How Swatting Turns Police Into Hitmen
Andrew Finch’s death shows how easily pranksters can sic the police on their adversaries like a pack of trained attack dogs
On December 28, 2017, a man named Andrew Finch was killed by police in Wichita, Kansas. Earlier that day, a bet between two men over a Call of Duty game had gone sour, with one, Casey Viner, threatening to swat the other (that is to say, send the police to his home by making a false accusation against him). The other man, Shane Gaskill, gave his former address in Wichita and reportedly said, “Bring it.” The address was to Finch’s house.
Finch did not know either of these men and was not known to be a gamer, much less participate in any bets over Call of Duty matches. But Gaskill had supplied his address to a homeless man named Tyler Barriss, who apparently made swatting calls for money. Using VoIP, or Voice over IP, through the free wifi at a local library in Los Angeles, Barriss called Wichita City Hall from hundreds of miles away, falsely claiming he was at Finch’s residence. Barriss lied to authorities and said he had shot his father, was holding several family members at gunpoint, and was planning to set the house on fire. Police soon had Finch’s home surrounded.
Andrew Finch’s mother, Lisa, reported that he heard a noise outside and went to the front door to investigate. At that point, the police apparently ordered him to put his hands up, which he did, but then seemed to lower them a bit. From across the street, officer Justin Rapp fired a single round, which pierced Finch’s heart and right lung. Finch, 28, and a father of two, was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead shortly after. His family, meanwhile, was ordered out of the house, handcuffed, and taken to the police station for questioning.
Swatting wouldn’t work if police officers weren’t so amazingly, profoundly trigger-happy.
Federal charges were filed against all three of the men involved in the orchestration of the swatting — Barriss, Gaskill, and Viner. Barriss received a 20-year prison sentence. Viner pled guilty to charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice, and received a 15-month sentence and two years’ probation. Gaskill, who originally supplied Finch’s address, was charged as a co-conspirator but struck a deal for deferred prosecution that could allow the charges to be dropped.
No charges were filed against any police officer for Finch’s death.
Finch’s 18-year-old niece, Adelina, who had lived with him since 2002 and witnessed his death, died by suicide in March of this year. Finch’s mother Lisa was quoted as saying “I scream internally every second of every single day and it’s never going to stop.” The Finch family is now suing the City of Wichita for $25 million in damages for Andrew Finch’s death and their pain and suffering.
Finch’s family deserves that money.
We don’t want to adopt a policy that gives people the power to go after their adversaries by “siccing” the police on them like a trained attack dog. Swatting makes it so that if a person wants someone dead, all they have to do is call up the police and make a false claim against them. Police officers are human beings with human abilities, empathy, and critical thinking — they should be expected to exercise those abilities. But if a simple accusation is all that is required to militarize the police, then we should scrap police entirely in favor of enforcement droids such as ED-209 from the movie Robocop.
Imagine spending a quiet evening at home with your family, as Andrew Finch was that night. You hear a noise outside, and go out onto the porch to investigate. Immediately you hear a bunch of voices yelling at you. There are bright lights, probably some of them blinding you, and you have no earthly idea what is going on. The voices are yelling over each other, and it’s difficult to understand what they’re saying. You’re probably hoping it’s the police, because you didn’t do anything wrong and the police wouldn’t shoot you for the heck of it, would they?
Would they?
Something has got to be catastrophically wrong, but you don’t know what. You put your hands up over your head, but then... something causes you to lower them again.
Maybe it sounded like one of the yelling voices was telling you to.
Maybe it sounded like they were asking you to get on the ground, so you were moving in that direction.
Maybe, for that matter, you have one or more of any number of conditions that make it difficult to hear and/or promptly follow verbal instructions. Maybe you’re deaf. Maybe you’re autistic.
Maybe, facing this cacophony of confusing sounds and sights, you get lightheaded and confused.
Maybe you lose your balance.
You lower your arms. A bullet rips into your chest. You scream loudly enough that your mother hears you from inside the house, and then you fall down. Shortly thereafter, you die.
You lost a fatal, impromptu game of Simon Says, and this is the consequence.
Over the next couple of years, not only does the man who killed you suffer no repercussions for it, not only is your family harassed, but people have the nerve to say that you deserved to die because of your failure to obey police instructions.
You lost a fatal, impromptu game of Simon Says, and this is the consequence. Oh well, some might say, swatting is bad, let’s put those swatters in jail for a very long time, but it’s not the fault of the police officer who shot you because after all, you did drop your arms.
This is not an apportionment of responsibility that our society can sustain. No person should be entrusted with the task of protecting and serving a community who treats an accusation over the phone as sufficient evidence to treat someone as if they’re some kind of supernatural-level threat to justify killing them — from across the street — if it looks like they lowered their arms when they weren’t supposed to.
People seem baffled by the notion that swatting even exists because of the absurdity of its intent — using the police to murder or harass someone because you got angry at them over the internet? Seriously? Yet those same critics often fail to consider one crucial idea: Swatting wouldn’t work if police officers weren’t so amazingly, profoundly trigger-happy.
If those officers exercised a tiny degree of critical thinking, they might reconsider their assumptions about this baffled man who stood on his porch, blinking in the lights and shivering in the December cold, before they put a bullet into his heart.
This is how swatting works. It shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t work at all.
