Watching a "Swatting" Slowly Unfold

netbuzz writes That online gamers have been victimized has unfortunately allowed us to see what "swatting" looks like from the perspective of the target: terrifying and potentially deadly. A similar type of criminally unnecessary SWAT scene played out Saturday night when a caller to police in Hopkinton, Mass., claimed to be holed up in the town's closed public library with two hostages and a bomb. The library stands within eyesight of the starting line for the Boston Marathon. An editor for Network World, there by happenstance, watched for two hours, and, while it was a hoax and no one was hurt, his account highlights the disruption and wastefulness these crimes inflict.

Comments

Re:call the library ?

[itzly]

Not in this case, which is what I was talking about. Naturally, you can't always call back, but it doesn't hurt to explore options like these before bringing in the big guns.

Re:Related to the Boston Marathon how?

[MobyDisk]

The Boston Marathon is on April 20th. So a hostage situation on April 5th would be unrelated. It would be like saying "Armed robbery at Pizza parlor within sight of the Statue of Liberty" knowing that the Statue of Liberty can be seen for miles away. Or maybe "Armed robbery at Pizza parlor visited by Barack Obama" when Barack Obama was there last year.

for those outside the states...

[nimbius]

Swatting is our warm colloquialism for the unintended consequences of the slow but progressive militarization of our local and regional police forces. forty years ago, the war on drugs and whats known in our nation as 'tough on crime' policies began to take the form of whatever our politicians fever-dreamed the nature of crime to be. California came out with 3 strike laws that relegated everything from bounced checks to jaywalking third offences to a minimum life sentence in prison, and the idea of civil forfeiture became a smart way to enact real-world consequences for movie-screen criminal caricatures. In america as it stands, thanks to the policies of carter, reagan, nixon, bush, and johnson, police officers can now purchase surplus military equipment for free, less shipping. And since america's chief export is war these days, we have a lot of surplus military equipment waiting to be used. This program ramped up after 9/11 and before we knew it, sleepy towns like Dothan Alabama owned tanks, mine resistent personnel vehicles, and millions of dollars in tactical military hardware such as night vision and machine guns with no realistic opportunity or purpose to utilize them.

So without real use, these systems degrade and deteriorate and the cost to maintain them is, well, very expensive. as a result, police departments found themselves shoehorning equipment requesitioned from hand-me-down government transfer projects and knee-jerk terrorism overfunding into everything. Warrant service for taxes? SWAT and a 40 ton tank can handle that. peaceful parade against planned parenthood? sounds like a job for machineguns and nightvision. And finally, the SWATting. Its an innocuous situation where some crank-yanker calls in an odious situation that requires immediate action. Hostage situations and school shootings arent oustide the american experience, but our response is nothing short of lethal interception no matter how far fetched it seems that a hostage situation in the Dugal county truck stop mens room is taking place.

Cops are baked in it. Theyve spend 30 years growing into this nonsense, that everything that isnt pulling over minorities in classic cars should be handled like a van damme movie. Their defense is often pretty good, noting that america is relatively unique in that citizenry can openly and easily procure weapons capable of quickly defeating both their body armor and their general defensive capability. But municipalities have no excuse for continuing to perpetuate this police-state response other than the obvious: theyre run by boomers and the elderly. People who have direct influence over the tactics and policy used by our police are obviously easily frightened. 24 hour news and internet forwards from grandma have reduced what should be a responsible, level-headed committee to a clamouring rats nest of assholes hovering somewhere between religious nationalism and dictatorial rule of law. the bottom line: cops arent soldiers, but we liketo pretend they are to make sure theyre ready to fight our boogeymen.

Re:call the library ?

[The Snowman]

If there's a real incident in progress, this wouldn't work. They'd either not answer, or be compelled by the people with guns to tell the cops that everything is a-okay.

I agree, nobody would answer. From the summary, nobody even has to read the article for this one:

...claimed to be holed up in the town's closed public library with two hostages and a bomb.

Re: call the library ?

[TWX]

Or they can claim to have put bombs one school in the city, after they crash a subway train into a station, then use excavation equipment to rob a gold repository, to make it look like they planted the gold on a ship that they blow up in the middle of the harbor...

I think the solution is obvious

[davydagger]

As long as the cops in the USA have the "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality, swatting will always be a problem. SWATing exploits the fact that cops are fucking stupid, scared animals, who are prone to alarmism, and itch for an excuse to use excessive force. They see no problem in roughing up many innocents to get a small handful of small time criminals. They are easy to trick, slow to think, quick to act.

The solution is to re-examine SWAT team usage nation wide, and how they are used and for what. Until we do, SWATing will always be a threat. The solution is to fix the vulernbility by replacing a dangerous and broken system with one that works better.