"In April 2023, he was swatted four times in one day. The fourth time the MPD sent six officers with assault rifles to his home at 9pm." - okay at some point the MPD shares some of the blame for letting themselves get used like this.
Sending in a swat team without any kind of in person validation is pretty insane anyway IMO.
I've never heard of this happening in Europe in the counties I've lived. They have such teams but they're only sent in after a serious hostage situation is confirmed by cops on the scene. They don't just go around busting down doors because some anonymous caller says so.
I wonder how many of these situations in the US are legit and actually needed such a response.
it's a natural conclusion of the militarization of the police. The police gets a bunch of toys it doesn't need and then itches to use them on something.
Militarization of the police is just symptom. Root cause is that police needs to expect that almost anyone in the US could be armed. This is not the case elsewhere.
It's unlikely police get confronted with guns in the US too; we just have 350 million people, extremely authoritarian police culture, and a corporate news that jumps on the chance to report every instance.
I would wager way more citizens are killed by police (rightfully or not) than police are killed by citizens.
Militarization of police was indeed a symptom, but rather a symptom of the War on Drugs - the first SWAT team (in LA) was organized largely for that purpose.
Estimates are that there’s a firearm in 23-33% of Canadian households, while estimates for the US are around 44%.
I don’t disagree that the firearms are a problem, or even a factor, but it certainly doesn’t seem likely that it’s the root cause unless there’s some tipping point between 1-1.5/5 houses and 2/5 houses that makes things substantially more dangerous.
And it's utterly useless.. What good does a tank against a drone with an rpg7 head. Real resistence by a gang would obliberate a Swatteam. A cold War style armament spiral between gangs and police can not end in success.
But it can end in a kind of success for the arms manufacturers, their shareholders, the “hard on crime” politicians, the upper management of the police force, and the pro-police state people who gets validation for their calls ever-increasing need for violence.
Like developer with new shiny JavaScript framework/toolkit. Gotta use it at the next opportunity. Human condition to want to use the gear you're excited about. I'm glad my work is crappy rather than dangerous.
How do you in-person-validate a distress call alleging multiple guns fired in a particular home? You might try to call the residents with a false pretext, but surely the SWAT team would be on the way as early as it can.
I’m in the US, with European family (parent, cousins, etc.) and I can’t count the number of comments that I’ve heard or read that begin with “I am from Europe” and go on to make a very sensible, reasonable assertion about how things ought to be in the US.
Well, they aren’t that way. However your town works, Detroit is different. NYC is different. Tampa is different.
At some point the person who is repeatedly surprised at what doesn’t make sense to them has an obligation to either accept that their expectations aren’t universal, or to dig deeper. Maintaining perpetual shock and confusion is not a sign of moral righteousness or principle, it’s provincial.
> However your town works, Detroit is different. NYC is different. Tampa is different.
Yup. But you know what? Europe isn't just one town either. It's not even one country, one currency, one language, or one alphabet. Αθήνα isn't Berlin isn't Paris; Cambridge isn't like London isn't like Glasgow isn't like Belfast, and only the latter has "RPG Avenue" nicknamed due to the weapon fired at the cops, and yet the English (do not go to Belfast and describe it as "England") are so anti-gun that even the cops don't want to be armed.
America isn't unique in being diverse, it's not even half as diverse as its self image makes claim.
Learn about the differences that mean the rest of us don't face your challenges, and then use that to make your cities better.
As a European who spent 3 years driving all around the western half of the US, I really wouldn't even call America very diverse. The climate changes more than the people. The difference between city and rural is bigger than the difference between north and south; rural people in Montana and Arizona just aren't that different.
I understand your frustration about the "I'm from Europe" comments, but you have to appreciate that those comments come from a similar frustration.
The universally shared image of the US is that they loudmouth how great they are compared to the rest of the world. So when news comes out on how the US fails so dramatically on very basic public/social services, it leaves people from outside the US stumped.
I'd be interested to see evidence supporting your assertion of 'universally shared image'.
The image of the United States is perceived not nearly so negative in the counties which I visited: Jordan, China, Vietnam.
I'll add a fourth country, which I haven't visited. The image of the United States in Israel, while complex, includes a great deal of admiration. As a country with security always top of mind, overall Israel broadly admires the United States' extensive defense capability and power. I doubt most Israelis would describe the US as 'loudmouth'.
Similar nuances could be laid out for the countries I listed above.
Many world citizens can parse media of a random football fan screaming 'USA!' from the state department's lengthy policy positions. The perceived image you describe resembles most closely to me a self reflection found often within the US.
Nonetheless, I do think our culture could stand to posture in a more reserved fashion broadly, while not being afraid to mention where appropriate...
We remain a positive world standout in a variety ways.
> Many world citizens can parse media of a random football fan screaming 'USA!' from the state department's lengthy policy positions.
Most recently, I believe, the main contributor to that image was the former president of the US, not some American at the FIFA World Cup. Trump providing nonstop material for satire and comedy shows didn't help either.
In general the international image of the US seems to be better under democrat presidents.
That article broadly matches with my personal observations as a European.
> I can say with high confidence that the image of the United States is perceived not nearly so negative in the following counties which I personally visited: Jordan, China, Vietnam.
Eh. I can't speak to Jordan or Vietnam, but in China opinions on the US are usually a toss up. US (cultural) exports are warring with opinionated news that doesn't portray the US any better than US news portrays China.
> As a country with security always top of mind, overall Israel broadly admires the United States' extensive defense capability and power. I doubt most Israelis would describe the US as 'loudmouth'.
You're right that overall Israelis have an extremely favorable opinion of the US (ignoring their Arab population of course), however I have to point out these opinions aren't mutually exclusive.
The only surprising thing about Israel is that Trump apparently was more liked there than Biden is. They still seem to think Trump is more arrogant though.
I definitely agree that the president has a huge affect on US image on the world stage. The critism of the analogy I laid out is fair. Trump arguably regularly carried himself in a way that aligns with the narrative we're discussing.
Props for citing evidence via Pew. Just FYI, that Israel poll arguably became obsolete in the weeks following the 10/7 terrorist attack. Not sure where things currently stand.
I do wish there was a bit more nuance. The discussion of favorability is complex. I was speaking specifically to the comment regarding the US being perceived as a 'loudmouth how great they are compared to the rest of the world'.
As far as Europe broadly is conencerned... I would probably agree that public perception does include
a component resembling the aforementioned perception. I'd speculate that this probably has a fair bit to do with many European nations exceeding the US in various metrics surrounding healthcare, happiness, safety, income distribution ect. Those critism are fair ofc.
I suppose the distilled point of my comment was that there is a lot of nuance to US image from nation to nation. Myself, I didn't realize just how respected the US is amongst so many nations. Even arguably adverserial nations often respect a great number of things about the US. I find it regrettable that the US domestic population often has very unfavorable views of their own nation, without giving adequate and nuanced consideration to our many accomplishments. Often less developed nations focus more on some of the bigger picture factors which are worthy of full consideration.
> I'll add a fourth country, which I haven't visited. The image of the United States in Israel, while complex, includes a great deal of admiration. As a country with security always top of mind, overall Israel broadly admires the United States' extensive defense capability and power. I doubt most Israelis would describe the US as 'loudmouth'.
I'm from Amsterdam and most people there adore the US as well. Our culture is heavily influenced by it as most people on the street now speak a curious mixture of Dutch and American English. The country became strongly neoliberal as a result too (which hurt me as a socialist personally) and even got caught up in the Trumpist outcry over things perceived as "woke". 24% voted for Wilders who is basically a mixture of Trump-style populism and fascism in the last election. The country is really messed up now.
But, the police is not militarised as it is in the US and I'm really glad for that. Even though gangs do have a lot of guns. They're not easy to come by in Holland but we have an unmonitored border with Belgium where they are freely available in criminal circles. We still have some 'common sense' in police approach, at least for now.
? A region has such a weak rule of law, that police can terrorize a man without consequences - and a person from a vast region of various states were that is rather unheard of (and people travel way more) is provincial for calling that out? I'm honestly confused. We had some "valley rulers" in europe, but the law tends to get rid of them, bloodfeuds and other idiocies included. And any low point ought to remain shocking. Getting numb to pain is not normal.
A relative worked at the police in downtown Amsterdam. Where gang violence is also a problem, only a few years ago people had to duck in a tram to avoid stray bullets from gangs firing automatic weapons.
This didn't really cause a militarisation of the police though. The problem with that is that it leads to further escalation on both sides. And ordinary people can get caught up in that like what is happening with the swatting.
Also I've lived in many different EU countries and swatting is just not a thing anywhere. The US really is pretty unique in this phenomenon within the western world.
For all the problems caused by militarization of the police, is there any evidence that it leads to “escalation on both sides”? Gangs using automatic weapons seems to be escalated well beyond America already.
The constitution also says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated”
An interesting point that I am amenable too, I certainly appreciate the mental connections you make here. Though, I could say that based on these comments this isnt a universal problem, and that preserving a police force that has no regard for civil rights is not a sign of, say, conservative values, its fear.
I am well aware that we have gang violence and all types of problems. What I do not see is a justification for things like violating someones property, repeatedly. The man has no obligation to cooperate with shit, and the police have no right to barge in anyways, that isnt how probably cause is supposed to work.
They are reminding you that the reality you are experiencing is not normal and should not be normalised. They are stating that it is not only possible to not be like this, but it's actually a baseline expectation in most of the rest of the developed world.
You can keep burying your head in the sand, make excuses for unacceptable behaviour such as swatting with "but it's extraordinary circumstances with very specific context" and bemoan the "provincials" for expecting the US behaves, or at least trends towards, a society that resembles the rest of the democratic, civilized world.
Or you can say enough, and demand action. One is a lot easier than the other.
Sending in a swat team without any kind of in person validation is pretty insane anyway IMO.
If I’m a police captain, I’m going in guns blazing every time because I know the trend of SWATting won’t end until the penalties are ratcheted way up. The only way that’s going to happen is for terrible stories like this to become public.
