ALAN W. FILION,
a/k/a "Nazgul Swattings,"
a/k/a "Torswats V3,"
a/k/a "Third Reich of Kiwiswats,"
a/k/a "The Table Swats,"
a/k/a "Angmar," and
a/k/a "Torswats"
Seems like a fun guy. It looks like most of this story was covered a year ago:
> from approximately August 2022 to January 2024, Filion made more than 375 swatting and threat calls, including calls in which he claimed to have planted bombs in the targeted locations or threatened to detonate bombs and/or conduct mass shootings at those locations.
Its not just the weapons. In parts of Europe you can get arrested for posting the wrong kind of meme online.
As a side note, when trying to research this you'll see weird double speak fact checks like below:
> Fact Check: 11-year-old arrested on suspicion of violent disorder after riots, not ‘mean tweets’
> Sending grossly offensive, obscene, indecent, or menacing messages on public electronic communication networks is a criminal offence in Britain under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003
> Misleading. An 11-year-old was arrested on suspicion of violent disorder, not for social media posts, during a swathe of arrests by British police targeting those involved in rioting.
But then the authors don't write what 'violent disorder' is.
Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson
> The spokesperson said the 11-year-old, one of five juveniles arrested on suspicion of violent disorder by the force on Aug. 28 in relation to the riots, was later bailed.
> Cleveland Police arrested another 11-year-old on suspicion of arson after a police vehicle was set alight in Hartlepool on July 31, according to the spokesperson and an Aug. 1 statement, opens new tab . The child was also released on bail, the spokesperson said.
And this isn't some weird online political rag, it's Reuters. It's all very strange.
If you insist on the original article being very precise and very exhaustive, you should too: “wrong kind of meme” is very vague. A meme of a swastika will indeed land you in trouble in multiple countries, to pick a lightweight example. What kind of meme do you mean?
I just read about a kid being arrested for $2 bill because the cops didn't know such bills exist. Not the first time it happens too. Some of them aren't exactly brilliant, unfortunately. And there are almost never any consequences for doing stupid while in the uniform.
> "Violent Disorder" is a specific offence listed in the Public Order Act.
So the article should explain it.
> The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.
How is this related apart from the person sharing the same age and the town being the same? One is suspected of arson and the other of Violent Disorder? Does this add value to the fact check?
>And this isn't some weird online political rag, it's Reuters
What makes you think they aren't? All news media is inherently biased if they want or not. Not to mention "fact checker" are a prime candidate for corruption.
FYI this is a reference to the opening statement of the Unabomber Manifesto "Industrial Society and its Future". Don't think OP meant anything by the distinction of US/humans
> The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the
human race.
Fairly obvious for those who've spent enough time online, I'd say most people would only recognize that first sentence. The Unabomber Manifesto has become something of a copypasta
The weapons are orthogonal to the culture; most of the police abuse volume is in beating, arrest and confinement, property destruction and confiscation, etc. The shootings make news, but lots of people don't get shot and still suffer lasting material consequences
It's a bit more complicated than just equipment I reckon. Australian cops don't necessarily use literal military equipment (as frequently as US cops) but they sure know how to and make time to beat and rough ride someone within an inch of their lives, harass and arrest political youtuber staff members (friendly jordies) for literally no reason, or tase people to death (a tiny ~92 year old demented lady at a nursing home with a blunt steak knife, for example) at impressive scale. Aboriginal Australians couldn't be the most incarcerated peoples on earth without the dedication of our repugnant police forces. It speaks to militarisation or being a disaster to me despite not rolling out the tanks because of the severity of responses is still utterly beyond reason and has basically the same outcomes including no repercussions for going so far beyond what could possibly be justified even when there actually is danger or a crime happening.
It would obviously fuck with the cultural reference replacing US for the world in the phrase.
But if you believe that only the US has this problem, I am sad to inform you that Taylor Swift and Hollywood Movies are not the only American cultural exports eagerly consumed around the world.
This is at best naive, and reads pretty smug and self-satisfied. You likely still have a military, and policing isn't really about the weapons a cop carries. Ironically less deadly weapons can encourage more liberal use, so maybe you can be proud of your higher rate of non-lethal beatings?
Someone subjected to a non-lethal beating can complain, and be a witness to what happened. They can be medically examined to determine what happened. Its far harder to cover up.
I am pretty happy with the police hardly ever killing anyone, and that almost always someone who is a real danger to others. I am happy fewer people being killed by police so far this decade (and that includes road accidents involving police!), than have been killed by police in the US so far this month.
The whole point of swatting is to cause massive over-reaction by the police endangering victim's life. If it would just cause a regular visit by a cop nobody would do it - what would be the point of it, waste 5 minutes of person's time? The whole premise relies on the massive militarized response.
Do you really think that dressing in military special ops tactical clothing, with advanced and powerful weaponry, balaclavas, helmets and responding to a call in a armoured vehicle doesn't create any weird expectations on the mind of police officer of how they should behave in a call?
Does playing dress up make any difference to how much murdering they do? I don't think that outcomes would be any different if they were sent in in their regular uniforms with their regular weaponry.
How is this even related to militarization? The perp is abusing emergency response systems with a total lack of empathy for the damage it did to the victim and the department.
The separation of empathy from an 18 year old online kid from his peers is the true tragedy here.
I think they are saying in the US the SWAT team shows up ready for war, while a more measured response would be a couple cops knocking on the door to see what's going on. Obviously the cops don't have a crystal ball and there's not going to be a clean solution here, outside of catching the person earlier.
It sucks this person was so angry and unfeeling to the world at a young age.
> They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols.
This is not accurate.
The timeframe is not wrong; it is true that the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s. But saying it evolved from "warehouse guards and slave patrols" is ahistorical. Most modern police forces modeled after London's Metropolitan Police replaced night watch systems that have been around for literally all of recorded history.
> the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s.
There are some pretty big differences between the UK policing model and the one used in the US.
The UK model was set up against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars (the French police's role included monitoring dissent, suppressing political opposition [1] and even censoring books) and the Peterloo Massacre [2] (where cavalry were set on a peaceful protest campaigning for more than 2% of people to be allowed to vote)
The Peelian model [3] is one of 'policing by consent' where the police focus their efforts on the sorts of crimes the average citizen wants solved - rather than on suppressing political dissent, or censoring books, or launching cavalry charges against protests. Peel's police aren't a military force, which is why very few of them have guns.
