The phone number is dead, and the only last need for it is scammers and companies that want to record you but you not record them.
My brother (a lawyer!) wanted to sue the person whose name is on the check! I had to convince him not to bother; that the person's account that the check was deposited to was probably some other victom who was tricked into giving the bank login information away and his account was being unwittingly used to launder checks. The scammer was most likely overseas, but pays U.S. Post Office employees to steal envelopes that likely contain checks and send images (See https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/former-postal-employee-se... for example)
The bank reversed the check but we had to get a notarized statement from my mom, and it was a hassle for a 92 year old.
As far as this case goes, guns should only be used in self-defense when there's an immediate danger. Not punitively. This guy's life wasn't immediately being threatened and he deserves to have the book thrown at him.
*Punitive* use of force.
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Batman usually doesn't do too badly. Not only is it fiction but they're often against fiction level villains who are 'hardened' criminals in literal senses. Even then the violence tends to stop at the point where actual resistance stops. (They get tied up and delivered to the cops with maybe the black eye used in the initial apprehension.)
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Contrast this with what we see repeatedly on TV when poorly trained and poorly supervised law enforcement officers beat down or outright murder someone until they're not just not resisting anymore but are outright _unable_ to resist at all. Such excessive use of force in a professional context should also be a crime that is punished with congruent weight for the breach trust in a public official absent extenuating circumstances ('I had an emotional reaction' leading directly to deadly force should not be such a circumstance).
I do recall a highly unfortunate case of someone from WA state who was on some combination of super drugs such that there didn't appear to be a reasonable application of force to result in a successful outcome. More and better tools might help. Maybe net launchers and methods of incapacitating someone at a bit of a distance for mutual safety?
Jesus, it's almost like Kaczynski was onto something.
I had agreed when I read your comment before I read the article. But after reading the article it feels like this is missing the mark. We're bumping up against the equivalent of gang stalking / stochastic terrorism here - someone being harassed through digital channels and put in a mental state where they're fearing for their life in the physical world.
A similar case of the phenomenon happened in NY a while back [0] with someone being killed for driving up to the wrong house at night, with the shooter presumably having been pumped full of general fearmongering by mass media. But the stark difference in that case it was the shooter's own media diet creating insular paranoia whereas here it was personally-targeted digital communications making the shooter feel threatened by the person ostensibly acting as an agent of those threatening him.
This is a tragic situation for sure, but falling back to applying fundamentalist judgement to emergent behavior is a mistake.
You can't just say that the people actually doing the thing (whatever that thing may be) are in the right because they are doing their jobs otherwise they become a black hole for infinite liability. You need to accept that the dead person was wrong to be there collecting that package at which point is becomes a question of who dispatched them (obviously not themselves in this case) on what grounds and under what circumstances, etc, etc and how did it lead to this failure.
Think about this like an industrial ancient, not some heartstring grabbing rage bait. There will always be crazy old men. Sure, send him to prison or whatever but how can the chain of events that lead to this particular crazy old man killing someone under these circumstances be broken. Uber needs to tighten their shit up, so does the phone system, etc, etc.
This guy didn’t just shoot the delivery person whom they were afraid of.
He didn’t let her drive away even after she was clearly scared, explained she was simply an Uber driver, showed no evidence of weaponry and just wanted to drive away.
There’s a reason he wasn’t just convicted of killing the Uber driver but also of kidnapping.
The amount of people being wraponized into doing terrible things for others is insane.
This is kind of a gun story but not really IMO.
This is kind of like a story like the people who SWAT others and sometimes people die and sometimes they are held accountable.
If someone is committed to presenting a false narrative for a long time they can manipulate people into doing things. That's not new, but it's certainly more accessible than ever and nobody is ready for it =(
Really is mind boggling when you look at it as "fractional evil". Some hypothetical clerk may make 99 "could go either way" decisions one way or the other to little ill effect and 1/100 or maybe 1/1000 of the time their decisions costs someone tens of thousands of dollars for no good reason for it could have gone either way.
How much of society's wealth is lost to such endeavors?
One wonders how much "evil" exists only because there exists some amount of legitimate activity it can be mixed among to dilute it enough that nobody cares.
- It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties. Email/phone call scams have been around for a long time. They’re very easy to fall prey to. There’s no reason our phones shouldn’t be able to inform us that a certain number is officially from the IRS, Cops, Verizon, etc.
- This is a form of Swatting. Delivery companies, and also the police, etc need to do better in ensuring the people demanding services are where they’re demanding the service and/or the person who lives there is aware and genuinely needs to be visited. - We need a bit of a broken windows policing for online/digital scams. The reason they are blowing up is there is hardly a risk of being caught. And the cost/benefit analysis probably suggests that th police really shouldn’t be involved in most of the individual cases or expend too many resources. However, this blows up the number of cases so the aggregate cost does indeed grow too high. So there needs to be an effort to prosecute and expend resources even on low level cases so the criminals get the message that they’re not gonna get away with it.
fortran77•1h ago