You're right about the incentives, and in my opinion this won't change until police departments and the local governments that enable them are required to compensate their victims, including for things like emotional distress (being assaulted by a violent gang is going to take some time to process). The deep root of the problem here is that police are allowed to cause harm and then just walk away from any responsibility.
You know, its probably more cost effective and, well, effective at that point to just post an offficer across the street? A crossing guard would do fine.
Wouldn't that street be definitionally the highest crime hotspot in the area anyhow?
> they should really temper the response on future calls
So I should swat myself in the morning when I want to go on a rampage in the afternoon?
As inconvenient as it is for the victims, the 100% response rate is the only guarantee the system cannot be abused in other ways. A similar example from Germany: A friend is driving 8h every 2 months to his mandatory shooting practice because he missed too many flights back due to residues of gun discharges found on him at the airport. The government is accepting this 8h commute as work time because any way around the mandatory, extensive investigation at the airport would open holes in the security procedures in place. And my friends "secret service" badge does not grant him any special powers at the airport - also by design.
I agree with you BUT. If one time, somewhere in America, someone truly is a violent threat you'll see all over Twitter & Facebook: "Government agency ignores dozens of pleas for help! Numerous reports that child killer would kill children!"
It's obviously super dumb, but it is sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Ideally, we would solve this in a sane way but at least it seems like there is some tempering of violence in most of these stories which is sadly refreshing.
In Uvalde there was a known threat and the police did nothing. I think there's just bad police.
It's a tough job, but there are also a lot of under-trained, under-educated people that just want to bust down doors and wouldn't actually risk their lives for anyone. In fact, I'm sure some let themselves be used by swatters, as it gives them a chance to use their heavy equipment in low risk scenarios.
It's less dangerous than delivering pizza, and is basically free from accountability. Outside of being exposed to deeply tragic situations, I'm not so sure it's a "tough job."
I think “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t” does not adequately capture the issue here.
Police departments are incentivized/required to respond to SWATs as genuine incidents; therefore, they are not “damned” by this situation. It is the victims of the SWAT that are “damned”. The article says that a SWAT costs $10,000 US, but that cost is borne by the taxpayer and so it would be up to municipalities to deal with the risk of looking weak on crime or just pay the bill.
However, if the police were to not respond to an emergency that required a SWAT team that actually needed one, then they would be accused of not doing their jobs and being “damned” in that fashion.
My sad conclusion is that police departments and the different levels of government are not incentivized to solve this problem because the rich, the powerful, and enough of the voting public are sufficiently shielded from the negative consequences.
I was going to make this point above as well but it felt to cynical. Ultimately, I think its just a case of normal people having to respond to an extremely rare and kinetic situation with no playbook as every decision you make is scrutinized and broadcast in HD with full commentary. I'm honestly curious how many times the "hostage negotiator" has had to show up and negotiate for hostages. It's hard to imagine what success looks like in that role as (luckily) each of these situations are rare and highly unique. Outside of incidents that good information about the legitimacy of the threat are established, it seems like we should put a lot more effort into tracking down people who make false claims and doing PR on the perpetrators of false allegations. Right now it seems like the risk to the "informant" of a SWAT is low and the victim is insanely high. If we narrow these odds without destroying privacy and freedom, that would be the best case.
"Normal people with no playbook"? These are police SWAT teams we're talking about, the entire reason the specialization exists is to make them highly trained to deal with these situations.
Of course, in America that training tends to take the form of learning how to use their military-style weaponry to kill the Bad Guys(tm), not eg how to deescalate a situation.
Hey, its us, whats that make, 45 times? Oh, 46, really? Well go ahead and stop what you are doing, put your hands up and watch a bunch of armed strangers violate your private space. Dont be mad, its highly irregular for us to get these calls, we have no idea how to better respond, like just giving you a call and checking in on you.
> The article says that a SWAT costs $10,000 US, but that cost is borne by the taxpayer and so it would be up to municipalities to deal with the risk of looking weak on crime or just pay the bill.
Police budgets are not infinite, taxes don't automatically get raised even if they spend all of it. Towns can and have shut down their police departments because they ran out of funding.
Taxes do not pay for anything but debt servicing. It is inaccurate to say "spend all of it", it is spent down to the penny as immediately as it is collected. Police budgets, or any government budget for that matter, are only limited by political measures in any meaningful context.
Police budgets are effectively infinite. The nypd has bases internationally, Seattle's police dept has a budget of like half a billion every year. Local governments will defund every service before reducing police budgets even fractionally.
The nypd has offices in sixteen cities internationally.
Seattle police department budgets passed four hundred million and were only recently reduced by progressive members of the city council. They've had decades of year over year growth that exceeds both city spending growth and population growth. Bruce Harrell, Seattles mayor, is trying to increase budgets for police again and the one time reduction is unlikely to stick given the change in membership in the city council. One single reduction in a ballooning police budget is not indicative of the overall trend of massively increasing police spending.
The issue of 4 SWATs called to the same location is interesting to me because of all the other follow-on questions it raises in my head. It is tempting to give answers for them all as well, but my answers would all be speculative with no evidence to back them.
1. How are 911 dispatchers organized and staffed to have 24/7 coverage?
2. How are SWAT teams organized and staffed to have 24/7 coverage? How many SWAT teams cover/overlap a given address?
3. Comparing the answers for 1. and 2. with something like the fire department. Fire departments at times have to fight fires that run into multiple hours and multiple days and scale up their operations with help from neighboring regions and higher levels of government while maintaining sufficient organization and knowledge.
Well, in the flesh things take time to happen, the setup for the call, the deployment, the investigation, the debrief, a cooling off period to observe the results, thats probably a couple hours minimum. This isnt something you can parallelize or task more cores too, the swatter probably got bored, tired, or hungry.
Because the 4th time could be real even if the first 3 calls were hoax? I suppose there can be protocol to filter out hoax calls, but imagine if a 911 call came but nobody took it seriously because of the swatting history of that place. Everyone including HN will have a field day how irresponsible and indifferent the police were, that they would only protect the rich and powerful. Sound familiar?
> It's obviously super dumb, but it is sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation
I refuse to believe that anyone woild damn them with a headline of “smae parson was found to be doing nothing wrong 3 times earlier on the same day. So the forth time only a small friendly team was sent initially after which a full swat team was sent when they discovers it was real”
No one in their right mind would be like “why didn’t they go in with force for the forth time that day!?
There have been cases of politicians and other high profile people being swatted. After it happens, the police are forced to figure out a way to make sure it doesn't happen again while still being vigilant against legitimate threats. So it is possible to do both if the will is there.
You would think they would have that address on a post-it note in the PD and call centers, but I guess not: (opposite situation, but relevant: https://xkcd.com/1105/)
How is that possible? Could someone offer any explanation? You would have thought an intelligent org would have figured it by the second time. At four ina DAY MPD is complicit in harrasment…
It’s a classic “boy who cried wolf” situation, because they’d be in a world of hurt if they didn’t respond to a legitimate call- but I have to agree, if the person has no prior criminal record what are you doing bringing the SWAT team out? These are citizens not subjects.
They wouldn't be, just like now they aren't in a world of hurt now when the same risks materialize in a fake call response (some people die during these raids)
> if the person has no prior criminal record what are you doing bringing the SWAT team out?
I believe the usual technique is to say you say two armed people enter the house followed by a scream/shout. You want to convince the police there are heavily armed hostage takers - hence the SWAT response.
I thought STIR/SHAKEN was deployed now. How can someone still call 911 with a fake number without it showing up as a fake number? Aren't PSAPs seeing the attestation level of the call? A local call that doesn't have an "A" attestation level is very suspicious.
Although this is supposed to be deployed throughout the US telephony network by now, apparently the public safety answering points are not up to speed yet.
Background: "NENA Spoofing Mitigation Information Document"[1]
Unfortunately there's still lots of reasons a legitimate call wouldn't have attestation, including if it passed over a legacy non-SIP link at any point. That's increasingly rare, but not rare enough to flag or block calls without attestation except within a network you know is pure IP. Even then you get edge cases like forwarded calls that people expect to work even when they don't do them right.
So is there any sort of real deadline or end in sight for spam/scam calls here? Can someone please legislate that if your call does not have attestation then it gets immediately blackholed? Give a deadline and if you aren't compliant then your phone doesn't work.
At this point I could not care less if this causes legacy systems or whatever exactly to break; if it kills a few businesses then so be it. Everyone I know in the US has a constant background of spam calls that makes the phone system almost worthless in many cases. We cannot allow critical infrastructure to be held hostage by a few holdouts.
I would think the swatters would just buy a cheap burner phone with cash for these calls. They don't even need a SIM card; in the US, at least, a SIM isn't required to make emergency calls.
(As a PSA for anyone with an emergency phone in the UK) You now need a valid SIM to ring 999 in the UK as they were getting too many nuisance calls - but any network will roam the call if reception is bad on your own one.
Having a GPS location doesn't mean you have a suspect. Unless the person called from their own property (zero chance) or didn't move locations at all after making the call (very unlikely), it would require a substantial investigation that most departments aren't able or willing to do, because the odds of catching someone would be extremely low.
Situation in Belgium: you cannot get a sim without ID/Passport. When you remove your sim, the network provider still knows your imei. So they ask the providers for which sim was used with this imei, and usually find the prankster this way.
Sadly, police don’t always show up when you call 112. Even in serious situations.
That's not required. If the telcos implement STIR/SHAKEN as it's been described, then a "swat" call can later (by investigators) be traced back to a human being who can be prosecuted and jailed. That will serve as sufficient deterrent in most cases.
No no, you dont understand, you just over*estimate their techno skills, having to remember that you already laid seige to some poor fuck at breakfast brunch and lunch is just too much, the appropriate response is coming to dinner too!
That in itself should be a red flag. Someone is in a hostage situation or dealing with an active shooter and instead of just dialing 911 they took the time to locate the non-emergency line and call that?
