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Swatting 19-Year-Old Arrested in Las Vegas
Ars Technica reports that a Las Vegas teenager is in custody for multiple instances of swatting:
Brandon Wilson, who goes by the online handle "Famed God," was arrested Thursday in Nevada and faces an extradition hearing to determine whether he should be sent to face hacking and other charges. Illinois prosecutors said there was evidence on his computers about the July 10 swatting incident, in which he allegedly reported a murder to Naperville's emergency 911 line. The SWAT team responded, but the call was a hoax. The Chicago-Sun Times said that, in addition to the Naperville incident, the suspect's computers held evidence "of similar incidents across the country."
Err. That's good, right ? Police arresting bad people ?
Not sure why this is news.
He gets caught and will stand trial. Isn't this how the system is supposed to work? What's the problem here?
#DeleteChrome
Filing a false police report is criminal in and of itself, even if it doesn't result in an expensive, resource-wasting, and potentially injurious or deadly response from the police.
Do it once, maybe you get away with it. Keep doing it, and you can [i]expect[/i] to get caught.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Up to 5 years? That's it?
The linked article uses the words "prank" and "prankster" multiple times. This is not ordering someone else a pizza; this is ordering someone else a large group of hair-trigger people carrying deadly weapons and expecting violence. People like this should be restrained or executed, not so much for what they have done, as for being the sort of people who would do it.
Agreed. Some things you don't fuck with. Like pulling the fire alarm for kicks or calling the cops on innocent people.
He should be charged with attempted murder. You're essentially sending a bunch of heavily armed people into someone's house where the slightest mistake on the part of the victim could result in their death. You're strapping a ticking bomb to their chest and telling them the only way they'll live is by cutting the blue wire.
A single wrong move, a single twitch, a sneeze, a fart, a knife they're cutting their sandwich with could get them killed because of his actions. He needs to locked away for a very very very long time in max security to prove a point that this is not a joke and someone is eventually going to get killed because of it.
Thought the same thing...
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
My feeling on the subject is that deliberately making a false report to generate an armed SWAT response should be charged and prosecuted as premeditated murder. The same as if they went and shot the people themselves. And if there's a miracle and the officers realize the report is false before someone is shot, it should still be charged and prosecuted as attempted murder, as if the person making the report attempted to kill someone themselves. Intentionally using the police as a weapon is no different than killing someone yourself. I would like to see them get the death penalty in these cases.
Don't care about the hacking, but he should be tortured for swatting.
>. Perhaps I underestimate the power of the average handgun. As for the face, are there no effective bulletproof visors?
Remember the tip of the bullet is around 2mm or so. Imagine you have a stout nail. You place the nail against a piece of glass and hit it with a hammer, hard. You want glass thick enough to take that without breaking. There's not all that much POWER involved, but it's concentrated in a small area.
Bullet-resistant Lexan is something like two inches thick, so not only is it heavy but it a curved piece would refract quite a bit. Think "coke bottle glasses" times ten. So you've got a flat piece of material hanging off your face blocking your peripheral vision and it weighs as maybe half as much as a gallon of milk. That's not I what I want to wear in a fight.
The thing about guns and power levels is that to do their job they have to RELIABLY go through a leather jacket, the clothes underneath, three inches of fat and muscle, then somehow do enough damage to stop someone within seconds. That means that they MIGHT go through all kinds of things and still do enough damage that you die eventually.
Some departments deploy SWAT for non-high risk situations because they see it as a convenient training exercise. The close quarter skills employed by SWAT are perishable, they need constant rehearsing. The low-risk deployments provide a certain amount of randomization to further enhance their skills, unknown buildings, unknown layouts, etc..
That said, yes there are too many SWAT teams. Not every friggin department needs one. A major city, a county, etc. but not every friggin town and federal/state agency.
is the question of why its so easy to get a large group of hair-triggered people carrying deadly weapons to violently storm someones house over nothing more than a single anonymous phone call.
Really? Thats all it takes??? some teenager with a cellphone & your address?
I think we need to do something about that.
Ars Technica reports that a Las Vegas teenager is in custody for multiple instances of swatting.
... but to me a nineteen year old is not a "teenager."
Don't care about the hacking, but he should be tortured for swatting.
No kidding. People could die from that. The days of the police sauntering in gun holstered saying "'ello 'ello what's all this then?" are flat gone, if they ever existed. If someone is bursting into your home with guns pointed, things can get lethal very quickly. Regardless of whether any crime was committed.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Judging by the looks of him, I'll bet anything Brandon Wilson is really concerned about ethics in game journalism.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
You are welcome on my lawn.
There's 2 problems here though, with only one being brought up by the article. The other is police going off half-cocked on only vague accusations by unknown claimants.
