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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."
"Hello, 911?"
Here we go again!
Sounds like a very reasonable and level-headed judge, making him completely ineligible for appointment to a higher court.
What have you got against Linus Torvalds?
Yea, Americans have NO conception of time whatsoever. Most of my countrymen would happily send somebody to prison for 10+ years for even minor offenses. Punch somebody while you are both drunk? 5 years. They have no idea how long 5 years, how insane a punishment is, how badly their lives will be permanently destroyed, how many friends and family they will lose, just how much time really costs somebody. 16 months during that developmental period is a HUGE chunk of his life. You can recover from a SWATing in a few weeks, months if it hit you particularly hard. But 16 months in jail is basically making sure the rest of his life is seriously restricted and damaged. But for that many swattings? Sure. It fits. I even thought this one was a little light.
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
"SJW" doesn't mean anybody who is for social justice. I'm for social justice! I want people to stop hating and harassing each other.
"SJW" is the term for those who do bad things in the name of social justice. They harass and threaten people who don't tow their very narrow definition of what is right. They become confrontational and angry if you so much as suggest they might be wrong about someone.
People who are for social justice? They're awesome.
Social Justice Warriors? They can be as bad as the guy this article is about.
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.
I work for nVidia.
Correct, but the militarization of SWAT and police in general SHOULD be the focus of the story. These little assholes wouldn't be swatting if it didn't evoke such a massive response from police.
Did you read the list of offenses this kid did? If you think he did all than just because SWAT teams react, and he is not the one that is primarily accountable.,., .well, I'll just have to assume you are the kid's mother.
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"
16 months in prison will help him improve his social skills no end.
The problem is like every cause its been taken over by the whack-a-doodles. Look at how MADD went from "We think you should call a cab when you've been drinking so you don't hurt anybody" (sensible and logical) to "Our ultimate goal is prohibition" (whack-a-doodle) or how PETA went from "We think food animals should be treated humanely" (sensible and logical) to "We'll call fish sea kittens and argue that germs should have the same rights as people!" (whack-a-doodle).
For those that think gamergate is about misogyny, or that social justice hasn't been taken over by the whack-a-doodles? I invite you to play a little game called "stormfront or social justice" where they simply remove the group being targeted and you have to choose whether it was written by a SJW or by a white supremacist. Congrats if you get even 50% correct because THAT is how whack-a-doodle the so called social justice "movement" has become, complete with calls for this or that group to be exterminated, this or that group should have their rights taken away, shit that would have sounded right at home at any Klan rally simply by changing the group.
So I'm sorry but "social justice" as a concept has been taken over, the sensible ones have been run out of the tent by ultra left wing racists that have total control of the platform.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm 58 and grew up just outside of Phila and can remember the TV commercial, Do you know where your children are? Well I think those commercials should run again but just a little different. Do you know what your children are doing online behind that Closed bedroom doors? Just an Idea. My daughters has her PC in the main living room. No TVs or PC in bedrooms allowed.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Sentence him to live 16 months in Quebec.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
It should be a serious crime. I haven't maintained otherwise. I just questioned that it should be a ten year prison sentence level of serious. That's over the top even by American standards of jurisprudence. In New York State, assuming no prior convictions, you need a class C felony to reach that kind of sentence. For perspective, class C felonies include robbery, burglary, criminal possession of a weapon, soliciting or supporting an act of terrorism, assault on a judge or first responder, or an attempt to commit a class B felony. There's some non-violent crimes in there too, primarily fraud that reaches a certain dollar amount.
IANAL but the closest charge we would have here to fit swatting would probably be falsely reporting an incident in the third degree, which is a misdemeanor. A reading of the law would seem to support bumping it up to first degree if someone is killed as a result of the false report, which makes it a class D felony.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.