The creator of the QWK offline mail format, Mark "Sparky" Herring, widely used on BBSs, suffered a heart attack in a swatting and died. He was being harassed to hand over his Twitter username.
Funny how anybody can call a SWAT team for free that costs taxpayers upwards of $10,000 per instance, but god forbid a $1000 ambulance ride gets financed by taxes
in italy ambulances are mostly run by ngo-like red cross organization: the building is leased for free by the township, the ambulances are donated by local car dealers or by local fundraising, 80% of the workforce are volunteers. they are free to end users. Still there are private ambulances for specific services but are reasonable priced
Unconstitutional? If someone has been swatted 47 times then you no longer have probable cause just because someone made a call.
I wonder if there is a gentlemanly version where they surround the building, call you on the phone to come out with your hands up. Do a quick check then fuck off.
What I find strange is that the original person who was threatened with swatting who gave the 'fake' address was convicted of wire fraud.
I do understand why he was convicted:
> Viner threatened to swat Gaskill over the loss. Gaskill intentionally gave Viner the wrong address, a location in Wichita where he previously resided with his family, and where he said he would "be waiting". Gaskill's family had been evicted from the address in 2016
So there is probable cause to believe that he intended harm to come to the new residents of that address.
As I understand it, the US system is pretty poorly set up to deal with things related to the internet, so wire fraud is often the go to. Happens often with hacking as well.
It makes me wonder if Gaskill would've gotten away with no legal consequences if he had given some made-up address that coincidentally happened to be a real one. Something like “420 Weed Avenue.” Instead, he got convicted for revenge on the current tenant.
Apparently the overtime is too good or recruiting standard too low. Either way, this yelp review says: avoid Milwaukee because police would have a struggle figuring out basic who dun its.
The kid, yeah, that’s a result of the twitch.tv hotheads. He should be prosecuted. Police, they are just doing their jobs (at the minimum) and should probably institute a protocol if they are tasked to the same location more than 5 times in a calendar year.
As someone from Milwaukee I can categorically tell you that the police department is a complete joke and I'm honestly shocked they haven't shot this dude yet with how incompetent they are.
I've written a lot today and don't have the time to reply to this comment properly.
I'm not familiar enough with the situation to really know. I was just commenting on the use of the term victim blaming.
I don't think I necessarily disagree with you that some people bring consequences upon themselves, even if those things are themselves illegal. Ultimately I would say that SWATing is clearly not a trivial thing to do: people die, money is wasted.
In general: nobody deserves to be SWATed; go through legal channels to seek justice. If that person is untouchable, maybe some sort of "vigilante" action is warranted; I don't know.
For the record I don't think they deserved to be swatted in the first place either. And I hope this doesn't start happening to random people who didn't do anything questionable either.
I was more or less just likening the whole situation to a "win stupid prizes" trope, didn't mean to start a fight.
> Mr Tomlinson also filed a lawsuit in 2020 to try to force the internet service provider Cloudflare to reveal the names of the individuals behind the website.
> The request to subpoena Cloudflare was denied by the Superior Court of California after a judge ruled it fell under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields blogs and social media sites from problematic content on their platforms posted by third parties.
What exactly is one supposed to do? You can't sue Cloudflare because they're only there for DDOS protection. You can't force Cloudflare to reveal the identity of the website owner. You can't sue the website owner because they are "just" service providers, but you can't subpoena them for the posters' identity because you don't know who the providers are and Cloudflare won't tell.
Sounds like using Tor for illegal activities is overkill when all you need to do it in the open are two degrees of separation.
Does anyone have the text of the court filings? I assume Mr. Tomlinson's legal actions were highly defective in some way, given that the court sanctioned him,
- "A judge also ordered Mr Tomlinson to pay the anonymous blogger behind the website $23,700 in legal fees."
In the US, you don't pay the opposing party's legal bills when you lose, unless you did something egregious.
[late edit]: I believe the relevant filing on the SFTC page is "ORDER GRANTING PETITIONER JOHN DOE 1'S PETITION TO QUASH SUBPOENA TO CLOUDFLARE, INC. ISSUED FOR CASE PENDING IN FOREIGN JURISDICTION PURSUANT TO CCP SEC.2029.600 AND REQUEST FOR SANCTIONS". (I'm not able to link to it).
To my understanding: it looks like the operator of the website didn't do anything actionable (as far the plaintiff could demonstrate), and it was (the court says) invalid for the plaintiff to try to unmask them. They could have tried to unmask individual users of the website, and it reads to me like the court might have agreed to compel the operator to do that. But it was sanctionable to go after the operator, on (to my reading) a speculative theory that they might have been involved with the posted content. As the court says, you can't do that: you need evidence specific to the person you are trying to deanonymize.
I really recommend Gary Noesner’s Stalling for Time. He was on the Waco siege before the FBI ran out of patience and the compound went up in flames.
A lot of guns drawn breaking down door situations could be made a lot less dangerous if police stop assuming they need to break in right now. Instead, establish a perimeter and a line of communication if possible.
I'm no expert and I have not read the book you mention, but wasn't the "slow down" approach to an urgent situation tried recently, with terrible results?
That’s the difference between active shooter and barricaded suspect situations. Best practice for an active shooter is to immediately intervene with the first officers to arrive on scene with whatever equipment and training they have on hand, and I’ve seen footage of many instances of officers responding quickly and decisively in those situations. Uvalde was an instance of negligence and cowardice and in my opinion the laws regulating the police aren’t sufficient to hold the Uvalde police department accountable for what they allowed to happen.
In both cases, the law enforcement on the scene are said to have believed that children were being actively harmed. In one case they went in guns blazing (and it went badly) and in the other case they stood around picking their noses waiting for somebody else to do something about it (and it went badly.)
Obviously there is no one correct answer for all situations.
Do you earnestly believe that a situation where the police actively hear shooting is the same as one where an anonymous phonecall says something is happening?
We're comparing Waco and Uvalde, in both cases there was shooting and police had reason to believe that kids were in harms way. The situations, while not identical in all regards, are close enough to demonstrate the point that law enforcement need to make these kind of calls on a case-by-case basis. Neither one approach nor the other will always be correct, and obviously the police won't always make the right call.
In Waco they did NOT have reason to believe the kids were in imminent danger. The imminent danger was from the FBI who started the fire that killed all those kids.
Neither side of this partisan dispute can conclusively prove their version of events about who started the fire. It may be the case that you're right, but you may also be wrong. You should at least be able to consider the implications of the hypothetical scenario in which the authorities made a good faith best effort to end the confrontation with a minimum loss of life but still failed despite this intent and effort. Even if you're pretty sure that isn't what happened here, the main point is that going in guns blazing is not necessarily the best solution to an armed standoff, and there may instead be situations in which waiting it out and letting hostage negotiators do their work is the best course of action.
Furthermore, the example of Uvalde demonstrates that waiting it out is not always the correct course of action. This proves that there isn't one single correct approach that can be applied to all situations. Law enforcement must be given the flexibility to respond on a case by case basis, because different circumstances may call for completely different approaches.
I agree with you that there isn't one correct approach in these situations. I can't agree that there was any possibility of authorities having made a good faith effort in the situation though. The government lost any shred of credibility and moral high ground when they brought M1 Abrams tanks into the situation. The children are in danger so we'll point a high powered tank cannon at the house? How will tanks save the children? Not to mention breaking the longstanding policy of not using military weapons against US citizens. That situation was an authoritarian massacre similar in style to Tiananmen Square.
You're conflating allegations of child abuse with hearing gunshots in an elementary school. These two situations are in no way "close enough to demonstrate" anything.
Waco was very plausibly perceived as a Johnstown scenario, in which the children would be subjected to a murder-suicide pact if another ending wasn't forced.
FWIW, I think you've made a clear, defensible point. I'm unsure if I agree with it, but given the exasperated/incredulous response you're getting, I'd pull the ripcord. People seem unwilling to engage in good faith here. But I appreciated your thoughts!
People are engaging in good faith, they are just emphatically disagreeing with the statement of the premise. "Good faith" doesn't require me to accept the thesis of the other person if it's a bad thesis. People are correctly identifying how the situations in Waco and Uvalde were extremely different.
Either you are being disingenuous here or you legitimately dont understand the difference. The authorities had no reason to suspect that children were being actively killed on a time sensitive basis in Waco. It was a PR dick-swinging contest that got all those 'victims' the feds cared about killed. The two are not even in the same galaxy, let alone the same ballpark.
Waco is politically contentious with hot takes mostly falling along partisan lines. Everybody likes to believe they know the truth about what happened, that this truth is evident to everybody else, and that anybody who claims to subscribe to a different narrative knows they're wrong about it but sticks with their version anyway for tribal political reasons.
I don't know what the law enforcement on the ground at Waco during those days truly believed, but I believe it is plausible they thought themselves in a violent confrontation with a cult that would rather die than surrender, and given that framing it is at least plausible they believed it would end in a Johnstown style murder-suicide pact if another ending wasn't forced quickly.
Maybe it wasn't really that sort of cult but they believed it was and acted on that belief. Maybe they were pretty sure the kids would be all unharmed but decided to go in anyway because they were bored or angry or psychopathic or something, and all their talk about saving the kids was just cynical excuse making. I don't know the truth for certain and I don't think you do either, but I believe it is at least plausible that law enforcement at Waco had good intentions and nevertheless failed to deliver a good outcome. If you're not willing to even consider the implications of that possibility, then I'm afraid you're lost to the politics of it.
While we can never know the motivations of the people who were burned alive as part of their rescue, we can in fact know the motivations of the feds because it was all pretty well documented. They were concerned that the branch dividians had illegal weapons. They never once mentioned any other motivation in any warrant application, memo, or otherwise. There was some frantic post hoc invented pearl clutching after the operation was bungled at a truely unprecedented level and excuses were needed to prevent embarrassment of powerful people, but none of that came up before the feds killed a bunch of children and needed to make a case why that was nessessary and part of a professional and skilled law enforcement operation.
