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?
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.