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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."
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 used to think that way. Over the years, I've mellowed. At least 10 in the provincial prison would be enough, but no less.
Watch the "White Bear" episode from the excellent anthology series "Black Mirror" - it's probably a far more cruel thing to inflict a crime upon an individual, over and over, than deal with it in the most direct, blunt sense.
The guy deserves harsh punishment, for sure. If the law put just 10% of the effort into catching these idiots that they do toward pursuing "copyright infringers" the world would be a far better place.
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"
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.)
I don't believe someone needs to die to warrant a bigger sentence. The fact is, this psychopath put many people in harms way and got their doors broken down and live guns pointed at them. The fact that nobody died is a miracle - certainly not attributable to this cretin's restraint but more to the restraint of the officers involved. It could easily have gone another way. Misuse of resources, false police reports, endangering lives - the guy deserves some real prison. After all, you aren't going to "correct" the behavior of a psychopath easily. You have to punish them enough that they don't do it again because of the potential punishment.
"Corrective"... A fool's dream. One flash-bang in a baby's crib or worse and this kid would have initiated a killing or severe maiming. Well beyond "brat".
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.
You have to punish them enough that they don't do it again because of the potential punishment.
You obviously aren't a parent. If the only thing they worry about is the potential punishment, they get better at hiding their actions. You need to correct behaviors and find out the underlying reasons WHY they are doing the things. The only thing punishment for punishment's sake teaches is that they need to be more careful about getting caught.
I am a parent and while it is important to get to the bottom of bad behavior to keep it from happening again, you also need to be firm in enforcing punishments for bad behavior. Kids will naturally test the boundaries. If your reaction to bad behavior is only "Now, why are you doing this? Let's have a friendly chat about it", then your kids will walk all over you. Have firm (but fair) consequences for their actions followed up with discussions about what they did, why it was wrong, and how they should act in similar situations in the future.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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)
First of all, it's not clear to me that robbing a store with an unloaded pistol is necessarily less dangerous. Are there statistics on that?
But for the sake of argument, I'll assume it is. In that case, it's not irrelevant that what this guy did is more dangerous, but that's not a sole determining factor either.
The five main points of criminal justice: rehabilitation, incapacitation, deterrence, retribution, restitution.
If we believe that teenagers are unlikely to ever again swat somebody after a month in jail (which I personally consider extremely likely), then that satisfies incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Restitution can never be fully satisfied because you can't truly un-SWAT somebody. It's only retribution that's left, and I reject that as a reason for high sentences.
So the question is, even if this is more dangerous, is it also easier to fix the root problem?
If the Swat team response to an unverified phone call is to put people's lives at such severe risk as you describe, the problem is with the police, not the teenage idiot who placed the fake calls.
Absolutely, totally wrong. Without the teenager's call, that Swat team would have stayed where they are, and nothing bad would have happened. With the phone call, here's a list of possible consequences, all of which are the teenagers fault:
1. Swat team goes out, and figures out that nothing bad is going on, without frightening anyone. Waste of tax payers money.
2. Exactly like 1, but then the Swat team isn't available when a real call comes in. As a consequence, people might lose their lives because nobody is coming to help them.
3. Swat team goes out, under the assumption that the caller might be correct. The safest way to do this is to use so much force that nobody can fire a gun, while trying not to injure anyone. Result if everything goes right is a very, very unpleasant experience for the homeowner.
4. Same as 3, but a bit of bad luck, and the home owner gets injured.
5. Same as 3, but the homeowner is in a position that makes him look dangerous. For example, cleaning the guns in his collections, or sharpening a huge kitchen knife. With his wife is with him, crying because she just sliced a bunch of onions. Anything can happen.
6. Home owner detects that there are potential intruders at his doors and gets his gun to fight them off in self defence. Bad things _will_ happen.
All these scenarios apply even if you have a well-trained team that does its best to keep everyone secure.