There is a reason that event inspired generations of domestic terrorists, and it was not because the feds had the moral high ground and executed an efficient, well planned and researched operation.The overwhelming evidence is that Waco was about ATF agents getting to finally cosplay some of their deepest fan fictions and it got people killed. It was the moral equivalent of dropping a 1000 ton bomb on a crowded village in the middle east and being shocked when it produced a generation of fanatic jihadists. It was one of the stupidest and least professional things the feds have ever done, and that's an illustrious list.
That's a situation where the person in charge decided they were just not going to do their job and give orders, while everyone else thought it was OK to sit around and wait for orders.
After reading your articles, it looks like Wikipedia does not need to be updated at all.
The group is still indeed a nutty cult and while the gas used may contribute to a fire, there was evidence that the Davidians did start the fire, whether or not the gas helped it grow.
The police came to investigate the sexual abuse; the response was the murder of several agents, eventually leading to the stand-off. Easy to claim there is no evidence of sexual abuse if you murder anyone who investigates...
Whether the fire was accidentally started by the tear-gas or set by the Branch Davidians themselves isn't actually all that important in deciding if they're a wacky cult or not.
People from the cult did survive, did do interviews, and even brought lawsuits. A large group was released before the fires and nine more survived the entire incident. So maybe you aren’t as familiar as you think? Furthermore, we already know more than enough about the cult from _before_ the incident. It’s pretty clear they are a nutty cult.
But, I suspect none of what I wrote above matters to you. You’ll probably still say that it’s a conspiracy and the group was a normal gathering of people, ignoring all of the evidence to the contrary. So I’m not even sure what I hope to gain from this response.
As addressed in the upstream PBS summary and the released report linked here, arsom investigators concluded the fire started at multiple internal ignation points simultaneously etc. etc.
The report lists the physical evidence that led to that conclusion.
Naturally you can assert that the report was doctored and the evidence fabricated, others can then respond and ask where is your evidence <shrug>.
> A lot of guns drawn breaking down door situations could be made a lot less dangerous if police stop assuming they need to break in right now.
Sure, but "right now" is a matter of perspective. There just is not a great answer to hostages being taken by armed & violent criminals. At a certain point you either need to take the initiative, or you're just responding to an opponents initiative. The best case in a situation where the criminals don't give up is an indefinite and expensive situation where dozens of highly paid people stand by feeding pizza to terrorists with a Twitter/Cnn/Facebook simulcast. Someone has to make a move at some point.
That said, I do agree with you in principle. If you can get as much information as possible while building rapport, thats ideal. Unfortunately, this isn't always an option and it is very unlikely there will be a good outcome as both parties have diametrically opposed incentives. As you stall for time and gain reinforcements the bargaining power of your side goes up, forcing a more aggressive posture from the other party. That's sort of the Nash equilibrium here, a good outcome is probably an on the ground plea deal with limited violent exchange. Not agreeing violence is the answer but not every hostage taker is John Gruber or the Money Heist crew.
Edit: I think this was kind of the rationale on 9/11. Most hostage situations on planes were resolved without huge casualties[1] and then all of a sudden non-rational actors kamikaze the planes, not only killing themselves and the hostages, but using the plane as a weapon. There are a lot of versions of this happening that substantiate taking action. I'm glad I'll likely never have to call the shots on something like this.
Just two days ago there was a story about FinCEN requiring more information to be gathered and stored about the owners of LLCs, and the comment section had quite some discussion from people shocked that anyone would feel a need for privacy in home records. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39304312
How do we stop swatting? Maybe improved technical means for identifying false calls, maybe better judgment by law enforcement of what situations are dangerous, maybe stronger investigation and punishment of the callers.
But what can I do right now to keep me at lower risk of swatting? I can go the extreme privacy route, form shell corporations to own my assets without publicly associating them to my identity, and stripping out my info from as many data brokers as possible. That's hard, but it's doable for the upper middle class like many of us in tech.
I would love for it not to be necessary, and I'd love for these measures to be more accessible to people with less money than me. But I'm gonna keep taking these measures wherever I can.
We need national legislation to dramatically increase enforcement against death threats and swatting and other forms of harassment involving violence or threats of violence. There's plenty of laws on the books and in typical American fashion the potential prison sentences are already obscenely long. So no use jacking up the sentences, which is typically the only way politicians bother to address the 'crime of the week'.
Deterrence doesn't come from long prison sentences or comically large fines. Deterrence comes form having a high probability of actually getting caught and convicted! But with the mass increase of death threats and doxing has also comes the widespread realization that these are crimes you can get away with. The more it happens, the less the chance of getting caught. That is unless we fund and prioritize this type of enforcement.
The fact that there is no movement in Congress on this topic is baffling, considering those legislators are among the most common targets for violent harassment.
Because our congresspeople are tech illiterate and can't wrap their minds around this problem. Combine that with general anti-regulatory lobbyists padding their pockets.
Unfortunately that just leads to the territory being controlled by the deranged who are prepared to flip out and take everything to a 10.
It would be nice if we didn't cede the internet to that metaphorical crazy guy who lurks outside the gas station holding a crowbar and muttering to himself
Perhaps a good defense, but the target of the article didn't get into an internet argument with anyone, and he's still been targeted. Have to stay off the internet entirely.
The article doesn't discuss it, and I'm also wary of getting into it too much because it sounds like victim blaming, but the man from the article gets into internet arguments pretty much constantly. He's kept the attention of his various trolls by repeatedly engaging them.
Of course, arguing on the internet does not excuse trying to get him killed by the police. It does however provide important context on how to avoid getting swatted yourself.
If you're getting attacked by internet strangers with no empathy and a desire to hurt you for kicks then it's probably pretty effective to leave the internet, and if you can't leave the internet you can still stop talking to them. This is not a justification for their actions in any way. Still, the article implicitly leans into the It Could Happen To You angle, and it's very unlikely to happen to someone who doesn't get into internet arguments under their real name when their personal income is also at stake.
I have no idea what language the people attacking him use. "Don't feed the trolls" is a decades old aphorism by now. It works. Most of us don't need to be afraid - to let the Intercept and a 17 year old with a telegram channel add another source of fear to our lives.
I guess I am imagining something different when I read "Internet argument". I picture those long two-poster Reddit threads going back and forth angrily calling each other names and essentially saying "no, you're wrong".
I never imagined engaging a "hot take" with a cogent argument to have any effect in changing opinions, especially when the response is intense anger.
Lock up the people calling in the fake threats, of course. But there also has to be a conversation about how anyone can summon armed men to anyone else’s house. Seems like it’s a bad enough problem that police departments should reconsider how they respond.
Police departments will of course respond that all of this is necessary as a precaution, but at a certain point it’s unsustainable and produces worse outcomes.
Each time they’re called out on a fake incident, they get to call it a successful resolution as a result of deploying their swat team. This then gives them an end of year that says “swat is highly effective in resolving situations”, which then allows a budgetary increase and more gear for the swat team.
I have been reading this thread for far too long, and this is the best comment. The one that explains my vast confusion as to why it could happen 47 times to one address.
Can I please put myself on this Do Not SWAT list? I’d be interested in putting myself on a Do Not Help list, too, if possible. Any police interaction brings with it a small probability of a deadly outcome. Would be nice to be able to opt out of their “help.”
Despite was sovern citizens may say, you can not opt-out of police services in the U.S. If you're well known on the Internet, let your local polic department know you may be targeted with swatting. It's worked for people in the past to soften the response. If you haven't already been swatted it's unlikely your profile is such that you'd be tarted.
Paranoid people are not allowed to opt out of police help because it is a negative externality to the neighbors and society for police to respond to reports of crime at a particular residence.
The police here only know three things - no knock raid with automatic weapons, not pulling over reckless drivers, and shooting unarmed black men. That is all they do.
And if the people calling in fake threats are doing so over hacked VOIP? It's not really like the old days where a phone meant you were somewhere in particular.
The particular elephant in the room is it is the cops get called to hundreds of locations (per department) per year that are actual violent confrontations, with domestic abuse being the most common type. That huge numbers of Americans are armed doesn't help the situation any.
> It's not really like the old days where a phone meant you were somewhere in particular.
The phone NEVER meant you were in a particular place. It was possible to route calls from switch to switch, and could even contact the operator posing as a line tech to have them make a connection for you. You must be too young to remember the good old days
The FCC mandates signatures to try to shift responsibility to call originators:
> The FCC requires that all voice service providers certify in the Robocall Mitigation Database that they have fully implemented STIR/SHAKEN or have instituted a robocall mitigation program to ensure that they are not originating illegal robocalls. To further protect consumers, gateway providers – those serving as the entry point for foreign calls into the United States – must both implement STIR/SHAKEN and institute a robocall mitigation program. All providers are required to submit to this public database the contact information for the personnel at their company responsible for robocall-mitigation related issues.
The FCC can mandate all they want, but if you keep finding people willing to sell you SS7 access under the table there is nothing the FCC can do about it.
Doing so should be the death penalty for the telco/telco's access to the network. I don't care if it's ATT, they'll shape up if this is seriously enforced.
Lock up the people responsible at the companies allowing anonymous VOIP calls to 911. If the ultimately responsible party is overseas or untraceable, the company at the end of what was able to be traced assumes responsibility.
They're not calling 911 over VOIP, they're calling the listed local police lines[0].
>The belief that these are false 911 calls or the narratives that these are 911 calls needs to change, because they’re not calling the 911 system. They’re not able to call 911. They’re calling the main line or the visible nonemergency number listed on the internet for a lot of these police departments and these dispatches.
This article explains the issue and is a good read.
I'd love to see the stats on real vs. fake reports on 911 vs. the local line, because it sounds dumb as hell to respond with SWAT to the local line.
Anyway, yeah, like the other commenter mentioned, treat the local police lines the same.
Actually, treat all calls to any number the same. Carriers should be required to understand provenance for every single call. All nuisance calls get fines or jail time. If the carrier cannot locate a responsible party, the carrier themselves are liable.
911 handles multiple non-police emergency services, though. Also, 911 is way easier to remember than a full local number, and works outside your home city.