If the American police are based on Peelian principles, then an awful lot of the principles have gotten lost in translation.
While some night watches were public safety distributed among community members, they were often there to protect the goods of merchants rather than protect the ordinary citizens of an area from petty crime. As merchants grew, and their goods became more valuable targets, the merchants would hire on guards, but saw the opportunity to turn the existing night watch systems in place to their favor, essentially insisting on distributing the cost of guarding their goods across the community.
I'm not saying the night watches didn't evolve into police departments, I'm saying the night watches were co-opted prior to them becoming uniformed departments.
And slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US. I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments.
For the warehouse guards, to summarize, you're saying that night watchmen and city watchmen were de facto warehouse guards before the formation of professional police forces? That seems a far cry from "evolved out of warehouse guards". Police still put resources into protecting property, but this does not make them "warehouse guards" any more than resources put on petty crime make them "cutpurse chasers" unless you're just making rhetorical points.
For the slave patrol point, I would appreciate a single example of this phenomenon. Is it the claim that there exists at least one professional police force that was created to replace a "slave patrol", which previously performed some subset of the civil duties of police officers? I have not been able to find an example; can you point me to one?
The establishment of the Charleston police department directly traces roots into slave patrols. The department was formed from city guard, who were used to round up spaces and put down slave revolts.
From my admittedly cursory reading, this does not appear to be accurate.
The antecedent organizations to the modern Charleston police department, notably the Town Watch and the City Guard, were both dissolved in the aftermath of the civil war, while civil order was kept by federal forces until the end of reconstruction.
But regardless of whether we can chase down a chain of organizations that meets the colloquial meaning of "evolved", it does not appear that either the City Guard nor the Town Watch were principally slave patrols, although they did enforce the slavery regime as part of their policing functions.
An organization that participates in the suppression of slaves as part of its function is not a "slave patrol". If the statement "[modern police forces] evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols" is to be parsed as "modern police forces evolved out of earlier organizations that sometimes protected private property or enforced slavery laws" then I grant the accusation, but it is rather hollow and meaningless at that point.
> For the slave patrol point, I would appreciate a single example of this phenomenon
Potter, Gary "The History of Policing in the United States"[1] references Platt, Tony, "Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term
Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 18"
Did you read Platt? Its a mistake to grant any assertion as valid, especially given what we now know about academic fraud. The Platt article is freely available and does not reference slavery in any way that I can see from searching (the bad OCR) and quickly reading through the paragraphs.
Potter: The genesis of the modern police organization in the South
is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982).
Potter: Platt, Tony, “Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 18 (1982).
"CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES: IMMEDIATE AND LONG-TERM REFORMS FROM A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE"
Tony Platt
Crime and Social Justice, No. 18, REMAKING JUSTICE (Winter 1982), pp. 38-45 (8 pages)
I have noted we have shifted from "I can't find a single example" to "I don't trust the first provided source", and yet there are plenty of other sources, if you're searching in good faith.
The history of the United States is well documented - it was only for a brief period during reconstruction that policing was deracialized in the American South, and even saw a number of formerly-enslaved lawmen. There were numerous violent revolts against this, and in support of white supremacy in places like Oklahoma, Louisiana[1], Mississippi and elsewhere where egalitarian leaders were ran out of town, and the law enforcement (along other administrative leadership) was reconfigured against the then "new", post-civil-war ways.
Do you see any functional differences between slave patrols (membership free from white land owners or their nominees) and the group that overthrew and reconstituted reconstruction-era law enforcement (mobs drew from white landowners, or their hired grunts).
Don’t “good faith” me with a reference that you claim supports your assertion but in actuality does not. You made an assertion and can defend it or abandon it.
If evidence for your claim was as plentiful as you claim, you would just add another link. You didn’t.
What sort of falsifiable evidence would be sufficient to convince you? That specific named individuals who were on slave patrols later became sheriffs?
I’ve been thinking about it since asking for evidence. I studied 17-1800’s US history a long time ago and was oriented toward drawing insight from census and other quantifiable records and plugging them into SPSS.
Post-Belesiles [0], I would want to see a body of relatively objective records that can be independently verified in the form of adversarial cooperation. Say some significant number of individuals of slave oriented occupations moving into net new police-specific occupations.
Your use of the word “sheriff” is significant here because sheriff and constable are occupation terms that predate the Atlantic slave trade. These were civil enforcers for what represented law and justice in the English system. They still exist today in name and function. Moving from slave patrol to sheriff doesn’t necessarily support the thesis since sheriff and constable are not net new police forces.
I suppose if you dismiss an article out of hand due to the ideology of the author without even seeing what historical facts they claim or their references, they might not be valuable to you.
Should progressive academics declare all CATO papers invalid because they are ideologically misaligned with the institute?
Given the origin of modern police forces in the Met, the principles set down by Peel would indicate that the aim was to have a force that was backed by the public - "policing by consent".
One of their predecessor organisations was the Bow Street Runners which was set up by magistrates with the aim of providing a less corrupt system than that of "thief takers" and a more professional one than parish constables.
Ok, first link in results contradicts "slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US":
While it is true that slave patrols were a form of American law enforcement that existed alongside other forms of law enforcement, the claim that American policing “traces back” to, “started out” as, or “evolved directly from,” slave patrols, or that slave patrols “morphed directly into” policing, is false. This widespread pernicious myth falsely asserts a causal relationship between slave patrols and policing and intimates that modern policing carries on a legacy of gross injustice. There is no evidence for either postulate.
This seems like a genetic fallacy. Police might have been former slave patrollers at one time in some places. That doesn’t mean all US police are the same or have anything in common with them.
I’m not sure what it means for US police to have “evolved out of” slave patrols in places that never had slaves, like New York City (northern states didn’t want to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act), or even in places like Hawaii that were founded well after slavery was abolished.
Police forces have roots in protecting capital, for example warehouse guards or for another slave patrols.
They still exist for that purpose in the US.
They do not exist to protect people. They are a tool of the state and capital.
