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Vancouver Area Teen Sentenced To 16 Months For Swatting
An anonymous reader writes: A 17-year-old from the Vancouver area in Canada has been sentenced to 16 months in youth custody and 8 months under supervision in the community after pleading guilty to 23 charges including criminal harassment, public mischief, extortion and uttering threats. The teenager was responsible for a number of swatting calls across the United States and Canada — mostly of female gamers. The judge told him, "It appears that when real life became too hard you retreated into the online world and became increasingly socially isolated. While you may think you enjoyed greater success in the online world, that success was an illusion. You were left with severely limited social skills and a significant educational deficit."
My sentence would have been life.
A life of swatting.
He'd know it's coming. Over and over again. He just would never know when. He'd be asleep at 3 AM, and BAM! Door kicked in, flashbangs detonated everywhere, guns pointed in his face.
He'd find it hilarious, I'm sure, whilst everyone's favorite tacticool occifers would no doubt appreciate the training exercise.
So despite the tens or hundreds of millions of gamers out there gaming away merrily without ever swatting anyone, you seize on one clearly disturbed and deeply dysfunctional psycho as evidence that the shrill goose-stepping SJW brigade are somehow justified in their hysterics, let alone needed? No thanks brownshirt, go back to tumblr, the population there is ignorant enough to put up with your huffed out bullshit.
That's the textbook definition; he delights in the suffering of others.
He needs extensive mental evaluation and should probably be watched carefully once his sentence is up. These people are dangerous by their very nature.
I have some bad news. They run the place.
You can recover from a SWATing in a few weeks...
Unless you are fucking DEAD.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'm Canadian, but cannot claim to speak for the country, only my own Canadian-derived viewpoints.
I, too, do not want to see someone capable of being rehabilitated denied the opportunity for a better life (ie: job, hobbies, freedom, personal fulfillment).
I, too, do not want people who are un-rehabilitable released back into the general population.
I, however, feel that I must give the court-appointed psychologists the same level of initial trust that I would extend to the courts in judging this fairly. Since I'm not a psychologist, I would choose to depend on the above experts determinations of the offender's mental state post-treatment (as I am presuming from other past experiences in the Canadian legal system that the offender will be subject to such treatments) to determine his future freedoms and limitations. As such, I cannot prejudge his fitness at this point.
I would agree there are many discussions that should be had about the relative militarization of the police.
TL:DR: Article light on specifics to relative ability of treatment for the offender, so I must rely on the determination of the courts.
PS: The commenting style is deliberate, but not intended as mocking. I mean to highlight the relatively small differences between sample USA and Canadian viewpoints that may aid a further discussion on the differences between the USA perception of justice and the Canadian viewpoint.
SWATTING isn't a light offence. When you do this there is a very real possibility that someone will end up dead because a cop gets excited, or a homeowner is armed and decides to start shooting. This should be treated as a very serious crime, and if anyone is killed, the person doing the swatting needs to get a murder one charge slapped on them.
Moreover, this kid didn't do this once, but many times, demonstrating that this isn't a spur of the moment 'crime of passion', but that he possess a consistent and dangerous disregard for life. I am all for lighter sentencing for a lot of things, but this is something that you need to come down heavy on people for. Grafitti is stupid teenage hyjinx. SWATTING is really dangerous behavior.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'm all for a massive reduction in police militarization and very nearly eliminating SWAT teams given how rarely they're used for what they were originally intended for. That being said, the problem with using this issue as a lever is that there will always be some fringe situation that calls for a swift armed reaction of some sort. These kids can literally say whatever they want, so there's always going to be a way to provoke a dangerous response as long as there's any conceivable situation that warrants that response. This is just one of those cases where there should be a panic button. It should be really difficult to hit and you should punish the living shit out of people who treat the panic button like it's a toy.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I think both issue need to be addressed.
The severity of punishment for calling in fake hostage situations should be sever to act as a deterrent, but considerably more important is effective enforcement. People have to think that if they do this they will get caught. Otherwise even a death sentance won't actually be an effective deterrent.
Simultaneously, the police need to reign in SWAT protocols. It is completely unacceptable to be kicking in doors of innocent people, so much so that in the US it's even in the fucking Constitution that the cops need to get a warrant first. Now, figuring out how to desitngruish between genuine threats and fake ones without compromising respnce time in the real cases is a hard problem, but if the cops can't figure it out their only other choice should be to disband their SWAT teams.