I meant literally substitute "local non-emergency police line" for "911" in this comment:
"Lock up the people responsible at the companies allowing anonymous VOIP calls to 911"
It shouldn't matter if these spoofed calls are going to 911 or to the local non-emergency line. They shouldn't be sending swat for spoofed calls from other states. The comment I was responding to seemed to imply that there's some meaningful difference that the calls are coming through the local non-emergency line. There really shouldn't be any difference in terms of what response these spoofed calls generate.
As a sibling points out, they're using the local lines.
But you don't need anonymous VoIP. You just buy a burner phone with cash. In the US, carriers are required to route emergency calls even if the phone has no SIM card in it, or if you do have a SIM, but your phone can only see a carrier network you don't have permission to use. The idea being emergencies trump silly things like whether or not you've paid your phone bill or picked the "right" carrier for that location. Or if, say, your SIM card got damaged or dislodged in the accident that caused you to need emergency services.
And I think this is a good thing. But it's of course a vector for abuse, too.
I read that interview. They also think it is ridiculous to respond with SWAT to those local line calls. But companies should be liable for those as well. Let's have accountability. Let's make them liable for all calls that they don't fully understand the origin of.
If swatters had to buy burner phones instead of using a free trial on a VOIP service, first of all the price and effort would put this out of range for the typical teenage griefer. Furthermore then the phone call itself would be traceable to a cell tower so people who did a number of these could be tracked down and prosecuted. I think a carrier tracing back to a physical device could fulfill what I am asking for.
Edit: also, similar to how I feel about the payphones comment; let's simply not send a SWAT team out when the caller is nowhere near the area of the reported crime.
You know what would be a great policy? Not sending SWAT teams when the call reporting whatever situation is coming from a phone physically on the other side of the state.
> When smoking move out of bars most bars seemed to close.
Pretty good outcome, IMO. If you can't make money without giving all your customers cancer, even if they don't smoke... maybe you shouldn't be in business.
Almost 20 years ago I got to talking to a sheriff in Texas who lamented that no one ever showed up to the boring important domestic disturbance calls. But when there was a call where there was even a slight chance a Taser could be deployed the squad cars were lined up in droves.
So I'm confused here. The poster you're responding to here says "this shouldn't work the way that it currently does" and your response is "this currently does work that way"? Like are you saying a change in police response policy is self-evidently impossible? If not, what are you trying to say?
Ostensibly a government service is supposed to be modifiable by the will of the electorate or someone representing it. Of course we don't expect them to relinquish power voluntarily. When people propose changing policy to modify how an organization behaves, they generally do not mean by asking them nicely to please do it differently
Tangential: the article notes that Telegram is an “encrypted messaging app”. While this is technically true, it's worth keeping in mind that it's not end-to-end encrypted, so it's less secure in that regard than, say, Signal or even WhatsApp. Telegram does have opt-in end-to-end encrypted one-on-one chats, but those are very inconvenient to use.
For a properly encrypted chat app, including group chats (opt-in), try Matrix instead: https://matrix.org/
Also their cryptography some claim is a little bit hand rolled and doesn't work quite like the rest some people have pointed to it potentially being intentional by bad actors.
Just imagine if kids can easily swat and break into users telecom accounts all the time, what foreign intelligence services can do. Telecom companies are not taking security seriously at a criminally negligence level.
A good article overall, but why no examination into the incentives for the same department to keep swatting? Makes you wonder who’s really to blame for this poor man’s harrowing and absurd experience.
Can someone explain to me how this happens? Don’t law enforcement get suspicious when you get sent to the same house, incorrectly say after the third time? Why would they go back 44 more times?
You are assuming cops are competent, incentivized to perform well, interested in self improvement and organizational improvement, and don't enjoy being deployed this way.
In reality, cops are just another gang who have permission to do whatever violence they want and will get whatever budget they want and have zero incentives to perform their jobs well.
Modern bureaucracy has incentives to avoid any discretion. They will take your 500th 911 call, 5000th asylum claim, or 50th arrest and treat you exactly the same as Joe Citizen filing claim #1. It's ridiculous.
My impression is that’s only one half of the story. If you look at some of the subreddits where he’s mentioned he’s basically turned into a lolcow. Lolcows are essentially terminally online people that are made fun of (up to cyber bullying, real life stalking and swatting) on websites like kiwifarms and reddit. The most famous lolcow that you may have heard of is Chris Chan.
This is not to defend the terrible things being done to this guy, but if he just went dark people would lose interest/age out of fucking with him. What gives a lolcow longevity and notability is their continuance to post weird stuff and actively engage with their bullies.
So if this comment and its parent are accurate, then the tweet was not a joke, and it was not the sole motive for the attacks. Making the headline inaccurate in at least two respects.
Freedom of expression is a thing. And while freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences (a concept I absolutely believe in), those consequences have to be in line with other basic rights. In this case, this would be the right of security at your home, protection from mental and bodily harm among others. A mob, online or not, is nothing that society should accept.
Putting the blame on Lolcows is classic victim blaming, and a capitulation before an online mob. Quite often actively or passivley supported by courts, judges and police.
> This is not to defend the terrible things being done to this guy, but if he just went dark people would lose interest/age out of fucking with him.
It's my understanding that he flagrantly disregards law-enforcement's advice. Any time he is tweeted at — let alone SWATed — he makes a large public spectacle. He often compulsively replies to every single person on Twitter, including branded company accounts, accusing them of being criminal stalkers.
To reiterate, that is in no way a defense of what people are doing to him, but he is by no means doing himself any favours by how he reacts. Though, how a police department can be so incompetent that they continually respond to phony calls is beyond me.
Sadly, yes. He's rightfully pissed off — and I don't think victims of harassment should have to go dark online or isolate themselves — but the reaction and the spectacle is usually what the perpetrators want. The old adage "don't feed the trolls" exists for a reason (see also, "grey rock method").
With torswats in custody, hopefully no one else is dumb enough to pick up where he left off.
> Their relief was short-lived. A new Telegram channel named “Torswats Return” was created by someone claiming that their “partner has been arrested”, according to posts viewed by The Independent.
> The channel stated that it would continue offering “swats” for as little as $40, and offered returning customers a discounted rate. It also posted derogatory photographs and text about Mr Tomlinson — noting that there would be no charge for requested swats against him.
> “And of course swats to Patrick… are free,” read the Telegram message.
Yeah. It’s the bullying feedback loop - there would be no point in bullying someone if you didn’t get a reaction out of them. If you reliably freak out in a grandiose way you’re just reinforcing yourself as a good bullying target by providing entertainment for your bullies.
As I've said, I cannot excuse the swatters or police for this behavior. It's clearly unacceptable. I'm merely trying to explain why someone would be targeted like this to begin with - because they provide a consistent source of entertainment for the swatters. It's not solely because of a random comment on Twitter.
The charitable take is that it's advice on how a victim could react in such a situation to minimize further harm. Similar to how police typically recommend that victims of armed robbery not attempt to resist. Of course it is not the victim's fault they are in that situation. Perhaps GP could have phrased it better...
FWIW Kiwi Farms is more observe and report and doesn't condone harassing people, that's especially true of Chris Chan. Some of the biggest "lolcows" in recent years have been trolls who posted about their exploits online and shared enough about themselves to be identified.
The way to make it make sense: there is a large group of people out there who essentially, have failed to launch. They are unemployed or have deadend jobs. They watch tons of internet porn but may have never had sexual intercourse with a woman. They have few or zero real life friends. They are obese or feeble-bodied. They have no real life skills or vital energy. The one way they can feel alive, like a "player character," is by hitting someone, but not in a boxing gym (see above), on the Internet.
The Norm Macdonald tweet isn't "triggering," they've already been triggered and are looking for their next victim. The Norm Macdonald Tweet is like raising your hand and saying "it's me."
Weird stuff about weight and virginity aside, I don't find it reductive to say there are people who have wasted their lives and can't process it well. This is a pretty apt description of a certain demographic on Steam. I've spent time in a lot of clans and it's pretty shocking to find what underachieving people are willing to do to people online if they encourage each other.
> Prosecutors say the 6ft 3in teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response”, and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.
Did his stature make him more intimidating through the Internet shadows?
General thought brought about by TFA, not commenting specifically on TFA.
Lately I've been wondering about contemporary expressions of opinion.
When I was much younger these was a oft-used chestnut 'Opinions are like assholes; everyone has one'[0]. To my mind, one's opinion was an entry point to a journey of dialogue, not a terminus.
I get that the level of effort to post one's opinion is low, and the resultant distribution high.
Why do we think our opinion should be widely disseminated? Does the world need to know my opinion on a topic, or is posting motivated by other factors, e.g. vanity?
The problem is that the people that do this face no real punishment. At some point, the only way to get it to stop is to take the law into your own hands (if the police are either unable or unwilling to stop it).
> Mr Tomlinson told The Independent he had woken in the middle of the night to find officers banging on his door, been handcuffed, and had guns shoved in his face during the yearslong ordeal. He was once swatted four times in one day.
Are officers and government actually involved in these Swat operations like mentally challenged or something? I mean ... after couple of hours you forget you've just been in the same place and the whole report was a fake?
> Are officers and government actually involved in these Swat operations like mentally challenged or something?
Yes. Each SWAT call is just an excuse to play soldier, the chance they never got because they couldn’t pass the ASVAB to become real soldiers.
Competent police departments maintain a list of common swatting targets. Any time an address on that list gets called in, they have a number to call to check before sending armed officers. Four dozen times is beyond incompetence.
This seems like an incredibly broad generalisation. It happens even in the UK where (except for Northern Ireland) most officers are not armed with any firearm.
At least to a layman not at all versed in firearms, armed police responses in the UK look a lot like SWAT teams in the US and feel similarly intense, but perhaps there are material differences here. I’m genuinely not sure.
Headline notwithstanding, nothing in the article implies the armed police forced their way into the home. Rather, the spokeswoman appears to imply that armed officers were present as a precaution but did not engage, which is consistent with the neighbours' comments.