To understand why there is not a full suit body armor, you have to understand what body armor actually is and what it does. A 'bullet-proof vest' is a multi-layered fabric composed of Kevlar and other fabrics, with a pocket in the center of the front and the back that mostly covers just the heart, and into this pocket goes a ceramic and steel composite plate. The fabric of the vest is designed to take the force of the bullet that hits it and spread it out. So instead of a massive amount of energy concentrated on a point around 2-9mm in size, it gets diffused into the surrounding layers of Kelvar (instead of your flesh). And even then, you still get hurt, very badly, because it cannot stop all of the kinetic force of the bullet, it jsut spreads it out over a large area of your body. Broken ribs, bruised and ruptured internal organs, even spinal injuries are common when getting shot in the vest and that's when it works and stops the bullet from going inside you!
Why the plates then? Because the fabric mesh is often not enough to stop even handgun caliber rounds at close range. The plates are insurance, they will stop most small arms fire, though rifle rounds quickly overpower even full steel plates. Thus your heart is not likely to damaged in a firefight if you are wearing your vest. Its not foolproof at all and it definitely is not bullet proof.
The giant bulky armored suits you see the explosives guys wearing? That's not bullet proof either and its the closest thing we've got. That suit is protection against a detonating device because the detonation is usually unshaped. Even it will at best stop small arms fire, still has vulnerable gaps, and its heavy, and extremely hot. Its utterly un-tactical. If you want to see it in action, there is footage out there of a bank robbery in California from the 90's I think where a couple of guys in them held off police for a long while, tore the cops up badly but they were finally taken down due to exhaustion, vulnerability and the fact they were just too slow to actually get away.
The less than lethal devices in an officers arsenal are unreliable. Not in that they may misfire, though that is certainly true as well. Mace/CS Spray for example is a terrible weapon to rely on. Its a spray, in mist form or stream, that travels through the air to splash onto a target. It can splash back onto the officer at extremely close range. Heavy winds can make you miss your target, hit an innocent, your partner, other officers, and even yourself. Also, a certain (small)_ percentage of the population is flat out immune to it, and even if the target is not, its not debilitating, its just a massive irritant. Police train to work through the pain and distraction and civilians can too. Even alcohol can make a person not feel the sting, and that's a legal substance. Get into narcotics and its a crapshoot if it'll do anything at all other than make it more difficult to apprehend the target. (oh yeah, that stuff is liquid and gets on everything. good luck wrestling that dude to the ground and not getting it all over yourself if it didn't work.)
Tasers. ugh. Boon and bane in a single device. Injuries from tasing are common as they cause an adult human being to freeze up tight and fall over from a standing position. The effect of them is very powerful, but not that difficult to recover from, especially if you are full of adrenaline. So they come with multiple charges to make him get on the ground again. But, the more juice you pump through someone, the more likely it is for side effects to arise. (like death) Getting hit with multiple tasers at once is not recommended if you want a living suspect, they have a limited range as well, but that range is better than Mace and is like a leash for a target, as long as the barbs are in and the device has a charge, it can zap him again if needed. They can miss the target, they can hit too far apart to be effective, heavy winter coats can stop them. They are not a great solution, but they are what we have now. And using a taser on someone pointing a gun at you or anyone else...all your muscles spasm when you get juiced, there is a high chance the firearm in the targets hand will discharge and injure or kill someone.
Can you give an example of swat being used to apprehend a non-violent person?
Gibson Guitars. Gibson imported wood guitar components that we legally harvested and legally exported. Eventually the US gov't admitted Gibson did nothing wrong. However to investigate Gibon's possible improper importation of wood a heavily armed SWAT raid was conducted to seize their paperwork and the wood in question.
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
They do in the country where they do say that. Except they don't have any guns to holster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Swatting is most likely a felony in many states. If it causes death then the offender can be charged with murder under the rule.
New Economic Perspectives
And I'm good at it. Usually flies.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Maybe cops should learn some restraint in their use of force?
What about false rape charges? Those are pretty popular and nobody goes to jail. It's a victimless crime!
Is this a new term for fake calling for a SWAT team?
In my day to swat meant to study for an upcoming exam of some kind. Hence the headline confused me for some time.
Oh, and mutter something something my lawn.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
We could make some metal flyswatters and go to town...
Maybe cops should learn some restraint in their use of force?
Hm. That's one possible outcome of swatting. If there are a few high profile innocent deaths as a result, policy may be changed to approach more cautiously. But they'd have to be really high profile, and we (and the media) would have to really rub their noses in it. I don't see it happening.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Maybe cops should learn some restraint in their use of force?
They clearly could use better training. I was reading in the newspaper about a cop shooting. It was recorded on video and shows the cop repeatedly shouting "Don't move!", "Put your hands up!" "Don't move!" over and over again. The guy put his hands up and the cop shot and killed him. The cop says he's not a fault because he told the victim not to move.
There's another video on YouTube of a guy getting shot at a gas station after the cop shouts "Don't move!", "Show me your ID!", etc.The guy went to get his wallet and got shot because he moved.
Perhaps the cops could be trained to not give contradictory commands? How does one put their hands up without moving? If I were cynical I'd wonder if these cops just felt like shooting someone and so gave contradictory commands to "justify" doing it.
Your police is partially to blame as well.