The years post slavery still were used to enforce Jim Crow laws, segregation, and violence against minorities. They still used dogs to attack peaceful protestors. SWAT teams are a continuation of an ethos of being warriors, willing to do violence at the behest of the government and capital at the expense of the people.
This is a genetic fallacy. The origins of policing don’t give you sufficient information to judge its present quality. Further, as many have also pointed out, many places didn’t even have slave patrols. Drawing a connection between contemporary Waco cops and Jim Crow is dubious but drawing that connection to e.g. LAPD is entirely unjustified. Bad police departments resemble something more akin to the Catholic Church than the KKK.
Assuming you are not making the entirely reductionist argument that requires every law be tied back to capital (in other words, murder is illegal because it brings down property values or something) this is an extremely narrow view of the purpose of police. This everything-is-capital framing doesn’t explain consumer protections or environmental laws or labor laws.
The purpose of police is to enforce the laws. Many of those laws have been significantly and disproportionately controlled by corporate and monied interests but again there are too many clear counterexamples to conclude as you did.
Specifically, SWAT teams didn’t exist until the 1960s. I’d wager their escalated use against civilians in their homes likely coincided with the War on Drugs in the 1980s.
> Cops are a relatively recent phenomena. (Cops as a uniformed, central office, patrolling force.)
Not at all, Spain for example had local "brotherhoods" who were meant to protect the local communities against bandits and other unwanted people, and this was back in the 12th century. I'm sure other countries could have been even earlier with their early versions of a police force. "Santa Hermandad" is a term you can look up to find some history about it.
Accidentally, I read about the Romans recently. They had the Cohortes Vigiles, which was mostly a night time fire watch but it included night watch duties. Daytime was the responsibility of the Praetorian Guard. They were more kind of a part of the army but under the mayor's control (to some degree at least). I think they meet your definition of uniformed, central office, and patrolling.
>That concept is from the mid 1800s. They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols.
Isn't this just guilt by association? Whether police are bad or not should be judged on its merits, not what its history is. The Autobahn and VW was built by Nazi Germany, but it'd be absurd to bring that factoid up when discussing road transport or the German car industry.
It's guilt by association and that narrow nationalistic perspective that the US is the entirety of the world. Turns out, most of the planet managed to form similarly-operating police forces without first having slave patrols.
Yeah, right. Those were distinctly US-ian things; somehow, the rest of the world managed to develop a similar form of police force at similar time, too.
The and was not meant to be exclusive. It should maybe be read as or. It's not meant to imply all police forces were slave patrols. Plenty evolved to protect other capital interests.
> They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols.
Are we still spouting this nonsense? They do come from the mid 1800s. Modeled after the London Metro Police, where there were so many slaves to catch. American cities soon imitated, based on how many slaves were recovered.
It would be fair to say that early US police were mostly about protecting the interests of the powerful. Over time that diminished and police protected an increasing number of less powerful groups.
During my childhood, it was common for police to defer to husbands regarding domestic abuse. And kids all over knew to not go to the police - for any kind of abuse from authority figures.
The article you point to is explicitly debunking the idea of slave patrols evolving into police forces.
> The claim that modern police originated from slave patrols is a dangerous slur designed to delegitimize policing ... Bad policing must be criticized, but we should not do so by resorting to historically flimsy myths, especially myths that unfairly tarnish the reputations of those in law enforcement and cast aspersions on their motives.
It does not matter... he believes it, so it must be true. But it does feel weird to wander among humans, listening to the nonsense being discussed so earnestly.
The truth of the matter is this: if you refuse to believe that modern policing evolved directly from slave patrols, it means you are a racist and you voted for Trump. This is undeniable, and by denying it you prove it true. Nuanced and sophisticated descriptions of how historical circumstances came to be are repressive and the enemy of social justice. Thomas Jefferson ate babies and George Washington stomped on little latinx children.
Are you willing to understand the argument? What does militarization mean? Because I’ve seen no evidence of police responding to a crime scene with an Apache helicopter or a howitzer. It’s remarkable that completely obviously false claims of militarization are accepted here.
As for your link: the claim made by the “study” is false since it is ignoring virtually every obvious confounding factor to claim that the number of police officers doesn’t affect crime rates. Per capita police count is a measure of how effectively a city can respond to crime. If they can’t respond that means there aren’t consequences. When there aren’t consequences you end up with the disaster of public safety you see in west coast cities like SF, Portland, and Seattle.
The driving force behind it is this LESO; established to facilitate the "1033 Program", which transfers excess weapons, equipment, and vehicles from the United States Armed Forces to civilian law enforcement agencies.
From 1997 until 2014, $5.1 billion in military hardware was transferred from the DoD to local American law enforcement agencies. 1/3rd of the equipment was brand-new.
> This is a vague claim made by the anti policing activists
Probably a conclusion people come to when they compare US police looking more like the US military every day, while their local police doesn't go in that direction at all. At least that's true for me as a person living in Spain but sometimes seeing the really crazy equipment US police seems to have.
Having semiautomatic rifles or armored vehicles isn’t militarization. Private citizens can get those too. Police forces don’t have M1 Abrams tanks or F35s or nuclear carriers. This claim that the police are problematic is an entirely emotional activist response to a few incidents. That sentiment then led to hyperbolic claims like militarization.
They have Bazookas, Grenade Launchers, Predator drones, and mine resistant vehicles up to and including Armored Personnel Carriers. None of these are available to private citizens.
Obama went so far as to say the following when trying to reign in the 1033 program in 2015
"We've seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like it's an occupying force as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them ... So we're going to prohibit equipment made for the battlefield that is not appropriate for local police departments."
> None of these are available to private citizens.
Private citizens can actually buy mine resistant vehicles. We can even buy main battle tanks - though the turret needs to be disabled without a Destructive Device permit.
With a Destructive Device permit, you can also buy a grenade launcher.
We don't sell predator drones to local police departments. Police use the same commercial drones any other private citizen can buy - though cities often restrict whether non-police can fly them.
Doesn't the police in the US frequently end up with hardware the military used to use? I've seen bunch of pictures/videos of police using Humvees and similar stuff, which I thought was originally made for military use, not domestic policing.
It also seems like in 2015 there was limits added that made it so "the military was restricted from transferring some weapons, such as grenade launchers, weaponized vehicles, and bayonets to police". Why was that restriction needed if the police isn't becoming more and more like the military?
