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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.
Wouldn't it be smarter for the police to call back the library, and ask if there's anything going on ?
So we do need to collect more meta data? Or just live with "falsies" as a way of life? A compromise could be for the ISP to keep such info for say a week or two so that authorities can potentially dig through it if necessary, but otherwise authorities do not store it themselves.
Table-ized A.I.
Moderately interesting article. Too bad they decided to add the clickbait boston marathon reference. Makes me feel a little dirty for giving them a click.
Would it be overkill to consider swatting a form of domestic terrorism?
It places people in imminent threat of bodily harm, definitely spreads fear - and the one that seems to tip the scales for me is that it intentionally disrupts the police's ability to respond to real threats and is basically derailing society's ability to defend itself.
Okay, labeling it terrorism would probably be too much, but things like swatting strike me as attacks on society itself - which to me falls under my own definition of terrorism.
Is because of the predictably over-the-top military reaction by the police.
Why kick someone in the balls when you can shine a laser pointer at his crotch, and have his dog bite him there?
De-escalate police reactions and you'll see this go away.
>> An editor for Network World....his account highlights the disruption and wastefulness these crimes inflict.
Or encourages other people to aim their hoaxes at other cities with high per-capita media, such as New York, LA, DC...in the hopes they get national attention too.
I'm from that town and the library is closed on the weekend, so the claim of a hostage situation was suspect from the jump. They shut the main street and the side street down for most of the day.
Better to call it "terrorism by proxy".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If someone calls in an active shooter situation, the police don't have time to get a patrol car out there and check it out. They need to respond like yesterday. A hostage situation probably allows for a greater degree of surveillance, but depending on the wording of the threat the police may be mentally put into a situation where they can credibly, fairly say they thought it was "now or never." Remember with Columbine, the police waited and a lot more people died. The VA Tech shooting was much the same way. When there's a situation that calls for a SWAT unit to be deployed, it is supposed to be dealt with using overwhelming force.
We all can agree that SWAT units are frivolously deployed and most jurisdictions shouldn't have them. That's not relevant to this particular issue. Even if no SWAT units existed, the expected response to an active shooter situation would be the police rushing in with a presumption that the use of deadly force is authorized and to be applied without too many questions being asked.
SWATters should be charged with attempted murder in the first degree, be judged under strict liability and do hard time, even if they are only 13 years old.
No the real problem is the police having essentially a para-military mindset. Look at the UK, there are places where cops openly carry automatic weapons, generally few and far between. However, aside from a few incidents which get MAJOR coverage (and condemnation of the police usually), they don't kill people.
To put it in perspective, a statistic said that last month, US police killed more people than UK police have since 1900. That's more than a hundred years.
You can argue about guns being more common here, but in many police departments who have decided to shoot first and ask questions later, officers are not disciplined if they do. The claim, the victim was reaching for my gun or It looked like a gun, and suddenly everything is fine for them. That's BS.
In my opinion, every police officer should be tried before a jury for every shooting, with an outside prosecutor, no exceptions. (Note, this does not mean they are automatically guilty, but does mean that we won't have prosecutors who work with same police department/officers saying 'nah, not enough evidence'.)
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.
Good people go to bed earlier.
No the real problem is the police having essentially a para-military mindset
Yes but you are still blaming the wrong people for the incidents. It's like blaming the explosion on the explosive. The one who lights it up is the one that caused the explosion, no the chemicals. You're using the .01% rule as your argument and that's why it's not valid.
In my opinion, every police officer should be tried before a jury for every shooting
A good start would be making them 100% accountable by putting body cams. I've said this a million times. People keep saying the police has too much power. The power isn't the problem, it's the lack of accountability. Without the body cams their word will always rule in court hence why they do things they can get away with.
To encourage more swatting simply:
1. Post videos of swatting online.
2. Post interviews of swatted people onlne.
Also works for mass-shootings.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
He's not wrong. Sorry, i'm not a leftist ideological hack, probably just the opposite, and I agree with, in essence, everything said by the GP poster. We did militarize our police forces for bad reasons. We do overreact to crimes. We should strip out all of the military hardware from "first responders" aka law enforcement. There's no need for it and it makes our existence more coarse.
Getting rid of some stupid drug laws and over the top criminal enforcement would also help.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
you are still blaming the wrong people for the incidents. It's like blaming the explosion on the explosive.
Not every situation has someone who's 100% to blame, and someone who's 100% blameless. Our binary way of thinking is part of the problem. It's why we can't say that "muggers are a problem, but putting yourself in a position where you have a high chance of getting mugged is also problematic." Actually, that's not so controversial, but replace "mugging" with "rape" and watch the sparks fly.
