Two More 'SWAT' Calls in California -- One Involving a 12-Year-Old Gamer (ktla.com)

In January an online gamer in California was arrested after at leat 20 fake emergency calls to police, one leading to a fatal shooting in Kansas. But this week in California there's been at least two more fake calls:

• A 12-year-old gamer heard a knock at his door Sunday -- which turned out to be "teams of Los Angeles police officers and other rescue personnel who believed two people had just hung themselves." The Los Angeles Police Department "said there's no way to initially discern swatting calls from actually emergencies, so they handle every scenario as if someone's life is in danger," according to the Los Angeles Times. The seventh-grader described it as "the most terrifying thing in my life."

• 36-year-old David Pearce has been arrested for falsely reporting an emergency at a Beverly Hills hotel involving "men with guns" holding him hostage. A local police captain later said that the people in the room had not made the call and in fact might have been asleep through much of the emergency. The Los Angeles Times reports that there's roughly 400 'SWATting' cases each year, according to FBI estimates, adding that "Some experts have said police agencies need to take the phenomenon more seriously and provide formal training to dispatchers and others to better recognize hoax callers."

Meanwhile, in the wake of a fatal shooting in Wichita, Kansas lawmakers have passed a new bipartisan bill increasing the penalties for SWAT calls. If a fake call results in a fatality -- and the caller intentionally masks their identity -- it's the equivalent of second-degree murder. "The caller must be held accountable," one lawmaker told the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Comments

Really "no way to discern"?

[Entrope]

If there is really no way for a 911 dispatcher to tell that a call is arriving from somewhere outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service, that is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be addressed. Probably all SWATing hoaxes involve that kind of proxy to reach the target dispatch, and probably vanishingly few legitimate emergency calls use those services.

If a dispatcher sees a VoIP call that indicates a high risk of violence or strongly points to heavily armed response, that should be good grounds to watch out for a hoax.

Re:Really "no way to discern"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last thing I'd want while talking to a 911 dispatcher is for them to be allowed to have doubt in my story.

Re:Really "no way to discern"?

[Kohath]

...that should be good grounds to watch out for a hoax.

The fact that anything could be a hoax is good grounds to watch out for a hoax.

But we don't need "good grounds" for the police to be careful when deciding to shoot at people.

Re:Really "no way to discern"?

[geekmux]

Last thing I'd want while talking to a 911 dispatcher is for them to be allowed to have doubt in my story.

Last thing I'd want is a bunch of people wrongfully shot dead because doubt is too scary for some other people who might have a story that "requires" a paramilitary strike.

That takes proper training to assess a threat, and has little to do with the problem of fake calls. You either have trigger-happy idiots behind an armed response, or you do not.

This is a two-fold problem. Make no mistake that change needs to happen on BOTH sides.

Re: Really "no way to discern"?

[nnull]

And how would you tell? Recently I'm getting phone calls with spoofed called ids, when you call them back, a real person answers that is confused about what's going on. The phone companies bare a large responsibility for allowing this, since they claimed this would never happen since the inception of caller Id.