Humvees (HMMWV) aren't anything special. They were sold new for a while on the US civilian market. It's just another truck. The military surplus ones didn't come with weapons. Lots of other countries also sell off military surplus trucks, I've seen regular people in Europe driving comparable vehicles like a Unimog.
> This claim that the police are problematic is an entirely emotional activist response to a few incidents.
Really? Do you realize that the amount of civil asset forfeiture has exceeded burglaries? The militarization of police is absolutely a huge problem. As is mass-incarceration for non-violent crimes, over-criminalization, no-knock raids, etc.
They just raided a dudes house for a squirrel.
And no, I don't advocate for the idiocy in CA where they legalized violent crime as a petty response to having their budgets threatened.
I don't pay nearly enough attention or care about police quality outcomes to comment on whether trends have been a disaster, but critiques of militarization are definitely not something that arose out of BLM. A huge amount was coming from Radley Balko and reason.com over 15 years ago. It was a major libertarian talking point for a long time. As soon as Iraq surplus donation programs started giving free MRAPs and full plate personal armor to police, it was making people uneasy. Early justification for beefing up police armament largely came out of the North Hollywood bank robbery shootout in what? 1998? We didn't want police being outgunned by common criminals, but it's never been clear they need to deal with paramilitary insurgencies that exist in active theaters of combat. Nobody was ever putting IEDs in the streets to blow up squad cars in the United States as far as I can remember.
> We don’t need any Oct 7th type attacks happening on home soil.
Well homegrown attacks happen DAILY. "Averaging almost 50,000 deaths from firearms annually". But no, once they're not on the news like the Oct 7th attacks where, it's fine I guess.
The number you’re citing is much higher than the number of firearm-related homicides on your linked page; I believe that’s because it includes suicides, which are not relevant to this conversation.
If there are guns, there is death. Frankly, if there are no guns, there's still death.
You pulling an argumentative sleight of hand here conflating your run of the mill gun violence with terrorist attacks or mass shootings isn't cool.
It doesn't matter how the police is equipped, they can't stop a guy from walking up to his neighbor and shooting him in the face unless they're already there pointing guns at him. Although, maybe some sort of remote mind control chip is the answer there?
Also, I'm certain every shooting ends up on local news.
This. There are valid reasons to have the big guns, though I still think we’ve overreached. It is terrifying that a damn teenager managed to trick the cops into whipping out the big guns hundreds of times.
Despite that the teenager will likely be going to jail, the most damning indictment is of the police forces that were repeatedly co-opted by the teenager. It should really take something much more clever to trigger this kind of systemic response repeatedly.
I'm not sure who aided in constructing this mental representation for you that the number of cops is directly proportional with the scale of conflict that's about to happen.
I'd challenge that view by claiming that if the threat is of someone holding their family hostage threatening to kill them (just a guess at what these "swatters" might say to the dispatcher to get cops to actually kick in some doors, I don't know what their state-of-the-art accusation is), then sending one cop car, poorly equipped, sounds a bit silly for multiple reasons.
It's because they have to assume it's real. Same reason behind weather warnings. They can't know for sure if it's real, but it's 'better' to assume it's real and respond accordingly only to discover it's a hoax, than it is to assume it's a prank and show up unprepared only to have it be real and they aren't ready to handle it. It's Schrodinger's hostage.
> We don’t need any Oct 7th type attacks happening on home soil.
USA has 1-2 mass shootings everyday on average. This is far worse than a singular big attack. And how long would the reaction of police to any big attack even take? Is it actually realistic that they will have a useful impact with big guns?
2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition so while what you say is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader as the typical mass shooting of the FBI definition consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.
The USA is the only first-world country I'm aware of where many people are happy to argue that a 2+ victim shooting (in any context) is NOT a mass shooting.
"2" being a large number of people to be killed in a crime does not necessarily make it sensible (to me, a Dutchman, very much not American) to call that crime a "mass shooting". If the crime was e.g. a bank robbery (sorry for the unimaginative example), and they shot a member of staff and later a civilian to get away, then that's a robbery with two dead, not a mass shooting. What people imagine when you say "mass shooting" is sensational stories from (predominantly) the US where some mad kid takes a gun to a school and shoots around. If that kid shoots 2 people, that's a mass shooting with 2 dead.
> Mass shootings like Columbine happen every day in America.
The guy you’re replying to (and I as well) are saying that this is an intentionally misleading statement. Three people being wounded but not killed in a shootout they started is still considered on the same level as dozens of innocent children being hurt and killed. IMO that’s straight up misinformation. It’s designed to illicit the strongest emotional reaction possible, while being not even technically wrong.
America has lots of problems, and guns are definitely one of them. Everyone agrees with this, we just disagree on how to fix it. Twisting words and lying is never helpful.
Mass shootings as defined to inflate statistics by groups like the Gun Violence Archive aren’t what people usually think of when they think of mass shootings. Those figures include anything with four victims including gang violence, robberies, etc. The more accurate measure is from the Mother Jones database, which lists just two this year.
The military model is that they are organized into units with training, and obey a central authority. On the whole, it's been an improvement over forming ad hoc posses of farmers and shopkeepers and arming them, or the medieval hue and cry model where someone screams and then everybody in town comes over and beats a stranger to death for having a different accent after dark. I'd love to see some statistics about how much worse it is now that we have professional police, though, if you've got any to share.
The "military model" goes so much further than that. They are "officers" and have military ranks as their position/title. They wear military-styled uniforms and headwear. They engage in military-style ceremonies.
> I'd love to see some statistics about how much worse it is now that we have professional police,
How fortunate that they're willing to collect statistics on their own performance for you.
> The "military model" goes so much further than that.
Claiming that police are being militarized is a very broad statement. Depending on your perspective it can be positive or negative.
You could argue that consistency and having a common operating model with accountability is a good thing. Unfortunately many would argue the adopted model is very flawed and that the level accountability is tied to public outrage or scrutiny.
I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate. Some argue that sensitivity and deescalation training are where the focus should be, while others are arguing for the warrior training.
The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because doing it badly will be more harmful than not having done it at all.
> You could argue that consistency and having a common operating model with accountability is a good thing.