It's definitely unclear, but there's also no evidence from the article that the armed police were not among the officers that "stormed the address," as the article states. They were also visible outside, and it would be unusual to see police with rifles in the UK (or the US, for that matter) so it makes sense that neighbours noted that, but the article title as you said points in the direction of armed officers raiding the home.
To be clear, my point is not to draw a false equivalence between armed police raids in the UK and the US. I would, however, say that the problem of appropriately responding to a potential armed threat isn't exactly solved in either country, if that's even possible.
> "No action will be taken against the occupants of a Hemel Hempstead home that was raided by armed police after a mystery phone call."
> "One witness described armed officers going inside a home shortly before putting two people inside the home in handcuffs and in the back of a police car."
Do you know what SWAT responses entail? It's kick down the door, assault rifles and body armor, shoot if you perceive a threat level response. Police shoot swatting targets sometimes because they have itchy trigger fingers.
Considering the frequency, you'd think at least some areas would have established a sort of "false report database" to keep track of locations where fake calls were made, but yeah, either way it's not like they're engaged in SWAT responses multiple times per day/week/month in most localities.
While this could have been worded a little differently, I think the core point is valid. What on earth is going on in law enforcement that they can get four anonymous tip-offs for the same address on the same day and not, by the fourth time, think "hey, we've already arrested this guy three times today, maybe he's not suddenly going to have become a heavily armed criminal since 2pm when we last checked."
1) The department could have a policy that considers all calls real threats. For example lets say you target a business that carries a lot of cash with swatting. You fatigue the cops with swatting until they no longer respond. Then you rob the place.
2) The cops don't like the guy. Couple that with number 1 and you get the perfect shitstorm situation for the victim.
> 1) The department could have a policy that considers all calls real threats. For example lets say you target a business that carries a lot of cash with swatting. You fatigue the cops with swatting until they no longer respond. Then you rob the place.
It's not that you no longer respond. What competent orgs do is establish that there is a swatting risk after the first incident (or after the individual notifies them), call the phone of a known good number at the residence/business to verify that things are okay, and then send a patrol car to the residence/business as a final safety check.
It's really not super complicated. You treat it like a real threat but with a known risk of impersonation/fake threats. And importantly you don't jump straight to the kicking down doors and swinging vases SWAT response but rather gradually ratchet up the response as red flags appear.
I'd never try that strategy for robbing a cash business. They would have been gotten civil asset forfeited after the first call, leaving nothing for any other crooks.
They are responding to a reported incident that allegedly requires a highly armed response, finding a sleeping man, and handcuffing him anyway. They shouldn't be doing that even once. An anonymous phone call is not probable cause.
If they stopped responding, then fake SWAT calls would end being a great way to stage a violent assault. Just make a dozen fake threats to the same address, wait for the cops to lose interest, then attack.
>Are officers and government actually involved in these Swat operations like mentally challenged or something?
Obviously, the same officers have been to his house 47 times. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me, fool me 47 times I'm mentally challenged....
Meanwhile, the FAA is currently looking for applicants with "Severe intellectual disability" as you can see from: https://www.faa.gov/pwdp
This older case has also been going around lately - https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/brigida-v-unite... - in which people cheated on a biographical test that 90% of people were expected to fail in order to pull in fellow organization members.
So I think the real answer is that many of our public agencies have been selecting against competence for quite some time now.
They gave people "applying for FAA jobs, the correct answers to select on the BQ as well as key words to use on their resumes in order to be selected by FAA hiring personnel"
So the teenager allegedly tried to murder him 47 times! using the police. And somebody in their circle claimed that this will not stop until he was killed?. Wow.
If the culprit was this child's, he is seriously broken inside, and will end very bad.
Their parents should pay for each time the police is mobilized for nothing, and the child should be forbidden by a judge to have access to any phone, computer or tablet for a decade [1].
[1] (Preferentially on a jail for reiterate homicide attempt).
There's so many levels to this. The people calling in the swats are obviously terrible people with no empathy for anyone.
But beyond that, is it that easy to get a swat team sent in? There's no initial contact with the person who is being subject to arrest?
And then do the police have the memory of a goldfish? No one says, "Hey, isn't this the house we've been to a ton and it was always a false alarm?"
He’s not being harassed by the swatters. He’s being terrorized by the police. It’s important to call out the blame shifting stance authorities like to take. You don’t kick someone’s door 47 times and say someone tricked us into it. Their communication problems and general amnesia are intentional at this point.
He's absolutely being harassed by swatters. They call the police to get him swatted. Not to mention that on top of swatting, there is impersonation going on AND they are targeting others as well - like his parents.
He's ALSO being terrorized by the police, who are more inclined to cosplay with guns and make people fear than to actually do anything about their broken system or be held accountable at all. They absolutely cannot play ignorance - the are basically in an alliance with the swatters. Swatter calls it in, they wink and nod and follow through.
The police are being hacked by the swatters, and not exercising due diligence.
The swatters are taking advantage of the police because it is somehow acceptable for police to show up a a residence in full battle gear, when the resident has no criminal record and there is no known probable cause to use such deadly force.
Swat should be rarely, if ever used. Instead they're used in more than 90% of these cases.
There is literally no downside to the judges who approve these actions, or to the police who conduct them.
They may even be justifying their budget, or receiving larger budgets, due to how many times they “have” to respond with lots of manpower and expensive equipment.
Wait so if someone calls in and says “hey this guy across the street keeps rolling in barrels and barrels of explosives and what looks like rifles and ammunition,” you’re thinking they should be sending a patrol officer over to knock on the door?
It’s obviously trivial to produce whatever kind of report is necessary to justify a SWAT response.
I had some friends have the cops called on them during college because they were laying out their (real looking) airsoft guns and gear out on their beds.
They sent police in SWAT gear, but they still politely knocked. They were let in, saw what was actually going on, talked to them about how neat the guns were, and that was that.
There’s a middle ground that’s probably acceptable to most.
Yeah, agreed. It can be true that SWAT is overused, that this guy shouldn't be able to get swatted 40+ times, that even when SWAT is used they're probably excessively aggressive and undertrained, and that "stop sending SWAT to extremely serious calls" is a ridiculously laughable solution to swatting.
You would expect them to learn after a couple of times that it's not a legit report, so yes 47 times would be entirely police getting played like a bunch of five year olds. Which I hope you'll agree is not good.
That’s not what I’m responding to, obviously. This is what GP said:
it is somehow acceptable for police to show up a a residence in full battle gear, when the resident has no criminal record and there is no known probable cause to use such deadly force.
Swat should be rarely, if ever used. Instead they're used in more than 90% of these cases.
—-
All of that is obviously bullshit if you spend 45 seconds thinking about reality.
Obviously there is an infinite number of different calls to police that can justify an aggressive, armed, SWAT response to someone previously unknown to law enforcement.
No. Cops should not even be carrying deadly weapons of any kind. Maybe tasers. Mayber pepper spray.
We have a legal system for a reason. Giving a cop any lethal weapon is passive acceptance that he may circumvent the legal system and put himself in the position of judge jury and executioner. This is wrong and erodes trust in police and the judicial system vastly more than any other issue. No cops should have guns, not "SWAT" team, not beat cops, none.
What’re you talking about? We’re discussing how in this particular case it would be trivial for the police department to see that this house has been SWATed 47 (!) times, which obviously means there’s something going on. How do you get from that to a school shooter executing students (what a horrible image to use for your argument so it’s based on emotion, and accusing people who disagree with you of being OK with school shootings). There’s place for nuance, esp when guns and lives are involved.
Because the GGP, to whom I replied, made much broader claims which I’ve already cited above. The more immediate GP doubled down and clarified the (insane) belief that cops should NEVER be armed, except perhaps tasers and pepper spray.
So to clarify its totally fine for police to act as judge jury and executioner if the crime is bad enough? Screw the whole legal process and the idea of trials, juries and the rule of law generally? At this point why do we even have a judicial apparatus? Just give cops carte blanche to do whatever they see fit, since we dont care about the rule of law anyway.
I am confused about what the guns are for if not for killing people.
It seems like you already said you dont believe in just circumventing due process and the judicial system so I am just at a total loss in trying to understand why the police would need guns. Maybe killing dogs?
I sure do! It may also surprise you to hear that I fully support private citizens being able to own and carry guns.
I feel like perhaps I am not communicating my point well here. By giving police guns we are implying that we as a society are OK with them using those weapons. By using those weapons they are likely to kill people. By killing people they are acting as judge jury and executioner. This would seem to imply that we as a society are totally fine with police circumventing the judiciary system.
The argument of course is that cops need guns to protect themselves. Unfortunately guns do not stop bullets. A gun is going to do nothing to stop a cop being shot. Unless they use that gun on the shooter. Thereby again acting as judge jury and executioner. Do you see the problem here?
> All of that is obviously bullshit if you spend 45 seconds thinking about reality.
> Obviously there is an infinite number of different calls to police that can justify an aggressive, armed, SWAT response to someone previously unknown to law enforcement.
People are really watching too many action movies. There are essentially no scenarios that justify responding to a residential area using essentially military gear. The obvious thing to do is first confirm and assess the situation, no assault rifles needed.
The biggest irony is that in the situations where police could have actually used heavy gear to save lifes (Uvalde, note it didn't need to be the initial response either), they rather waited outside not risk any injuries to themselves. Just goes to show they just want to play tough guy in situations with little risk.
The real intention of the police could be to respond to each call and swat just to assure that as many charges as possible are accumulated and billed to the culprit later.
Everything is reported and recorded so the police actions, that are torturing the victim, also dig the hole deeper and deeper for the criminal. The harm done is obvious and allow asking for damage compensations. At that level of reckless no judge could dismiss it as just child's play.
Keep swatting also reward the criminals that are watching. This is not necessarily a bad thing. To keep them engaged and interested on the game is a must for the police, that therefore increase their chances to complete patterns and chase them slowly one by one.
