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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 ?
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.
No actual guns blazed in this scenario. Lots of people milled about, but not a single shot was fired.
Did you have some kind of point to make?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Better to call it "terrorism by proxy".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Longer sentences tend not to work on crazy people. If they had long-term thinking ability and discipline, they probably would not do stupid things to begin with.
Longer sentences look good on paper and politically, but often just cost tax payers more than the crime damage potential because locking people up is expensive. It might be a better deal to have more cops than more jails, for quicker response.
Table-ized A.I.
the use of deadly force is authorized
An anonymous phone call should not be the basis of authorization of deadly force.
Wasn't that last guy convicted guilty of some 19 "swattings"?
Plus, I don't discount the Deterrence effect.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
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
when it affects someone in power.
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.