My only annoyance with the whole internet abuse counter-attack (Gamergate, etc.) is that those who were targeted by the abuse went and painted the entirety of the population of male gamers as sociopathic misogynists and giggled while the innocent were lumped in with that horrible stereotype.
Just like pre-internet days, the nerds get abused for being nerds.
This case is exactly what needs to be the standard response. (1) Someone reports abuse. (2) Investigation. (3) Abuser found. (4) Abuser tried and convicted. The end. No making a career based on accusing all male gamers or the entire video game industry or the entirety of "science" for the abuse of a few people perpetrated. Just report, investigate, find, convict, close the book.
We don't need social martyrs, we need good police work and good courts.
And yet the ones trying to shame and abuse people are corrupt gaming journalists and similar dilettantes who get a hardon at the idea of changing gaming culture, even if that culture neither wants nor needs to be changed to match the fever swamps of neomarxist feminist ideology.
I don't see tens of millions of gamers standing up against GG, all I see are a few mouthbreathing journo grads, opportunistic wasters and beardos with babies lying, getting caught out on their lies, and lying again in the hopes that the information age will just go away. The old maxim of lying big enough and often enough... ...no longer applies.
Or have PTSD from nearly being made dead. People who claim that an armed paramilitary raid of your home is no big deal obviously haven't had it happen.
It should not be possible to make 911 calls and spoof the source as somewhere else. I'm sure "swatting" never occurred as a potential threat to anyone when the 911 system was being built, but it's pretty dang obvious now, and the vulnerability needs to be closed before some idiot's use of it gets someone killed. (Or someone else killed... have there been any deaths caused by swatting? I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't recall one.)
Yes, this kid was wrong. But we should examine the root cause of how a kid can pick up a phone that essentially deploys a military unit. How is that response valid? Shouldn't they vet the situation more before deploying a military force?
Examine the content and credibility of the phone call first. Maybe just knock on the door for a first check with conventional police officers. Only if they confirm a valid threat, with an active hostage situation, then you deploy a negotiator, and then if that fails, you consider deploying a force unit response.
The ridiculous disproportionate response, from phone call right to military force, is what should be punished and the leaders who making these decisions are enabling and creating this problem.
"For my money, anyone over 13 years old is aware of their actions and if they are defective enough to SWAT once, let alone multiple times, they should be incarcerated indefinitely in a mental health facility and banned from any phone or internet connected devices for life. "
There are no more mental health facilities the way you're thinking of them. All the institutions closed in the 80s and 90s. Now, you pretty much need to be Hannibal Lechter to get a mental health inpatient bed; you need to be so dangerous to yourself or others that the only choice is to keep you locked up and attempt to treat you. Prison is the new asylum for most mid-level mentally ill people.
Until they day you get accused by someone, and put in prison while trying to prove your innocence. Or if it happens to someone else who only got freed after a year when their lawyer finally gets round to lodging an appeal. Or when it happens to your son or daughter who should have been fined for jaywalking, but had the misfortune of encountering a judge who gets paid by the privatized prison company for each new client. We're not just talking about criminals - which may include people stealing a slice of pizza and Charles Manson, so the word is pretty much meaningless to me - but also a lot of people who'd never be in prison in any other country in the world in the first place. The mentally ill, for instance. Or the retarded - who get locked up a lot.
The prison system not just locks up criminals, it also creates criminals, and the more dehumanizing the treatment, the worse the monsters that come out. Even, or especially, if they were completely innocent to begin with. It has been a long standing observation that victims of torture (which is what we are discussing here) are more resilient to psychiatric damage if they were "guilty", i.e. worked for the resistance, or actually committed crimes. Not so the innocent - they get hit the hardest.
Just today I read a story about a leading member of the Lords Resistance Army on trial for war crimes. He started out as an innocent boy that got kidnapped. And turned into a monster. He slaughtered a lot of people before they caught him.
The prison system in the USA creates more monsters every day and thereby perpetuates itself to the point where it is both the biggest and most unsuccessful prison system in the world. It may also be the most expensive. So I would worry about prisoners undergoing torture. Because it's part of a huge problem the US society has to solve.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)