Yes, the majority of the fault lies with the person who made the call. No one is saying otherwise. But police departments are not inanimate objects -- they are composed of people who make their own decisions as well. The militarization of police has been problematic, and maybe that's a temporary, transitional issue, or maybe it's a natural consequence of heading in the wrong direction.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Could it be the guy interviewing with network world? Seems like an absolutely perfect situation for a person interested in this sort of thing to find themselves in. My money's on that guy being the culprit.
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.
and it makes our existence more coarse.
We are living in the fall of The Republic and the beginning of The Empire.
This is similar to how for hundreds of years it was forbidden for Roman Troops to enter the city. Then they did.
It was forbidden to go armed into The Forum. Then they did.
It was forbidden to go armed into The Senate. Then they did.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I find it extraordinary that an anonymous phone call is ever enough justification to merit the dispatch of armed personnel.
Here's a way to stop swatting.
When an 'anonymous source' reports a hostage situation and there isn't one, issue arrest-on-site warrants for the user/owner of the phone that made the call. Attempted assault, false reports,reckless endangerment, attempted manslaughter, at least two felonies' worth. If possible, send an officer with zip ties to that address immediately (if a landline) or at least the last known position of the cell and see who happens to be lying around.
That'll get the dipshit in question picked up quickly and sent to the can with a fairly outrageous bail.
Please have the officer that does the arresting have a bodycam active, so we can see the whiney little twat that does things like swatting blubber and cry and piss themselves.
Then throw then in jail for a couple of years minimum.
Pretty sure the swatting would stop fairly quickly once the beginning steps of this process were taken.
when it affects someone in power.
My point is that we focus too much on the 0.01%. The real issue is the hoax call. That needs to be addressed first. Authorities can very easily be made accountable as suggested previously. Heck, why not pay for the equipment with the savings from not having to answer all those hoax calls?
The militarization of police has been problematic, and maybe that's a temporary, transitional issue, or maybe it's a natural consequence of heading in the wrong direction
I tend to see this as an exaggeration of reality. The media plays a great role at making it look worst than it really is.
But police departments are not inanimate objects
No they aren't and at no point do I shell them from the truth but we need to determine if the ratio of failure to success is acceptable. At first glance it doesn't look that bad but we are also limited to what the media picks and chooses for us.
Yes, before he was caught. A sentence of a billion years probably wouldn't have prevented those 19.
I do. A cost/benefit analysis suggests we often over-detain for "feel good" political reasons.
In some cases it makes the problem WORSE because the thought of long sentences makes the chasee take bigger risks. One rapist told investigators he killed his under-age victim because the penalty for murder was only slightly more than the rape sentence. The "jail math" thus lead him to remove the "witness".
Table-ized A.I.
The best part is when you assume that "those outside the US" somehow are unaware of what you perceive to be heavy-handed police tactics, when the sad (to you, anyway) truth is that people outside Western nations routinely live under oppression and police abuse
The best part is where you assume the US is the only western nation.
Intentionally make a false report to police that results in armed response: attempted murder. Police actually end up shooting someone over it: premeditated murder. The punishment should be the same as if they actually pulled the trigger themselves.
When police procedures allow an anonymous tip to endanger someone's life, the police are at fault.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Power is very much the problem. The power that you don't have is the power that cannot be abused. Why the fuck is Maryland SWAT spending 90% of its time serving search warrants for non-violent crimes (mostly drug possession)? What exactly about those things justifies sending a bunch of adrenaline-rush junkies with assault rifles to bust doors, which they do 66% of the time (again, this is specifically while serving search warrants for non-violent crimes!)?
Power is very much the problem. The power that you don't have is the power that cannot be abused.
No power doesn't get the job done. Power with accountability is a much better compromise and it gets the job done.
Why the fuck is Maryland SWAT spending 90% of its time serving search warrants for non-violent crimes (mostly drug possession)?
Maybe because drug and violence are often seen together.
(again, this is specifically while serving search warrants for non-violent crimes!)?
Non violent crimes? I doubt all drug possession cases are non violent. Most distributors I've met either carried a handgun or blade.
What exactly about those things justifies sending a bunch of adrenaline-rush junkies with assault rifles to bust doors
BTW, that's just your slanted opinion that isn't backed by anything else than your hate for authorities.
No power doesn't get the job done. Power with accountability is a much better compromise and it gets the job done.
Power is not a binary trigger. We need to give them just enough they need to do the job done, and no more.
Accountability has been found to be tricky to enforce in practice, esp. with things such as "blue code of silence".
Maybe because drug and violence are often seen together.