I live in Germany go try and SWAT me, good luck.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
...who had no idea what "swatting" meant, until reading the linked article.
Since when do we use unknown/uncommon words in headlines ?
There's zero chance of that happening. Coming in with as many heavy weapons and officers as possible is great for them since it reduces the risks in their work and is in general fun and easy. There have been tens of people shot during raids recently including little children. Try to do something about it and all the police unions will go mental about how you hate cops and want them dead. They almost always get away with it as far as legal repercussions go too. The only way for them to get in trouble is to do something against their training. But their training is "if you feel the slightest bit threatened shoot at the problem until it goes away" so that's not happening either.
They should imprison him and his swat team accomplices who have put us in danger of people like him with their very existence. Do you have any idea how sublimely infrequent the actual need for them is? There is truely no point in even having them.
Hell 93% of their uses here in MA have nothing to do with hostage situations or even shoot outs, they are just the pricks who go around busting down the doors of pot heads.
And....because they exist, and like to flashbang first and ask questions later, we are all in danger. Imprison them all for reckless endangerment!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
That would make it all the more sweet.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
So what would happen if someone calls 112 saying a shooting happened at your residence? A Police officer shows up and calmly knocks on the door? I am inclined to agree that the swatting response in the us is way overkill. But no or minimal response likely isn't the answer either.
Agreed, and while I doubt the prosecution team would be dumb enough to try and peruse this as a hacking case, based on what I've read if they do the "perp" deserves to get off scot-free. I'm tired of these catch all laws being used Constnatly where they don't apply because prosecutors are either too lazy or too ignorant to determine the actual crime.
This is contradictory to the reduced IQ requirement. One man tried suing the police force for declining his application on the grounds that his IQ was too high. The supreme court upheld the force's decision. I believe that was a slashdot story around a year ago if anyone can post a link.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Yes I suppose the arrestee has a point in playing pranks in order to call attention to the drastic over-response that has become the brunt of jokes and pranks like this. A lot of other comments here have pointed out that this can become highly dangerous due to the overzealousness of these gun-toting maniacs. A sticky situation indeed. Some people want to use prank calls to point out how ridiculous this situation is, while the rest of us want them to stop because its making bullets fly. Something's gotta give, and its probably going to be pictures of american kids shot to death by SWAT members responding to a prank call.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
So what would happen if someone calls 112 saying a shooting happened at your residence? A Police officer shows up and calmly knocks on the door? I am inclined to agree that the swatting response in the us is way overkill. But no or minimal response likely isn't the answer either.
Well first off, its Germany so not everyone is an armed nutcase. In fact most people will be very ordered and restrained.
Secondly, there will be more than one police officer. They typically work in pairs.
Thirdly, police officers in modern, functioning societies are trained to observe and measure up a situation before acting. So they'll take a look around and see that there's no need to call GSG 9.
Finally, even if there were a gunman, the officers would attempt to contain the situation and seek a non violent solution using force as a last resort only instead of going in half cocked, shooting everything that moves after which, they check to see if there is anything black that didn't get shot in the initial barrage.
Yep, those crazy Germans.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Something like, oh busting into the mayor's place and shooting his dog?
Why would they need a claymore? It's not hard to blow things up, and you certainly don't need military hardware for it. That's one of the problems with the "wars" in variou countries, as IED (remember, the "I" stands for Improvised) aren't particularly hard, with the biggest issue being the possibility of blowing oneself up while making one. Hell, the Boston bombing was a household item and some ball bearings.
Materials to cause significant body count aren't at issue, it's that - thankfully - there don't appear to be that many people sick enough to try it on a regular basis. That and/or those that so depraved are lacking even the relatively low skill to make such devices, or they're too afraid for their own skins to try it.
I do recall an incident where a terrorist van apparently blew up enroute because they forgot to calibrate for time-zone differences. That one always made chuckle. If only all terrorists and crazies were so unskillful as to blow themselves up prematurely or set their crotch on fire...
If somebody had died, I agree, murder 1. From Wikipedia:
"At base, murder consists of an intentional unlawful act with a design to kill and fatal consequences. Generally, an intention to cause great bodily harm is considered indistinguishable from an intention to kill, as is an act so inherently dangerous that any reasonable person would realize the likelihood of fatality. Thus, if the defendant hurled the victim from a bridge, it is no defense to argue that harm was not contemplated, or that the defendant hoped only to break bones."
Sending armed men to bust in your house and point guns at you is an act so inherently dangerous that any reasonable person would realize the likelihood of fatality. And it's clearly planned and premeditated.
Since nobody died, though, I'd say reckless endangerment. Attempted murder does require intent to kill, and I don't think Wilson intended for anyone to die.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I think this whole story is a great example of police mis-allocating resources. Cut the cost of SWAT and armored trucks, and you have enough money to get some computer specialist to identify suspicious/fake calls for swat whenever you get them.
But that's not as much fun.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Considering how much our federal government has tried to extend its power into other countries, I wouldn't be surprised if they start flying SWAT teams overseas or cobble them up from soldiers stationed at bases in the area.