Somebody didn’t pass along the message.

Communication is everything.

Well, no, it was just an educated guess.

9/11 operator has to pass along info to police dispatcher, who has to pass along info to units on the street. That’s a literal game of telephone where the most important info is what the situation is and where the situation is. Everything else would be at risk for information decay.

I’m not saying people weren’t at fault. People were totally at fault. I’m just saying how that failure ended up killing somebody.

I’m not a cop and don’t know the procedures but you think an easy fix to this, if it’s not already a thing is making sure the lead officer of the swat team is provided the 911 call prior to kicking in a door....

Well, depending on exactly how much time they have until they arrive, that may not be possible.

As far as I recall, SWAT units are basically gearing up as they ride to the destination. A lot like firefighters. They lounge around in their basic uniforms and have to spend the trip being briefed about the situation and prepping firehoses or guns and stuff. Listening to an entire 9/11 call eats up quite a bit of the trip that they might want to use looking at a GPS map or something (of the wrong house, in this case).

This wouldn’t have happened if the SWATer hadn’t said he was going to kill more people. That means every second is a potential death. If he’d just said he’d had a gun and hostages, SWAT would have been much more methodical.

This also wouldn’t have happened if cops weren’t fucking itching to shoot somebody, but that’s another debate entirely.

That’s good, but howstuffworks seems to be mostly talking about situations that naturally develop from situations not requiring SWAT. Not a hostage situation which would immediately necessitate deploying SWAT units.

Rapid-response special weapons and tactics units are installed in many major cities. They’re generally already at police headquarters; these are dedicated units who only deploy on specific missions.

In smaller municipalities, SWAT is drawn from regular officers, and that would necessitate they gather at HQ before deploying.

Well, yeah, cops got a real bad case of bloodlust. Some of them, anyway. Others are so pumped up about being a hero that they’re too focused on that to make good decisions.

They need better training. They need to be aware of SWATing. They need to model themselves after other police forces around the world. They need to drop the whole hero mentality.

Slashing funding might not be a good answer. I don’t know enough about the subject to say for sure. The Wire taught me that some police forces are just criminally underfunded.

That show took great pains to demonstrate reality through the lens of fictional characters. The writers were former cops and newspaper writers. At least one actor was an actual gang member.

I’ve since read actual books about the setting of the fiction, and gotten a pretty good idea about the reality of the situation.

So yeah, it’s fiction, but saying that was mostly just a quip, so don’t get any ideas about where I get my information about life.

It's hard to get rid of a hero mentality when you do something that saves a life on a regular basis

So we all have computers in our car. The computer displays the call. Everything the dispatcher types shows up on my computer in a running list with time stamps. Every thing that I say over the radio is logged. Everything said to an operator is logged and I see it.

That's how it was when I was a mp. We used the same system at ft hood that all the civilian departments in the area including the dps troopers used

I'd imagine it's the same or similar for them

The 911 operator is usually a dispatcher

I doubt the police would deliberately open themselves up to a lawsuit in a case like this. It seems more likely it's just another case of overzealous, roided up, overstimulated, trigger happy police itching to use their weapons for a story to tell at the bar.

They will be sued for sure. I just doubt that they purposely and willfully ignored the details of the call, or at least they have plausible deniability that they set out with the intention of killing a man.

Sounds like paid leave to me.

"should" the word we use when that is how it would be if all people were sane rational people with an IQ over 35, but know that everyone is a hairs width from failing in the most triumphant ways imaginable

I’m not a cop and don’t know the procedures but you think an easy fix to this, if it’s not already a thing is making sure the lead officer of the swat team is provided the 911 call prior to kicking in a door....

Well, yeah, cops got a real bad case of bloodlust. Some of them, anyway. Others are so pumped up about being a hero that they’re too focused on that to make good decisions.

They need better training. They need to be aware of SWATing. They need to model themselves after other police forces around the world. They need to drop the whole hero mentality.

Slashing funding might not be a good answer. I don’t know enough about the subject to say for sure. The Wire taught me that some police forces are just criminally underfunded.

The 911 operator is usually a dispatcher