They are seen together largely because drugs are criminalized in the first place. Even then, police often escalates non-violent situations into violent ones. For example, in the case of the raid on the mayor's house, they knew that the package was headed for the house, and could have intercepted it in the mail - and then just do a routine search of the house. Instead, they deliberately let it actually arrive to the house, and then went and obtained a no-knock warrant for it on the basis that they need to act fast because otherwise the occupant will be able to destroy the evidence.
There's also a reason why they do that, and it's asset forfeiture. When they raid a house and it's for a legitimate crime, the feds can use asset forfeiture to claim a lot of property "associated" with that crime, often including the house itself - and the PD that made the seizure gets a cut of that. As a result, they do things not in a way that minimizes violence, but in a way that maximizes seized property - which are often directly contradictory (e.g. if you want to minimize violence, you arrest people when they're outside of their house, in the open; but if you want to maximize seized property, you arrest them when they're in the house, where most of their property is). They have also been found waiting until the drug dealers sell the goods before raiding, because seized drugs are just evidence, whereas seized money qualifies for asset forfeiture.
Non violent crimes? I doubt all drug possession cases are non violent. Most distributors I've met either carried a handgun or blade.
A non-violent crime is a crime that does not involve violence. Drug possession and distribution is one such crime. It doesn't mean that all people connected to it are necessarily non-violent, but then again, the reason why they are is largely because drug trade is heavily criminalized in the first place. In any case, even if you accept for granted that "handgun or blade" is common, these are threats that regular cops routinely deal with on the streets. They don't necessitate ceramic plate armor, assault rifles, MRAPs and flashbang grenades.
Which part of it? That they're adrenaline junkies? They say so themselves! Here's a quote from Balko's awesome work on the subject, that itself quotes police officers:
"The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate. “Oh, it’s a huge rush,” Franklin says. “Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.” Downing agrees. “It’s a rush. And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.” Jamie Haase, a former special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who went on multiple narcotics, money laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better. You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That’s the safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a lot of these cops are meatheads. They think this stuff is cool. And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get during a raid."
"Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun."
The part where they have assault rifles? That's just factually correct, you can go look up the things that these guys buy from Pentagon for pennies, now that the lists have been made public under FOIA.
Busting doors? That is plainly true, you just need to read the news. Or go check Maryland stats, where they say "forced entry", that's basically what it means.
Usually, RomeUS comparisons are trite, uninformed and boring. In this case...you actually have a good point.
I'm drawn back to Jefferson's comment about the tree of Liberty needing refreshing with the blood of tyrants and patriots from time to time.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Quotes from a select few hardly proves they are adrenaline junkies.
The part where they have assault rifles?
At no point did I argue that they aren't over equipped for the situation as it's irrelevant to the issue itself. A power abusing officer with a hand gun is no different than one with a riffle.
Busting doors?
"Forced Entry" in most cases is used when there is refusal to cooperate (denial of access to the location specified on the warrant). It's not as simple as just kicking down the door such as some ill informed writers often claim.
Accountability has been found to be tricky to enforce in practice, esp. with things such as "blue code of silence".
Body cams cancel the blue code of silence BS.
They are seen together largely because drugs are criminalized in the first place
That's another issue. For now it's a criminal act and must be dealt with as such until laws change. If it hasn't changed it's because enough of the population believes current law is fine.
A non-violent crime is a crime that does not involve violence. Drug possession and distribution is one such crime
That's very much incorrect. Most street violence is over drug distribution. AKA, turf wars.
"Forced Entry" in most cases is used when there is refusal to cooperate (denial of access to the location specified on the warrant). It's not as simple as just kicking down the door such as some ill informed writers often claim.
The problem is that there can not be a refusal to cooperate when the warrant is no-knock, by definition - because the occupant isn't even given a chance to cooperate. And have you seen the sheer number of no-knock warrants issued? For drug busts, they are practically routine, because police just claims that they need to go in hot lest the suspect disposes of all evidence. Just look at the stats for how many are issued, that is not some secret knowledge.
And even for warrants that are not no-knock, the standard procedure in many cases is to knock quietly, and give at most a few seconds to answer - and then proceed as if it were refusal to cooperate. Here's one example from a botched raid that resulted in a death of an innocent man: ]
"Tommie DuBose’s wife, brother-in-law, and twenty-five-year-old son Brett were all in the house at the time of the raid. None of them heard either the knock or the announcement. One neighbor who saw the entire raid estimated that only about fifteen seconds expired from the time the police pulled up until he heard gunshots. Others said that they never heard any announcement. Brett DuBose said that he first saw the police pull up from the window in another room, but that they were in the house before he had time to say anything."