Why would that require that a "captain" has several subordinates ranked "Lieutenant" and "Sergeant"? Why do the highest ranked police have caps with brocade, and gold braid on their shoulders? Is that part of the consistency? Why does the NYPD have dress uniforms? Why do they give military style funerals for those who die, or x-gun salutes? We're often told they're out there fighting "wars", though everyone is always vague about who the other side is.
I'm not making the claim that they've been militarized recently. It seems to have been the case no matter how far you go back.
> I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate.
I don't think this is a training problem. When they shoot some grandma or shake down travelers for the cash in their wallets, I don't think this could ever be corrected no matter how much or what sort of training they are required to undergo. This is some baseline ethics problem, that could only be corrected with initial selection, and then only if the selection process itself were relatively uncorrupted (and it's not).
Your comment doesn't just suggest you are mistaken about this or that, but that you aren't in a frame of mind where you could recognize or appreciate that there is a problem.
> The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because
What if the task were something absolutely morally abhorrent? What if the task was to efficiently and artfully carve the hearts out of newborn babies and toddlers, and to terrorize the parents with the mutilated remains of their children? But you've been doing this task for so long, that you and everyone else just assumes that it's something that needs to be done. You're sitting around arguing "ok, maybe we need to do only have as many satanic baby sacrifices, and I won't listen to the people who say we need to have more not less". And there's another guy sitting next to you saying "I don't know why we need the terror... we could kill just as many babies without being cruel, they could get anesthesia, and we could do grief counseling for the mom and dad".
And you endlessly yammer about this stuff, for decades, never noticing that you're all lunatics. The concept that this just shouldn't be done at all, in any manner, it's something you can't possibly hear. Even those who can understand this like to whine that they're powerless to stop it, that they don't have the tools to put a stop to it, etc. The truth is we all have the power to stop, none of you want to.
> Your comment doesn't just suggest you are mistaken about this or that, but that you aren't in a frame of mind where you could recognize or appreciate that there is a problem.
Popping in here to say that it's funny how you said this then go on about baby sacrifice.
In Europe this would have been a completely different story. It's highly unlikely (compared to the US) that a SWAT team equivalent would kill anyone. The guy could have got away with 5-7 years max.
I know it's a museum, but I prefer to live here.
I have been following swatting incidents of content creators for years and I have learned that police jurisdictions where this happens frequently in are becoming wiser and spreading information around, so the threat of getting killed from a swatting incident has gone down. Places with pockets of content creators like Austin Texas have become very aware of these types of things.
If you are a content creator, or someone who might be at risk for swatting you can call your local PD and explain the situation. You can let them know that you understand they must respond to those types of calls, but just wanted to call in and let them know it could happen. Most are happy to hear from you and take note.
Before swattings became popular, people used to send pizzas (popularized by old 4chan) and you would have to call all the pizza places in your area and get your address blacklisted. That was a pain.
I'd recommend that if you receive threats of a swatting, whether you're a content creator or not, it's a good idea to talk to your local police department about it the moment it happens.
Unfortunately, I speak from experience. I received a credible threat, called my local PD, and they began to investigate immediately. They also put notes in their dispatch system (which is shared by the local SWAT team) indicating that this had happened before, and to proceed with extreme caution.
The "swatter" never did follow through on the first attempt, but did follow through about 6 months later. I didn't get any threats from the swatter that time, but did get a call from my local PD while I was at work, and they let me know they'd driven by my place and called it off after being confident it was a false alarm.
Anticipating questions: no, there's no sort of protocol I setup with the PD. They have to investigate every threat, and even if we setup some sort of "shared secret" ahead of time, if a swatter says I'm cutting up my family in the basement, the PD can't know with certainty that I'm not. About the best I can do is make sure to answer the door when/if the PD shows up so they can more quickly establish things are safe.
Also: the attackers were after some OG Twitter accounts I used to use, and they thought they could intimidate me into giving the accounts to them.
Ye olde 4chan's reputation for being an evil website is funny in retrospect. The mortality rate on phony pizza deliveries is pretty close to zero and harmless compared to what goes down on the internet these days.
A European swatting may be highly unlikely to succeed in killing somebody, but the murderous intent is still there. It should be punished as attempted murder both in America and Europe.
Nevertheless European, especially German police, is obviously also prone to go all in without establishing any kind of context. One email is sufficient.
remarkably similar story to JStark1809, creator of the FGC9 [1] and thus a great boon to the people in Myanmar fighting against a tyrannical government. JStark died of a heart attack during a european swat raid.
It seems statistically rare (highly unlikely) that a SWAT team would injure or kill someone in the US too. I can only find references to 3 - of which only 1 is a result of a direct shooting by law enforcement. The other two are a shooting of law enforcement and a heart attack.
I've made this comment before but technology could help here. If the call was tagged as landline, cell, or VoIP along with approximate location info it would help a lot.
A landline call tagged as "same town" or cell call tagged as "pinged tower near reported location" could be treated more seriously than a VoIP call from "Fly-by-night VoIP Gateway Plc".
The phone system is sufficiently easy to spoof this kind of info, even if the dispatch does receive it (which they probably already do) it doesn't mean that the origin is reliably accurate. Furthermore, there is no way to be sure that police actually pay attention to the signals they have available.
They like opportunities to play with their tech toys and rough up some "suspects." A compelling story about someone in distress is the perfect excuse, whether the message comes in via VOIP, TOR or 4chan.
Does swatting only exist in the US? By swatting I mean “causing life threatening police action to innocent people by giving false information to said police”.
Ideally sending cops anywhere shouldn't be treated as a murder attempt, no matter the persons intent. They should be trained to recognize if there is true threat or not.
If our legal system started recognizing that sending the police somewhere is equivalent to calling an assassin then we've got larger issues to address.
He's probably not facing anything resembling 20 years. Charged as an adult under the fact patterns we know about, I get something like 15 years. But he's being charged as a juvenile.
In criminal law, attempted crime is treated the same as successful completions. That’s because we don’t want to encourage people to make attempts: many such attempts could be successful.
Imagine a world in which someone is trying to murder you or your children. You know who they are, and you even have incontrovertible evidence they are doing it. Yet they get off scot-free every time because their bullets missed the mark.
