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| When the police surrounded a house in Wichita, Kan., late Thursday, they expected to find a gunman who told a 911 dispatcher that he was holding his mother and brother at gunpoint after shooting his father in the head. But no crime had been committed at that house, and the man who would be fatally shot by an officer moments later was not the person who had called. The suspected caller, who was arrested on Friday and has a history of making false police reports, was actually about 1,300 miles away, in Los Angeles. Both the Wichita police and the man in the house were pawns in a hoax called “swatting,” in which people report made-up crimes in hopes of creating a spectacle and getting a SWAT team deployed. —The New York Times, December 31, 2017. Photo: An image from body-camera footage showing the fatal shooting of Andrew Finch, 28, by a Wichita police officer in the swatting hoax. —Wichita Police Department |
I do not want
do not want to live
in a country where it is possible
for the digitally demented to phone in
an order
for a police murder
and where the SWAT
the Special Weapons And Tactics team
delivers
drives to the arbitrary house
surrounds it
orders the confused and peaceable
man to come out
of his quiet home
with his hands up
and when he does not
or does not
quickly and obediently enough
they shoot him
dead
For this to be a thing that happens
that happens again
consider
how many layers of disconnection,
of inhumanity
of reflexive violence
must be laid down, deposited like ash
must settle upon us
take on our forms as we ourselves
trapped inside, suffocate, die
decompose, and leave behind nothing
but the shells of the human beings we were
our arms outflung
our eyes wide with terror
our mouths twisted open
crying out, struck dumb
Pepper Trail is a conservation biologist, poet, and photographer living in Ashland, Oregon. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Pedestal, and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. His collection, Cascade-Siskiyou, was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.