I am not sure the unions are as local.
Deterrence/imprisonment debate aside, one good thing about these arrests is it lets people know that they are not untraceable. These idiots think it’s a perfect crime but awareness that it’s not will spread.
That’s fair, but I’m also not sure the unions are voting for the GOP. Please correct me if I’m wrong because maybe police unions are the exception, but the vast majority of public sector unions are strongly Democrat-leaning.
Trump had the backing of a big one. I don’t really know how many there are though.
I’d be surprised if the percentage of police officers in the NRA isn’t much much higher than any other profession, which naturally leads them to be much more Republican-leaning.
I have most of P&R muted so it’s always an amusing surprise to remember there are a lot of people who blame every major problem on the Republican Party. Heh.
I think this thread has run its course for me. I hope some bureaucrat is coming up with a plan to mitigate this risk! I’d laugh if people weren’t dying.
This should probably go into P&R here pretty soon (and I’m at least part of why it’s veering there) so I’ll just say that while there is definitely a strain of the GOP who are strongly cops-first there is also a strain who are very opposed to police militarization. I think there could be a very interesting common cause to be found between left and right on the issue, if both sides could stop attacking each other long enough to do it.
Whatever floats your boat.
The the swatter is not puling the trigger. That’s a fact. It is also a fact that it’s almost impossible to talk about the person who is pulling the trigger… well this is where it leads to because it can’t be talked about for reasons like you just showed.
Police militarization isn’t really the problem here; cops are always going to have handguns. The problem is they aren’t trained to handle swattings, they’re a recent problem, and most of them don’t even know they’re a thing. This is a police training issue.
Putting asshole kids in prison won’t solve anything, it does not act as a deterrent, although I agree they should be severe consequences.
I disagree with this. If for no other reason then we need to reduce the prevalence of swatting so that cops are free to respond to real emergencies, even if proper training substantially reduced or even eliminates tragedies from swatting. Someone above noted that kids think that they’re untraceable when they do this. I agree with this. Most mistakenly think there is zero risk. Most of these kids don’t have the mentality of, say, a street racer or joyrider who knows there is a risk of getting caught but do it anyways.
High profile convictions can have an impact, eventually. Hell, it’s up to the streaming sites to do public service announcements to eeucate their audience that this can, and has, led to jail time.
I’m using “police militarization” as unexplained shorthand for both the increase in tactical SWAT gear and the current training strategy that officer safety is paramount and the appropriate way to keep control of a scene is escalating aggressive authority.
It’s a police training issue, sure, but the training needs to be that shooting some guy on his front porch because he doesn’t follow multiple contradictory orders instantly ends in a murder trial. That’s… Not how it is in America right now.
That’s not really about swatting. The police should be able to enter a home and assess the situation without slaughtering someone. Prank phone calls is not a new thing at all. Having a motivation for someone to do it across country is, and it might be more frequent but any claim that the police were not knowingly sent to a home with wrong information in the past is just not true; we just get it on camera more often now and it makes the national news’ meanwhile some asshole kid, almost always a young man, is online laughing about it.
This statement fills me with sadness and rage at the same time. What a brave new world we live in.
Swatting is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s always been possible, it just wasn’t widespread before.
Swatting is more fun for the swatter because they can see it happening live. With the prevalence of streaming these days, it seems it was inevitable that shitheads would ramp it up.
Prank phone calls to the police, trying to get the police to mess someone up, is not.
Correct, it wasn’t widespread until recently.
Thinking about that, seems like I remember (relatively harmless) prank calling being a big thing in the 80s, but then it died it as people got called ID. My elementary school got regular bomb threats when kids didn’t want to go… Until the county got a caller ID system and then it stopped in a hurry.
Until recently, I don’t think it was actually easy to spoof your number? Now we’re basically back to pre-caller ID days with a police force that responds a lot more heavily and the ability for swatters to see the results of their call online. It’s a bad combination.
It’s the police chief that tends to be overseen by local government. The police themselves are union employees. And Repubs have chosen this one union as the one they want to bless and not attempt to strip power from.
The union isn’t some supranational organization that can ignore the law. Police behave as they are trained to and encouraged to and allowed to by the local governments they report to.
Trying to blame the police force in Baltimore or Saint Louis (for example) on Republicans is utterly ridiculous. Republicans haven’t been in power there since the 1940s. Police militarization and lack of accountability is allowed by both Democrats and Republicans. Trying to turn it into partisan point scoring just ensures it’ll never be solved.