(This is covered in the mandatory first-year criminal law course in law school, BTW.)
Yes, I agree. The SWAT-ter attempted to kill people. The police did not. I'm not sticking up for the accused; I'm saying the facile "this is a police problem" argument doesn't apply in this story.
I never said the police's problems were on display with this case. In fact i think the case is largely meaningless to the topic. the threat of swatting is going to remain until the police can be brought under some kind of democratic control.
That's more than a decade less than what Chelsea Manning or John Kiriakou was sentenced to. It's absurd that the punishment is much harsher for unspecified theoretical harm caused by whistleblowing than the very real harm caused by literal murder attempts.
As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people who cooperated with the US or the Afghanistan government against the Taliban. When the Taliban found out about such people they would go after them.
We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks because there is no way to know if the Taliban found them out through the leaks or through some other source. The odds are pretty good that it was more than one, probably a lot more.
The swatting teen on the other hand is known to have not actually gotten anyone killed.
A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you. They were there to do something that sometimes goes wrong and does kill, but most of the time that doesn't happen.
Someone coming to your house because the Manning leaks identified you as cooperating against the Taliban was there to kill you.
> We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks
This is exactly what I meant by "unspecified and theoretical." The government had over 2 decades to point to any instances of harm. Where are they?
Also again, Chelsea Manning didn't publish the unredacted files. It's rich to blame her for Afghanistan deaths while ignoring the actions of Bush and every president after him, where the ultimate responsibility lies.
> A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you.
No, the crucial difference is intent. Swatting kills people, swatters know that, but they do it anyways for their own pleasure. Obviously, swatters aren't sending trigger-happy cops so that their victims can survive.
Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes. This is whistleblowing, not some selfish "leak." The intent here is to save lives, the exact opposite of swatting. I don't know how anyone can demonize whistleblowing while trivializing swatting.
Crimes against the state or that that thumb their nose at the authority of the state always carry disproportionate punishments because the state is who's writing the rules, running the systems, creating the sentencing guidelines, etc.
Not to mention the opportunity cost: victims of real violent/urgent situations who couldn't access timely protection, as well as the cost to society of perpetrators who marginally escaped while law enforcement were occupied tending to fake call outs.
Yes, they can't charge him again for the same physical act.
His federal guilty plea appears to admit to 375 swatting calls. So I don't think the state or local courts can subsequently charge him for any of those calls - they would need to find evidence of some separate calls.
It's only attempted murder because American SWAT is trigger happy, equipped literally like an army and shoots before asking questions or establishing context, that's hardly his fault.
If you have smart police officers who do smart police work this is a mild annoyance at best. Not trying to defend him, but SWAT is just as guilty as he is.
AFAIK the swat teams involved in the OP incidents didn't kill anybody, so they more or less did their jobs properly. Nonetheless, the intent was there; this guy committed hundreds of attempted murders.
I agree that he is complicit, but I find it hard to view him as solely culpable for a death. If a child feeds law enforcement false data, and law enforcement then kills someone, both parties should have known better but I have much higher expectations of our law enforcement than a teenager.
The kid needs to be punished, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have a glaring hole in our law enforcement procedures so large that even children can exploit them. That’s insane. Children are always going to do dumb shit, we need to have policies and procedures to guard against that.
My response is in the context of the parent comment saying that it should be treated like attempted murder, and then the response citing the 20 years of sentence reading to me like it was implying that the crimes were being treated seriously enough. The premise you seem to disagree with was established by previous comments and isn't something I proposed myself.
If there's one thing to take away from the last, idk, ten-ish years, it's that the US court system is remarkably forgiving, even on things it really shouldn't be.
He's not facing 20 years; he's facing a small fraction of that.
That requires not only people wrapping their mind around the fact that death is likely when the cops kick in a door but also the state overtly codifying that reality.
> In January 2024, an individual affiliated with the Torswats Telegram account and claiming to be a friend of Filion suggested that he was part of a group aiming to incite racial violence and that he sought money to “buy weapons and commit a mass shooting.” The allegation aligns with a written tip, placed to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in April 2023 and obtained by WIRED, alleging that the person behind the Torswats account was involved in a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles.
I wonder if this was supposed to be Nine Angels. Copy editing on the web is so sloppy that I'm going to assume so because it makes more sense (to me).
Wow, neo-nazis are a fun bunch. Their ideas about accelerationism and trying to induce race riots have got to be our biggest semi-organized domestic threat. It's encouraging to see authorities seemingly beginning to catch on to this, as well as widespread recognition of what swatting is. Five years ago was a very different story, especially on the latter.
>I wonder if this was supposed to be Nine Angels. Copy editing on the web is so sloppy that I'm going to assume so because it makes more sense (to me).
I'm going to assume that wired got it right and it's the neo-nazis that misspelled it; it's much funnier that way.
It should really not be possible for a single anonymous phone call to dispatch a heavily armed response team to break down someone's door.
Aside from that, people who do so are despicable. 20 years is a light sentence. Taking money to put people in situations that could easily become deadly.
While the acab is kind of rough, I'm absolutely with you on police accountability.
If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time. Training only goes so far. After that, you're investigating mistakes versus violent intent.
I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
> If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
To be clear, your 2nd statement is why ACAB. The police are the people fighting against the open & honest accountability you are asking for. When accountability comes up, they refuse to do their jobs[1], inflate crime numbers & incident severity[2], harass the few cops trying to improve accountability until they quit[3], and actively campaign against accountability[4].
If some cops are bastards, and people who shield those bastards from accountability are also bastards, then all cops are bastards. ACAB is not rough, it exactly describes the situation.
> The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time.
In the US, police officer does not even rise to top 10 most dangerous jobs. Groundskeeper is a more dangerous job than being a cop.
The lack of training and toxic culture of policing is far more dangerous to cops than criminals are. The average US citizen simply does not, and should not, trust the average cop.
But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves.
For instance, several officers have been treated for severe symptoms after coming into contact with fentanyl. Except that there is no way, biochemically speaking, the kind of contact they had with fentanyl could have produced anything resembling those symptoms. It was an entirely psychosomatic reaction, brought on by the police's own utterly false propaganda about how terrifyingly dangerous fentanyl is.
