Jack Rascal said:
Therumancer said:
Sounds to me like the police there need better training and higher standards. Not to mention policies where the police go after people who file false reports civilly if nothing else. To be honest I can't believe someone would mistake a video game for real violence... even grandparents, since the sound effects are QUITE differant. That leads me to believe a case like this is an intentionally false report intended as a phrank, or motivated by another reason (not liking the neighbor, too much noise, etc...). If the neighbor insists they actually believed this they might need to be committed, because frankly if this causes them to lose track of reality the same thing could happen with a loud playing radio or TV.
It was someone passing by who heard the boys. They heard gun shots and one of the kids screaming "help, help, help". This lead to them calling the police. Nothing wrong with that.
Source http://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/polisen-stormade-dataspelskvall/
And another source in English http://www.thelocal.se/45844/20130127/#.UQbN9GdLfzB
And I can believe that my grandmother would mistake gun shots from TV to real ones. And she lived through war.
Over a period of decades I've heard some interesting things about Swedish/Norweigian/Danish cops and really it paints a pretty unflattering picture, making me think it's easier to take a "Swedish Policewoman" in a porno more seriously than the real thing. I don't know how much the countries from this neck of the woods participate in international policing, but it occurs to me that the US, UK, etc... run programs to help train and educate policemen from all over the world through things like Interpol. I'm just saying... it hardly seems like this is the first time we've been looking at one of these police misfires, and while it happens to all countries, it isn't like you see much international news like "Swedish Police bust multi-billion dollar drug smuggling ring" once in a while to balance it out. It's not like you can say "well on the mean streets of Sweden, a bit of occasional overreaction happens, I mean look at all the other crap going on..."
Someone called the police and reported hearing gun shots and someone calling help. What was the police supposed to do? Ask the caller to go and investigate? Ignore the call? Only dispatch one police officer?
Righto on the last one.
The reason why you send one cop to investigate to a call like this at first (based on second hand information) is because it can easily be crank call or bad information from a civilian. That way you don't waste time, effort, and departmental resources by sending a SWAT team into a Frat party.
A big part of it is also because if you respond with this kind of force on every report of where it might be needed, it means that if you get a false report the team could be tied up when they might be needed elsewhere. For example having someone call in a report like this on one side of town, while my team of merry masked robbers with AK-47s hits a jewlery shop on the other side of town, slowing the response time of the only force in the region with the firepower to stop us while we make off with the loot, gunning down any cops with handguns left to respond because we've got assault rifles.
As I said, law enforcement in this part of the world has never exactly seemed to be "with it" so to speak.
Also understand there is a huge differance between "I see a guy with a gun shooting people" or "a guy with a gun is trying to shoot me" and "I hear sounds of gunshots and cries for help". It also comes down to multiple reports. Basically if there is something major going down more than one person is going to hear it. When someone does a shooting rampage or whatever nowadays you get tons of calls, tweets, etc... about it all at once. That's a good sign it might be a real problem. If the neighbor hears the stuff on one side of the house where it's happening for example, the other neighbor on the otherside is also likely to hear it and call. Sure they might not be home or whatever, but as dispatch to look at the facts as they approach to you and the probabilities. One call based on suspician, you send ONE cop, who you tell there might be something dangerous, they go in on guard, as a scout, then if they spot something they call
for backup.
In short a competant law enforcement team should never send SWAT after a bunch of kids playing X-box.
To put this into personal perspective, for a while when I worked as monitor room I acted as the dispatch for outside patrol that covered the parking lots and everything outside the casino door, as well as watching pretty much all non-gaming areas of the casino back of the house and otherwise (garages, hotels, retail, cages, etc...). This later went totally tribal (long, boring, story) but the bottom line is that at this time I had access to all kinds of wonderful tools, outside patrol vehicles, bike patrol, security supervisors, investigators, tribal police, and even our invited
on-site state police. Let's say for the sake of arguement I get a report from strange sounds coming from a dark van with tinted windows, it sounds like someone could be getting raped or killed in there. That is indeed possible, screwed up things happen, but as a professional I know that it could be something lurid like people having sex, or just some cheapskates watching TV in the back of the van because they don't want to pay for a hotel room, maybe both. With one report I am going to send a single security officer to check this out, letting them know the reason and what they are looking for. I *could* jump to the conclusion "ZOMG Someone is being killed", have the entire garage locked down with vehicles on all on and off ramps, and have gun-toting cops and stuff running in there like gangbusters on my say so,
but in doing so I'd be a frakking idiot. Being a cop of certain kinds of security is not safe, and going out there to stick your head out is one of the risks involved, 99.99% it's nothing, but people are always on their toes or the 00.01% it's not going to be. If you treat every incident like it's that 00.01% your going to either create a police state, scare customers away, or just as likely piss everyone off for being too touchy since responses like this for nothing cost time, effort, and manpower, and sometimes even money depending on what resources you wind up tapping. Doing your job right as dispatch means the right tool, for the right job. This was an epic fail for Swedish law enforcement.