Swedish Police Raid Teenagers Playing Call of Duty

[VoidWanderer]

I would've hoped that while the kids were being escorted away some of the officers would 'borrow the game' for a while. I can imagine the cops playing the game and telling the oppoising team there are cops outside their respective houses.

 

[MegaManOfNumbers]

AW DAMNIT. I was hoping they were raided for playing such a shit game!

Shoot.

 

[Strazdas]

What i would like to know is this: is the police going to pay for busting their doors, because obviously they broke them to get in, im sure they weren't sitting there with their front door ajar.

Because i would be mad as hell if police had busted my door and would sue them for damages.

 

[MonkeyPunch]

Only just come to read this article in a bored browse of Escapist.
Well written - made the story really funny.

 

[xomocekc]

Fortunate this didn't happen in America, because all the kids would be dead now.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

To be fair most people from Scandinavia especially Denmark Norway and Sweden have no clue what an actual gunshot sounds like. So if the kids played it really noisy they might have misunderstood. Still stupid.

They definitely need 2nd Amendment rights. How can they live without guns? That's insanity. INSANITY I SAY!

 

[Aralaas]

Man am I glad it was just a hilarious mix-up, I came to this forum ready to apologize to gamers everywhere on behalf of my country ^^;

 

[Lunar Templar]

Good thing they weren't playing Grand Theft Auto 4 or the police breaking in on them would have been too meta.

It would have been hilarious though, more so then it already is

 

[PsychicTaco115]

Don't you worry, don't you worry child...

See heaven's got a plan for you to get raided by the PO-LICE!

OT: That's bad luck for them, I must say. Still, no long-lasting harm done!

 

[waj9876]

I'm...confused over why people are saying the police were in the wrong on this one. They got a report of gunshots, in a country with very strict gun laws, and no one was actually arrested over the whole thing. What were they supposed to do? Take the kids' words at face value and not investigate? THAT would be something worthy of mockery, not...you know, actually doing their jobs.

Come on guys, it can't be the police's fault EVERY time. Save the anger for when they actually DO something worthy of it. At the very least.

 

[Jingle Fett]

I'm disappointed the police didn't shove glass into the mouths of the kids while interrogating them. Not so fun when it happens to you is it!

 

[Hagi]

Because in a city like Stockholm a 10-member team is the full police force...

It was 10 cops... For a case where there was the, however unlikely, possibility of criminals armed with assault rifles. That's the intelligent response to make. If it turns out to be, as most likely, a mistake then you just gave 10 police officers a drill. If it turns out to be a diversionary call then you've still got the entire rest of the Stockholm police force to deal with it. If it turns out to be real then you've got the bare minimum to make sure the situation doesn't escalate in much worse.

Sending just one cop when there's a 0,1% chance that it might be genuine is pants on head retarded.

 

[Jack Rascal]

Spoiler

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.

That is all well and good, but we're not talking US of A here. We're talking of Lund, a city in Sweden with a population of 82000. And no SWAT team was despatched, the local police sent 10 officers, with handguns, to the scene. What happened with this case was effectively Lund's "jewellery shop robbery with AK's". It was a big deal for them. Sweden has strict gun laws. And you must understand that not every part of the world operates the same. Something "huge" in one city (or country) is minor news in another.

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.

You do what you know best, either out of experience or what you have been taught. If it's common for you to experience couples having sex in vans on the parking lot, it does sound ridiculous if you call complete lock down for something like that. But do you think it's normal for the police officers in Lund to be called about a shooting?

 

[barbzilla]

To be fair most people from Scandinavia especially Denmark Norway and Sweden have no clue what an actual gunshot sounds like. So if the kids played it really noisy they might have misunderstood. Still stupid.

You know that Sweden is in the top 10 list for gun ownership per capita, so I am pretty sure they have a fair idea of what a gun shot looks like.

Also, this is exactly what I expected this to be.
Funny story though, I imagine the kids were actually kinda excited by all the cops in riot gear (if they were in riot gear).

 

[dyre]

At least it makes for a cool story to tell their friends in school.

I'm...confused over why people are saying the police were in the wrong on this one. They got a report of gunshots, in a country with very strict gun laws, and no one was actually arrested over the whole thing. What were they supposed to do? Take the kids' words at face value and not investigate? THAT would be something worthy of mockery, not...you know, actually doing their jobs.

Come on guys, it can't be the police's fault EVERY time. Save the anger for when they actually DO something worthy of it. At the very least.

Uninformed, horribly biased opinions on the Escapist? What's confusing about that?

 

[Therumancer]

Because in a city like Stockholm a 10-member team is the full police force...

It was 10 cops... For a case where there was the, however unlikely, possibility of criminals armed with assault rifles. That's the intelligent response to make. If it turns out to be, as most likely, a mistake then you just gave 10 police officers a drill. If it turns out to be a diversionary call then you've still got the entire rest of the Stockholm police force to deal with it. If it turns out to be real then you've got the bare minimum to make sure the situation doesn't escalate in much worse.

Sending just one cop when there's a 0,1% chance that it might be genuine is pants on head retarded.

Incorrect to the extreme, but there is apparently no point in trying to explain that to you further. Understand though, I've been a dispatcher before, and formally trained. You send that much manpower on a single report from one person good luck justifying it after the fact. Seriously.

If it makes sense to you, fine. To me, it sounds like the Swedish Police need more training given the way this went down.

Understand police/high end security/etc... do not have a bunch of people just sitting around waiting to be sent somewhere. Usually you have just as much manpower as you need to cover the area your supposed to secure, and in reality your usually understaffed because the guys with their hands on the purse strings, whether it's a boss, or the mayor/governor wants to do the absolute minimum and spend as little as possible... excepting immediatly after an emergency but I won't go into that cycle. The bottom line is those 10 officers do not just materialize from nowhere, those are all people you have to divert from elsewhere, it doesn't matter how big your force is, that's 9 people
leaving their assigned areas for this. That is why you send the person closest/assigned to that area to check it out under circumstances like this.

But also understand as I explained, this is also based on a single report coming in, relaying second hand information. It's differant if your receiving multiple reports from differant sources, or acting on first hand information. Again, if someone was shooting an assault rifle off and there were people inside a building screaming, it's unlikely you'd get one report from some guy saying "he heard something". There would be more to it.

Understand also, that if you know ANTHING about tactics, that bullets don't just stop at walls magically like in most video games. They tend to go right through your normal, civilian, plaster walls and installation. If someone is cutting loose with an assault rifle, which as a rifle is going to have combat grade ammo, there isn't going to be much mistake and more than just "I heard something that *might* be a gun" that's going to generally make a bit of a scene. Guns are pretty loud, and a bit differant than a video game.

Of course this is an old post, and we're apparently not going to agree. Maybe someday you'll be in a position to really get what I'm saying. This is one of those cases where the differance between someone whose trained and has done this kind of thing, and someone who hasn't is pretty substantial.