Similarly, so much of their "high stress" is because they expect to be attacked/shot/killed at any given moment even when, by any reasonable analysis, they are 100% safe. Furthermore, a lot of the actual danger to them is manufactured by this exact phenomenon: they expect a physical confrontation, so, in order to ensure they "win" it, they create it, striking preemptively in one fashion or another.
....It is supported by specific facts in the rest of my post.
I'll grant I didn't cite sources, because this is HN, not a scientific journal, and if you're interested enough you can Google it (or DDG it, or Kagi it) for yourself, but the basis really is right there in my post.
At least try to be persuasive. There are a myriad of ways that jobs can be stressful without endangering your life, that should not be difficult for you to imagine. Shift work, demands for quotas and metrics (sales people can tell you this), dealing with violent and erratic individuals in the public with sometimes insufficient support, etc.
Correctional Officers face similar circumstances and have a life expectancy of 58-59 years old. High divorce rate too, but people want to content themselves with the truism that "only bad people work these jobs", with no consideration for environmental effects. The divorce rate is higher among medical assistants and some skilled trades, for reasons that can just as easily apply: long hours, on-call, fatigue, etc.
> it would be mitigated by better training and careful psychological filtering.
Only on the conceit that any and all stress is imposed by lack of training and bad psychology.
That US 6 month number excludes field training (typically 1 year) whereas the 2-3 year German number includes it (6 months I believe).
This largely stems from a difference in how academies work. In many countries, field training is required to graduate. In the US, field training is required after you graduate in order to get a permanent job. This skews the total training time numbers.
That said, American police are still undertrained by comparison.
>The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time.
Police mostly act as professional witnesses taking reports and engage in revenue generating law enforcement.
The most high pressure situations they deal with with any regularity involve mediating domestic disputes or wrestling angry drunks.
Police absolutely are not dealing with violent criminals on the daily. And when they do go out of their way to deal with people who many become violent they show up with the kind numerical advantage that would make Stalin proud.
Your average beat cop probably un-holsters their handgun once a month to once a year depending on where and when they patrol. These high stress high stakes split second judgement call situations are not a daily or weekly thing.
>I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
They do accept this and did for decades. The only reason it's no longer being blanked accepted is because the modern media landscape makes it much harder to hide the fact that a huge fraction of these "honest mistakes" were in fact not so honest and not so mistaken.
Basically nobody has a problem with honest mistakes by themselves. What people have a problem with is thug behavior. Spending decades classifying various degrees of thug behavior as honest mistakes is why nobody wants to tolerate honest mistakes.
Before the people that make this possible and carry out the raids in an unsafe manner and without due dilligence? Before the ones protecting the police from any accountability?
The kid should be punished, yes, but a quarter of his lifespan is not exactly a light sentence.
Both issues need to be addressed and addressing one doesn’t relate to the other.
This kid shouldn’t get off easy just because his crime shouldn’t be possible. It is possible, and he chose to do it. Most people are good and choose not to do it.
Not only do I have zero interest in speaking with SWAT team members, I have very real reasons why I choose wherever possible to not talk to any cops at all.
The fact that you "know a few" SWAT team members immediately makes me strongly suspicious that you are part of the problem, perhaps not directly corrupt yourself, but very likely to be complicit in hiding the misbehaviour of police you know who are corrupt.
How many police officers do you know? Have you been on a ride along or attempted to understand their job?
Swatting victimizes the police as well, they’re responding to a potential hostage situation and do not have the benefit of hindsight. I guarantee these officers are horrified that the man was innocent and frustrated that they were put in this situation.
I encourage everyone who is adamantly “ACAB” to go on a ride along- contact your local department. At best, you get first hand experience to justify your beliefs and can virtue signal even more to your friends. Or you may be able to humanize the police.
> I guarantee these officers are horrified that the man was innocent and frustrated that they were put in this situation.
How many cops do you know? They might say they're horrified to the media, but that's not how they operate when no one's watching. There's a reason these SWATting events keep happening: cops enjoy them just as much as the SWATters do. They get to bust out their fun military surplus toys and do their SEAL Team 6 cosplay. If they wanted to stop these SWATting events, they would have found a solution by now.
Check out these highlights (lowlights?) from the Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department:
Do you know why ACAB? Is not because they are rude, it's not cause they mean. It's because they participate in a societal role that requires them to do bastardly things.
They have to enforce unjust laws and unjust outcomes, and statistically do so more heavily across minority populations.
The institution requires them to be bastards, ACAB is a statement about the institution of police and the people who elect to join that institution.
> It's because they participate in a societal role that requires them to do bastardly things. They have to enforce unjust laws and unjust outcomes
The problems with American policing aren't merely that the cops have to enforce the law.
It's the qualified immunity, the get-out-of-jail-free cards for their buddies, and the dog shootings.
If the police never shot the wrong guy, always replaced your door after breaking it down, and were polite and apologetic when a mistake was made - people in this thread wouldn't be equating swatting with attempted murder.
If one were to believe there are actors in our society bad enough to justify a service existing then one would also have to believe there are actors bad enough to abuse that service with a view to kill anyone. It’s paradoxical that such a thing exists.
To be ever so slightly sympathetic to American cops, unlike just about anywhere else in the developed world, it is plausible that the person behind the door is armed with anything up to an automatic rifle, and any random person they stop may be carrying a concealed firearm.
Given that, if I was busting down doors in the US, I’d want to be armed to the teeth, equipped with the best body armour money can buy, and wouldn’t waste a lot of time on niceties until I was sure that nobody was going to attempt to kill me.
Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted.
When the cops think they are actually likely to encounter genuine armed resistance they ambush the suspect outside their home. If that's not practical they set up a perimeter. Police are not profession combatants. Their tactical doctrine is dominated by "gotta go home safe." SWAT raids exist mostly for the image and spectacle.
And the First should only cover religions, forms of speech, printing technologies, venues of public assembly, and petitioning grievances that existed before it was "created"?
The argument that the grandparent is making is that the U.S. Supreme Court recently created legal president that only restrictions on firearms that have similar laws that were enforced during the creation of the Second Amendment can be considered constitutional under the Second Amendment. The argument that that means only firearms similar to those available at the time of the passing the Second Amendment sounds largely similar to the thinking.