And here's some verbiage from the 2003 SCOTUS case that ruled that this kind of BS is legal:
"what matters is the opportunity to get rid of cocaine, which a prudent dealer will keep near a commode or kitchen sink. The significant circumstances include the arrival of the police during the day, when anyone inside would probably have been up and around, and the sufficiency of 15 to 20 seconds for getting to the bathroom or the kitchen to start flushing cocaine down the drain. . . . It is imminent disposal, not travel time to the entrance, that governs when the police may reasonably enter."
15-20 seconds is how long it took for SWAT team to go from knocking at the door to busting said door; the suspect was in the shower. Note that by this logic, even shorter periods are justified if there's reason to believe that evidence can be destroyed that quickly.
And SWAT teams took that ruling to heart once it's appeared. Here's a later example where the court found that such a team really did overstep the line:
"In 2006 a Florida state appeals court found that a SWAT team had violated a man’s Fourth Amendment rights because although they waited fifteen seconds after announcing before forcing entry, the officers began counting only after detonating a flash-bang grenade and included in their count the time they spent bashing the door with a battering ram."
So throwing in a flashbang after 15 seconds would have been fine.
So yes, effectively, "forced entry" is used literally all the time, and is kicking down doors (and throwing flashbangs).
Turns out that if you declare a "war on X", and create special units to fight that war, they will actually treat it as war, and their AoO as warzone. Who could have thought?..
Body cams cancel the blue code of silence BS.
Yes, which is why most PDs are vehemently against them.
Then, of course, they can be prone to conveniently timed "malfunctions", same as dash cams are today.
That's another issue. For now it's a criminal act and must be dealt with as such until laws change. If it hasn't changed it's because enough of the population believes current law is fine.
There is a difference in believing that something must be illegal, and believing that it requires the degree of violence exemplified by SWAT to enforce. Vast majority of people agree that theft should be a crime, for example, but if you said that properly enforcing that law requires posting snipers all over the city that would shoot anyone trying to escape with stolen goods, those same people would think you insane, and rightly so.
Ultimately, the point of law enforcement is to make the citizens safer. If they fight crimes in such a way that actually increases the risk of bystanders, they fail at their purpose. A guy smoking a joint in the privacy of his home does not pose any security threat to me whatsoever, but a SWAT team raiding his house with a no-knock warrant to prevent him from flushing this joint is a definitive threat, simply because they can raid the wrong address, and that address can be mine.
That's very much incorrect. Most street violence is over drug distribution. AKA, turf wars.
Once again, the crime of drug possession and distribution itself is non-violent - there's no victim in it and no harm. It may have other crimes associated with it that are violent - such as assault and battery or even murder, which is what those gang wars are. But they're separate crimes. If you're raiding the house of someone on a warrant for such a crime, then yeah, it's reasonable to assume that they are armed and violent. If you're raiding the house of someone because their neighbor has seen a bong through the window (true story, BTW), then it's not. But SWAT teams behave exactly the same in both cases.
And furthermore, even in the first category, they often arrange raids such that they're more likely to trigger and/or necessitate violence, not less (e.g. arresting suspects at their home rather than when they go to pick up the goods). Which is again done to maximize asset forfeiture gains.
Both your responses trail way off the main issue. Law and procedures will always require tuning. I can't argue that. After all, we've come a long way from public stoning and live burning of witches.
Fact is that the number of issues resulting from said procedure is insignificant if the procedure never have to be executed. Imagine how less significant said procedures would appear to be if they didn't have to act in the first place. That is why the root cause needs to be extinguished. It will save everybody grief and tax money which can be re-invested to do something more constructive.
That is true. However, US is not unique among other countries in having drug laws etc on the books. But it is unique (among the First World countries) in the degree of police militarization, and widespread use of said militarized police. Swatting, for example, is largely a US-specific phenomenon - that alone should tell you heaps about how US is far, far from normal in that area.
I wholeheartedly support the repeal of laws that are used as a justification for all this stuff in the first place. At the same time, I worry that they're just that - a justification - and when they go away, something else will take their place (domestic terrorism?), and meanwhile police will remain militarized and prone to escalation of violence in routine, day-to-day activities. So campaigning against "war on drugs" doesn't preclude campaigning against police militarization.
This had swatting written all over it. However let's ignore that for a moment.
Dude calls up for a swatting. Do you:
A) Send in the swat team
B) Send a uniform car
C) Send in an undercover guy
D) Send in a pizza/delivery/utility guy
If you answered D - ding ding ding - you get the prize. A utility guy could check it right out with a clip board. Next time it could be a pizza guy, rotate them around. It would render this all useless. Mean time, track the asshole down and swat him. Swat him good. If he's still alive, hang 'em. Hang 'em high!