>I don’t understand why you want to let the swatters off the hook. They should absolutely be going to jail.
the police aren't mindless drones -- when they act like they are it's a problem that is greater than the thing that initiated it.
Yes, the swatters are bad -- but the consistency of this response and the absolute trust in the pseudo-anonymous report every single time is absolutely baffling ; like Clancy Wiggums or Frank Drebin baffling; it's just rolling the dice until an innocent is killed while pointing fingers at some boy who cried wolf while knowing that the boy is full of shit.
Care where the idea that we have to let anybody off the hook comes from?
As I see it just because we shift the focus to the lower level (the layer executing the swats) we don't have to automatically let anybody off the hook on the higher levels. We can have both.
My comment was not intended to let swatters of the hook. My point was that the harassment should be called “attempted harassment”, because it should never have been effective, although still punishable.
That’s still harassment - the clear intention was to at best harass and at worst get them killed. You can support more responsible use of force by police while still recognizing that these guys were looking for a weapon to hurt someone and SWATing was the option they chose.
And even if they were not acting in that intention, knowingly calling emergency when there isn't one is a drain on resources that might be needed elsewhere.
Nobody mentioned letting anyone off the hook. That's a very internet thing to claim your opponent has said.
The question is pragmatic: are you going to surveil and psychologically analyze everyone in the world in order to detect and pre-crime imprison everyone who might potentially call in a false tip anonymously, or are you going to control your police forces so they don't attack people with sometimes deadly force based solely on anonymous tips?
> are you going to surveil and psychologically analyze everyone in the world in order to detect and pre-crime imprison everyone
No one suggested this; strawman.
There are a whole lot of ways to harass someone using proxies beyond swatting and the traditional ordering of 40 pizzas to their house. Even if any given proxy only falls for it once it can be really bad.
Coming up with ways to counter these kinds of harassment campaigns is important, but it probably doesn't involve "pre-crime imprison[ment]".
Many police departments have upper IQ limits for officers that’s only slightly above average. Since leadership is promoted from internal ranks, that also causes ineffective leadership.
This sounds crazy but this has been documented at least once, as far as I can tell. This link describes a court case where a candidate for a police force was rejected on the basis of having too high an IQ:
If you look at the culture of police in the US, the department policies that they enforce, and the laws that they enforce, it begins to make more sense. An intelligent person would not fit into existing police culture very well (because of the IQ restriction policies that have been in place). There are many police departments with awful internal policies (racist, illegal, anti-civilian), that a smart person wouldn't want to enforce, and of course so many laws in the US are just bonkers. Civil asset forfeiture, no knock raids, broken windows policing, drug evidence planting, CYA charges, these are all awful practices that are routinely done at PDs across the US, in some case documented as PD policy. An intelligent person would want to fix these problems, make a difference. This would of course hurt the PD's bottom line, their arrest stats, would cast former and current police in a bad light.
To further one of your points, there is very much pressure to keep closure rates up by pinning it on the most-plausible suspect even if you have doubts, and letting the DA sort it out. The DA does not always sort it out, and if it looks like an easy case then that someone gets railroaded.
Obviously this is not ideal at the police level (who should find the truth, not someone to blame) but some more accountability is warranted within the judicial system too. All incentives here are perverse, yet lack of them results in fuckall getting done.
The inability or unwillingness of so many people to accept that multiple actors all be to blame for their part without that necessarily leaving one side off the hook is so frustrating and I think also very dangerous
>I don’t understand why you want to let the swatters off the hook. They should absolutely be going to jail.
Because they're irrelevant to the situation. The swatters could be a compulsive person with mental illness.
Or dozens of different people, because it become some internet fad or something to target this person, that's impossible to stop.
Or untrackable "hackers".
The police has no excuse to come in SWATing in the first place without verification of the actual situation, much less keep swatting additional times, and in no civilized environment would it do it even 10 times, much less 47.
>They’re not irrelevant to the situation. In fact, they’re the people who have malicious intent.
Let's put it this way, they're not irrelevant to the particular situation, but they're irrelevant to the real problem, which is the "open for abuse" system of SWATing, and the problematic management it gets from the police.
Fixing that helps society at large (plus helps this guy).
Whereas getting those guys just solves this particular guy's problem.
I just want to highlight: we really need to do both.
Police response to these types of calls is faulty. The Milwaukee police are definitely particularly deficient in continuing to fall for this and not taking corrective action.
But there's myriad ways to harass people through proxies-- SWATing is only one. We need to be put in the effort to catch and punish people engaging in these stalking and harassing behaviors, because we'll never harden our society against all of these.
We have laws in place for this type of thing, but that's not to say that law enforcement generally cares.
It would take _years_ to get the police to put their house in order. So why not go after swatters as well in the meantime? Most swatters are repeat offenders.
And once the police have cleaned up their act… do you believe former swatters will quietly become law abiding citizens? I don’t. They’ll find some other way to ruin people’s lives, hopefully a less dangerous way.
We could also ask, why do swatters swat in the first place anyway? How could we prevent them from wanting to do such a thing?
Shutting down communities (as in shutting down a subreddit in this case) is not a popular idea but I wonder if it's not the only viable response.
I think communities can police themselves if there is an incentive to do so (or rather disincentive not to). I know of plenty of communities with strict rules of conduct because frankly they worry about being shut down. Any community around MAME for example will likely have rules against "asking for ROMs".
> don’t understand why you want to let the swatters off the hook. They should absolutely be going to jail.
Care to explain why criticizing the police should amount to "letting the swatters off the hook"? This is nothing that automatically follows unless we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
If you jail one swatter there will be another one, and one after. If the police/dispatch gets their house in order you fix the problem on a systemic level and swatting becomes harder for all swatters.
So yeah if this should be fixed: punish swatters and avoid situations where one guy gets 47 swats without the police realizing they are played for fools each single time.
As much as I dislike police and as weird as I find the idea that police in the US kicks down doors without checking whether the danger even exists — the officer on the ground might not be the one to make that judgement.
Sure, if it happens 47 times I would expect them to add a big red flag aka "first check if danger is present" to the dispatch adress after the second false alarm — and one can blame dispatch for that. But if you are a different officer each time and you are told there is a sociopathic murder taking place in that house that you have never seen, how is it your fault to assume dispatch did their job here.
This is a systemic issue:
- anonymous contacts of emergency services is possible, so swatters abuse this without having to fear immidiate punishment
- dispatch aparantly has no mechanism of linking knowledge between different calls. E.g. if this is the 3rd time we are dispatching swat to that address they should tell the officers that it might be a fake, or don't even dispatch officers at all. However attackers could use this to then go there for real and punch/kill our victim without having to fear police being called there
- police officers don't do a good job at the assessment of the situation before they kick doors in. This isn't always an easy call to make
Ok yeah people have tried several times to unsuccessfully SWAT sitting members of Congress. Like clearly there is a list of addresses like "this address belongs to a Congress person, proceed with caution." Dispatch should add OP to this list.
However, it is the job of the officer to investigate. I doubt it is the officer's first day in life in the United States. They know how things work here.
Yeah, cities hate paying out for police officers who get hurt and disabled on the job and have decided it is cheaper to pay for "bad apples" than to have a police force that shows humanity. This we have this situation where police officers shoot to preserve their own life just in case the suspect is armed (a valid assumption when getting hold of a gun is easy).
> police officers don't do a good job at the assessment of the situation before they kick doors in. This isn't always an easy call to make
The officer on the ground is indeed the one making a determination to kick the door in over nothing but a phone call. I don't see why they shouldn't be held accountable.
I'm tired of all the QI and associated bullshit. Violating someone's constitutional rights should come with consequences.
A funny thing to note, QI only applies to civil lawsuits. So, it only applies in circumstances where they've already decided there is no criminal activity. So a secondary issue here is the legal system has decided that pretty much anything a cop does is legal.
Them officers should have noticed how many times they were called to raid a same home earlier but no they continued...
On slightly unrelated note, i found court documents related to the swatter "Torswats" (though pages are plastered with "unofficial") and shit is crazy to say the least, especially on materials found by detectives and cops. Such material are messages from Torswats and cops handpicked his diatribes against jews, government officials, homosexuals, black people and ukrainians.
It's a linguistic phenomenon where when two words happen so often in combination then the one that least frequently stands alone ends up acquiring the meaning of the whole combination.
I think i messed up that one. I wanted to specify which ethnic groups he was hating in his messages that showed up in court documents so certain details are not missed out.
I feel like he should be able to sue the cops for negligent infliction of emotional distress. Although from the article it looks like he already went to court once before and lost.
I quite agree, I believe the police must have heard of the swatters long ago and kept terrorising the person, I just checked the Torswats channel on Telegram and saw the Torswats return channel alive and the owner claiming swats to the said person is free. It is ridiculous this should be going on and on in a civilised society.
It adds to the count of incidents responded to. Given that they don't actually encounter anything I doubt it'll justify purchasing of a departmental M1 Abrams but I could see it being spun for negotiation of additional SWAT officer hours or a new training facility or something.
There are plenty of YouTubers swatted whose response is significantly downgraded after 2 or 3 false calls. I think DarkSydePhil just gets a welfare check (no pun intended) at this point.
It’s obvious that they are taking such calls as an opportunity to train.
The nice thing is that they get more and more familiar with the place and so can be more and more efficient in case that man really gets in trouble one day
He is also being harasser directly by the swatters.
>He says they have stalked and impersonated him, defaced his home, and continue to send a daily avalanche of abusive phone calls, voicemail messages and emails.
> swat your own house
> your house now has swat immunity
> swat every house in the country
> no house can be swatted again anymore
> swat officers lose their job
At one point the article quotes the force, saying that they must take all calls as credible, and investigate.
I can just imagine.. guy gets swatted, then the cops stop coming, then he gets attacked for real ..
And at the same time, the officers responding have a right to protect themselves, which means treating it as credible.
Of course the middle ground is they respond as if real, except they just talk to the guy.
The problem 100% is the swatters. They should get decades in jail for repeated calls like this. And yes the swatters are harassing the guy, regardless of the police issue, any other stance is absurd.
