Wichita, Kansas — This week a 28-year-old man was shot dead in his doorway by police after a SWAT team was sent to his house on a false report by a disgruntled gamer. While the full details are still unclear and police have not made any official announcements, it has been widely reported that this is likely the result of a “Swatting” prank that started over a video game.
“Swatting” is when an extreme false report is made about someone, usually involving murder or hostages, which causes a SWAT team to raid the individuals home, putting them in serious danger. It is estimated that over 400 swatting incidences occur in the US each year, and many of them stem from online feuds and video games.
However, while the victim, Andrew Finch, was not involved in the game himself, his address was given out during an argument in an online Call of Duty match between two other people.
Deputy Wichita Police Chief Troy Livingston told reporters on Thursday night that his department received a report that a person at that address was holding an entire family hostage after killing the father.
“It was a shooting call involving hostages. The original call, we were told someone had an argument with their mother and dad was accidentally shot, and now that person was holding mother, brother and sister hostage. We learned through that call that a father was deceased, and had been shot in the head. That was the information we were working off of,” Livingston said.
According to Kansas.com, officers arrived at the 1000 block of McCormick, where the Finch family lived, and “got into position” for a hostage situation. Shouldn’t 911 be able to tell when a call is coming from nowhere near the crime scene? It is highly unlikely that the prank caller just happened to be in the same neighborhood as the victim. Even with a cell phone, what are the odds it was a local area code? It is likely that the caller took measures to mask their identity, but if that was the case police should have been able to know that up front as well.
It is not clear as to whether Finch’s address was specifically chosen as a target for the prank, or if it just happened to be a random address that someone gave out to avoid being the victim of a raid themselves, or if the caller just got the address wrong. Soon after the incident, a number of gamers saw a Twitter user make a post that said, “Someone tried to swat me and got an innocent man killed.”
But unlike the rest of us, I feel strongly that there will be no justice brought to the loved ones of this fallen man. Thee will be no officer to answer, and if it happens to be that I am wrong in that assumption, you can rest assured that any settlements that come out of it will be paid by tax payers and the officers at falt will go unpunnished!!
