There was recently some articles about the phenomenon in the Finnish Helsinki Times, but they say it mainly happens in the USA "due to the agressive operating culture of the countrys police"[1]. Apparently the people calling the swat strike may be from other countries.
I don't know if you can entirely blame the police. These scenarios are sort of a product of their environment: guns are very available in the US and there's no room to make assumptions about emergency calls. Police are forced to respond like its a real scenario - almost like a low level DDoS attack. Makes you wonder what these SWATers are saying to police.
Guns were very available to civilians in the US before we started giving the police military hardware, before we escalated paramilitary tactics from a few dozen teams around the country to every single department, before the no-knock warrant and the guns-drawn entry and the highest incarceration rate in the world.
This stuff doesn't have to be the standard. This is a fad borne of the fact that most people who are SWATed find boots on their necks and cuffs on their wrists before they're capable of explaining themselves. If they're lucky.
Here's an example of a women with a knife making threats to kill people and ignoring police instruction where those police are clearly armed and prepared to kill.
She was pregnant; the knife was a three inch blade; the police had less-lethal options available but chose not to use them; police did not just have their pistols - one of them had an AR15 rifle.
There were things the police could have done that would have avoided the death of the woman (and the risk of death or injury to bystanders). (I'm not talking about shoot to wound - I know enough to know that's misguided). The police could have used their tasers. They should have been given better training in de-escalation.
My understanding of this situation from following on Twitter is that they claimed to be at her location, armed, with a hostage, asking for ransom.
I'm doing my best to spare the diatribe about how the Oakland Police Department is essentially the worst police department in the US.
Let's just take a step back. In what world does someone who wants a ransom for a hostage call the police? This isn't something that happens, except in action movies. The entire narrative, including the police reaction, is straight out of a sophomore film student's twisted imagination.
The police, esp in the US, but in general, aren't designed to protect and serve, they're designed to eliminate threats to power. Right now Oakland has a new mayor who wants to make sure voters see that she is tough on crime.
This situation is an unfortunate collision of two worlds that know very little about each other. :/
Surely we have to blame the police a little. (Procedures I mean, not individuals.) I mean, it's true that every anonymous call is a potential life-and-death situation, but it's equally true that every call is a potential prank.
To put it in a fire department metaphor, if someone anonymously calls in a fire, naturally you send out the trucks. But you need to check for smoke before you turn the hose on, right?
Why procedures and not individuals? Procedures don't emerge out of the ether, they are written, reviewed, approved, and implemented by individuals. If individuals aren't responsible, there is no accountability.
I'm finnish and I was really wondering how this could be happening in Finland as our police is not exactly known for swat style raids.
So FYI for other people nor unerstanding finnish: This is about some finns (probably teens) calling police to some address in another country, not police raiding homes swat style in Finland.
I can confirm that most indications we've been able to gather point at SWAT threats coming in over Skype and google voice. Location is harder to pinpoint. Many do appear to come from overseas.
I was wondering this recently. It's hard to imagine this happening here in the UK. The thought of police in riot gear kicking down doors and waving guns around sounds beyond crazy to me.
American police kill about 1,000 people per year. There's a thing going round saying that US police in March killed more people than UK police killed since 1900 but none of the sources look particularly reliable.
Several bad shootings over decades? What's your point? What a strange thing to say.
We don't shoot many people, America do. It's such a huge, cavernous gulf in magnitude that I have no idea what point you're trying to make with your last paragraph.
I'm saying that it's wrong to think that armed police officers do better than armed US officers. We mostly don't have armed officers over here. Where they are armed mistakes happen and people die, so it's important to keep UK officers unarmed.
Also: yes, even those few deaths are totally unacceptable in the UK. People are shocked by police shootings; investigations are rigorous. Contrast that to the US where shootin a dog sparks mass outrage but shooting a drunk pregnant woman doesn't.
No knock entries are indeed insane - I don't understand the scenario that would be required for a no-knock entry to be the only acceptable option. Are the police scared of the occupants firing guns at them? That would be ironic.
For one, you could detect these no-knocking individuals quite easily:
- Cameras on the exterior of the property
- Motion lights, motion sensors, motion bells are all quite cheap.
And re: destruction/obfuscation of electronic evidence-
-"One-click" destruction scripts, etc.
- TrueCrypt volumes, everywhere. Circuit breakers, power strips, etc. with switches. If you don't manage to destroy the volume, no aggressor will be able to access it.
- Degaussing setups for spinning disks, activated by similar mechanisms.
This stuff is pretty cheap, easily available. Anybody caught by these technically-incompetent police executing no-knock raids deserves to be caught.
Hell, if you don't have a few 6TB volumes full of random bits, labeled "Evidence," you aren't doing it right. Gotta tie up those investigative resources somehow.
Which would be exactly what's not happening if "a guy has a gun".
Either someone is in danger, in which case no-knock isn't needed, or they're not, in which case why the hell is a SWAT raid being carried out on the basis of an anonymous tip?