And yes, the police should be working with the victim.
Not 100% at all. Look at Brian Krebs from krebsonsecurity.com. The perps he's exposing have repeatedly tried to SWAT him. He says it's no use because he is on good terms with his local PD and they check with him now before they send someone. I doubt it took 47 times to arrive at that arrangement.
> saying that they must take all calls as credible, and investigate
If "investigate" is limited to "send in team", then criminals can exploit this by calling in a dozen or so fake cases on the far side of the police jurisdiction to where they're actually going.
How exactly do these criminals get access to personal information and addresses exactly?
If you are in an online game using some pseudonym, your IP address is hidden, how do you find a city/street address?
Secondly unless the victim was giving out the address willy-nilly, most IPs don't point to actual locations/addresses just general vicinity and if you use a mobile carrier, even very very far away.
If you're a home owner in the US, the information about your real estate transaction is public information. And even if it isn't, the Zillow's of the world have that information online anyway.
All you need is a name, and if you want a bit more targeted search the municipality of the home.
I just recently searched for my home purchase information online, because it would've taken me longer to dig up the closing documents. It took me 2 minutes.
From reading the article it seems the authorities won't or can't figure out the perpetrators. A California judge denied the victim's request for Cloudflare to unmask the blog owner under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and even forced the victim to pay the blogger's legal fees. Seems like the current system is not only unprepared to protect people from online abuse, but even punishes the victims.
`“Out of an abundance of caution, MPD has a duty to respond to calls for service in order to ensure that no one is in danger and that the necessary precautions are taken into consideration during these incidents.”`
The phrase "abundance of caution" is a tell for doing something stupid.
Shouldn't we go after the people actually committing the crime? Swatting does not occur because of corporations. It occurs because a few people abuse the emergency response system. The fix is to punish people who abuse the system. Preferably with long jail sentences.
> and they all face disciplinary action for dereliction of duty.
I can find no examples that this happens to US Police.
In several minutes of skimming forums with US Police commenting on variations on this question they seem to all agree that it is safer, career wise, to do nothing than it is to do something that they can be blamed for or that can be viewed as insubordinate, etc.
I think it’s a question of how they show up. After the pattern has been establish, they this is a prank, it should be more of a wellness check than kicking down doors.
While one of the richest countries in the world, there are risks to life in the US of A which are totally unknown to the rest of the Western world. I wouldn't move there long-term either for any amount of money.
A lot of my friends did not want to move USA, but security is a major concern. 3x more likely to die on road, 10x violent crime, 20x from overdose. Most people will encounter accidents, crime and other problems in their lives. It is not an anomaly.
We're not only talking about swatting. Add to that death due to firearms, drug epidemic, extraordinary rate of incarceration per capita. There are a lot of statistical coincidences and anomalies, at some point you gotta ask whether it's worth the risk.
If I were living in sub-Saharian Africa, would it make sense to move to the US? Without a doubt. From the United Kingdom or the Netherlands? Ehhh, I don't know about that. These statistical differences would have a much bigger weight given all the other similarities.
Most of the pull of the US is due to propaganda rather than actual increased standards of living. "The land of the free" and all.
Yep, I was basically invited to great careers at top universities in the US and turned them down simply because of how much I dislike the country itself regarding these matters
Yeah the cops are negligent. Now scale this across the entire country and tell me BLM doesn't have a point.
"How could this happen?!?" The cops are willfully stupid thugs who are willing to be cruel and violent for an easy paycheck. Worst trained police force in the developed world.
This is the problem we have. The cops don't care. They just don't.
About 1,000 times a year out of over 300,000,000 people. It needs to stop, but it is not a factor in the lives of normal people. It’s accepted because there are 500,000,000 guns in America, so the idea of a heavily armed police force makes some sense. In general, Americans believe that the police would not hurt them, so they are not scared. Media intensifies every bad example (and of course foreigners only see the craziest instances reported outside the country).
Somewhat related, there was a John Oliver segment regarding raids which you maybe (depending on geoblocking) able to watch in full on YT: https://youtu.be/WYdi1bL6s10
Is swatting even close to be a problem in other countries? It really seems like something that could be solved with protocol changes. If the chance of getting the victim killed or inconvenienced lessens, the incentive to swat would go away.
I've been on the receiving end of a SWAT in New Zealand. It was aimed at my friend, so I don't know cause.
Here we have an armed offenders squad.
A mostly bizarre experience - not particularly horrible - but neither did I fully understand the risk at the time.
I haven't had any hideous dealings with the police here in Christchurch - it's a small world so perhaps they are a bit more human? I certainly have lots of friends with bad stories - but often pretty damn biased stories!
There is no swatting problems in other countries because they don’t have SWAT! :)
But seriously, the heavily militarized police is a US only phenomenon.
France even has a national police force, the Gendarmerie, that is literally a branch of the military. The Gendarmerie’s most famous tactical unit is the GIGN, who have responded to high profile incidents including the 2015 terrorist attacks in and around Paris.
Good police elsewhere tend to worry more about whether they have the correct address as reported, whether the correct address was reported, and whether or not the report was factual or made up to waste police time | harress people.
That's not because the french police is especially militarized or anything, it's just that they are under threat. Swedish police patrolled the streets and malls with submachine guns this christmas too, it happens more than you know. Islamic terrorism is a real and ongoing thing.
This is for show only. In very few occasions are they allowed to use them. Ammunition are actually stored safely away.
At least that was the case few years ago.
The official report about the Bataclan attacks mention such unit not being given clearance to get amo.
Sounds stupid in that case, but I believe they did the maths properly when balancing the chance of armed illiterate young men in public killing innocents versus saving the day.
"In one post, Mr Filion allegedly wrote that he “sent police to the homes of people I don’t like (f… and transsexuals) for fun”, according to a charging document."
It's really interesting that your comment has been heavily downvoted, just for noting that it's not surprising that a criminal like this was also bigoted.
That comment is important context. If its true that this guy is being harassed by multiple groups for varied reasons that substantially muddies the supposed Norm connection.
The harasser's motives being as bullshit as they are varied seems likely, but it's odd for the article to lay it all at the feet of apparent Norm fans. Kind of like the article is using Norm's name to get clicks..
Thirteen years ago in a heated divorce related argument at a public pool it was claimed he threatened to kill three people by one specific withness.
From the linked document he freely admitted threatening "to kill" the new boyfriend, and stated he made no such statements about his wife | unborn child.
He admitted the comment was out of line and apologised.
If you have nothing else then your claim about him being an "obviously unstable individual" is thin at best.
His own family members snitched on him because they thought he was dangerous, he was convicted of the crime, what more do you want? Don't you think domestic violence should be taken seriously?
As far as being unstable goes you're free to peruse his Twitter account @StealthyGeek, search for his name on Youtube, etc. There's stuff I'd love to show you but I don't want to get banned for revealing his personal info.
> His own family members snitched on him because they thought he was dangerous
A sister in law made a complaint, yes.
> Don't you think domestic violence should be taken seriously?
What violence? I read the report, it was claimed that he made threatening speech, he agreed but countered that it was directed at one person. He apologised.
He was released after paying a bond for disorderly conduct .. thirteen years ago.
Is there anything else, or are you just here to defend Kiwi Farms?
Well, that’s certainly a hot take. Your framing of getting swatted as “police keep showing up” is incredibly disingenuous considering there is documented proof that the calls were fake. Having a 2654 page thread does not justify anyone getting swatted as some vague form of internet vigilantism.
"The swat came soon after stalkers had created a bogus Craigslist advert with Mr Tomlinson’s home address bizarrely claiming that he was kidnapping African-American children, and “grinding them down to make pepperoni”.
The twisted claim has echoes of the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which claimed that Democratic Party insiders were keeping child sex slaves in a pizza parlour in Washington DC."
Haha what? Why would this make them think about Comet Ping Pong?
You have to read a long way into the article to find out what the guy "did wrong" to attract this attention. For those who didn't scroll, he tweeted
> “Hot take: I’ve never found Norm Macdonald funny and was pretty sure all my comedy friends who did were either nuts or screwing with me,” he posted on 11 September 2018.
> Mr Tomlinson, who dabbles in stand-up comedy, came to the attention of a hardcore group of online stalkers five and a half years ago after posting an innocuous tweet about the late Saturday Night Live comedian Norm Macdonald.
> “Hot take: I’ve never found Norm Macdonald funny and was pretty sure all my comedy friends who did were either nuts or screwing with me,” he posted on 11 September 2018.
Obviously that remark doesn't justify a harassment campaign, but it seems a little clickbaity for the headline to frame it as a joke. I clicked to see what joke so witty could tick people off that badly, but it's more of a mundane statement of opinion than a joke.
This isn't a trivial problem to solve. If you stop sending SWAT after multiple fake calls, then it's "killer makes 47 fake calls and then shoots up a place unbothered by police".
Finding and punishing the callers is the only way.
1. Stop using pseudo swat forces for everything, especially as first responders. As we’ve seen with Uvalde, when the rubber meets the road they’re as useful as screen doors on submarines anyway.
2. If an address is a known swatting victim, try to call them back, and have a uniformed officer at the door rather than enter guns blazing.
But PDs have little incentive to fix the issue, I’m sure it looks good on the stats annd serves to justify their swat and it lets them play with their toys.
Norm is my all time favorite comic, but I will readily admit that not everyone “gets” his humor. Most of my friends and family can’t understand why I like him so much. I was a wreck when I heard he died. I didn’t even know he was sick.
Tomlinson is a compulsive liar. He has been SWATed, he does have insane and cruel stalkers, but he was not SWATed 47 times. He lies about this because he gets instant media attention.
He attempted to hire Torswats on himself, who provided receipts proving the attempt. When confronted, rather than denying it, he said a forum had cloned his SIM card, in a way that was not possible.
Tomlinson is extremely litigious and has threatened to sue people who have brought this to light.
It also tells the story about how a Swedish man was accused of being the swatter based on no other evidence than an audio recording where he allegedly had a Swedish accent.
