the victim as "occuring during the comission of the crime" so whoever we say is the criminal is at fault.
"We" must be middle-class whites adults.
No one else is safe in US.
UK pop is 70m, less than 700 homicides a year.
USA is 340m (5x), 18,000 homicides.
10 children a day killed by guns in USA. Maybe 10 in a year here.
Shot to death by police: USA over 1000 per year UK less than 4 per year.
And there's just no reckoning with it, everyone with power just asks Police are death squads now and, at best, condemns people for unleashing the death squads based on false premises.