And be careful about brining the First Amendment into that... the First Amendment as it was understood by its creators was not about your write to say anything you wanted without government response, it was about your right to publish your own newspaper (or broadsheet/advertisement) without the government issuing you a license or collecting a tax (both of which the colonial government did).
The second amendment was ratified in 1791, and just 7 years later (1978) the Alien and Sedition Acts were ratified by congress, in large part other silence critics of the federal government by making it illegal to say "false, scandalous, and malicious" about it (with the exception of about the Vice-President). And it was absolutely used as a political tool, and this was approved of by the Supreme Court at the time.
So I don't think that anyone really wants this horrible president that the modern Supreme Court has yoked us with. Unfortunately, given the election results, it appears we are going to be subject to these horrible ideas for a whole generation.
That's actually a bad solution. Weapons weren't much less brutal then, mostly just less precise. You'd have people accidentally shooting bystanders in armed conflicts.
We already have that: spray-and-prey is common, as are bystanders killed (even those who are just going about their lives in their own homes). But the weapons of the day were single-shot before reloading. In your argument we would only be reducing the number of bystanders reasonably shot.
The repeating air rifle with a 20 round magazine that Lewis and Clark brought on their expedition was invented over a decade before the ratification of the US Bill of Rights. If you're worried about capacity for indiscriminate violence, there were also cannons and grenades.
Not the fully automatic machine presses. The founding fathers had printing presses that had to be hand loaded one page at a time. Clearly, they had no ability to conceive of more advanced technology than that.
>Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted.
It's been largely interpreted this way throughout most of our history, until around the 1960s when civil rights activists started carrying them. All the modern gun regulation started then.
No, you have history on its head. It was not seen as an absolute until the , and 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, then strengthened in 2010 in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Prior to that reasonable regulations were allowed (and what is reasonable was hotly debated) were permitted, so long as there were legitimate government interests.
The main point of the Second Amendment from the framers perspective was to prevent the need (or even the existence) of a standing army. Of course from a modern perspective this is near-ridiculous.
You could have fully automatic Thompson sub machine guns mailed to your house before 1934. You could have any other type of gun shipped to your house before 1968. All this is (relatively) recent.
I'm sure a lot of consideration was put into how to deal with this problem. It's probably not cheap or easy running specialized SWAT teams for calls and there's nothing police would hate more than being taken advantage of by criminals.
But they seem to have decided this is the least bad option. They have a duty to respond to serious phone calls about armed situations.
The main issue is the insecurity of the old telecom system where spoofing is so easy. But we're heavily invested in it as a society.
> The main issue is the insecurity of the old telecom system where spoofing is so easy.
I disagree.
The main issue is qualified immunity.
The phone companies never killed anybody in a SWAT raid. The phone companies never claimed to be building a "secure telecom system", nobody ever offered to pay for them to ensure high grade authentication and integrity checking of phone calls.
And the cops know that. And don't care. They are the people showing uo with military weapons to people's homes. It's their responsibility to know and understand the reliability of the information they're acting on, and the ease with which the phone system can be made to show them misleading information.
Cops with guns and police unions and qualified immunity who now they're never going to be held accountable for killing people based on false information are the problem, not the phone system.
One must not result in, or be able to cause, the other.
Let's say we have to deal with the fact that they do co-exist and interact. Maybe there should be additional protection and safeguards, and if there are some (which there probably are), don't stop there until the percentage of illegitimate calls is below a certain threshold.
And maybe it is already below a certain threshold, and I'm getting all hot under the collar about an incredibly rare scenario. Maybe it's better than it was. 20-year sentences should go part-way to reducing the frequency.
I'm mostly on the side of "letting a guilty person walk free is better than imprisoning (or arresting or shooting to death or even just violating the freedoms of) an innocent person".
This type of behavior is why I am so adamant about not doxxing myself on the internet. I had a belligerent internet-goer track me down last year through some open profiles. Luckily, they were the non-swatting type, and it allowed me to fix the gaps. It sucks to live in fear of these people.
Also, HN seems to have a bad echo chamber on both policing and gun control.
Just like the evolution of sim swapping and how it went from hijacking celebrity accounts for a day to stealing millions from crypto investors, cybercriminals slowly realized that it's far more easier to get personal data through bribing/hacking companies (telecoms, amazon) or even by directly sending emergency data requests from stolen law enforcement email addresses.
No amount of opsec can save you from corrupt employees making below minimum wage.
Okay so like, genuinely not trying to do a "back in my day" fuckin thing here, but also: what the fuck is wrong with kids? Back when I was coming up, pranking at it's absolute worst was like, filling a dudes shoes with yogurt in the locker room, or like, putting plastic bugs in people's desks n shit. Why the fuck are teenagers trying to get each other murdered by cops!?
Fair question, but I would also like to ask "What the f** is wrong with cops?".
Receiving an anonymous call claiming some not-particularly-plausible threat at a particular location probably DOES deserve a police investigation. I see no reason why it impels police to drag people from their house in chains, threaten to shoot them, or actually shoot them.
If police responses were reasonable and proportionate to the plausibility of the threat then swatters would not be able to use them as a weapon.
What is the reasonable and proportionate response?
"Swatting" isn't really a thing in Germany, but we've always had other disproportionate responses to single phone calls. One call (or even an email) that threatens to blow up the air port, or some particular air plane, and it's shut down for hours until they've looked in all the places you could hide a serious bomb (presumably, I have no idea what their "okay, I guess it was a hoax" signal is).
But what's the alternative when somebody plausibly describes a situation that indicates someone is in extreme danger? Send out a single cruiser the next day to check out what was up?
What happens in Germany when someone plausibly describes a situation that indicates someone is in extreme danger? Over here (in Greece), police officers will knock on your door, say they had a report and need to check, and then walk in and look around.
I've heard of reports of domestic violence, child molestation, things like that, and it's always the same. They rush to the place, knock on the door, look around, and arrest the people they need to arrest. What they don't do is start shooting.
What if in the call they claim the suspect is armed and threatening to start shooting hostages if the police show up? Do they still just knock on the door?
What if in the call they claim the suspect has a nuclear bomb and is threatening to blow up the city? It's kind of a similar scenario, given that I can't remember either of these ever happening. People here don't tend to have guns.
Yeah, this never happens here. Even if it did happen once a decade, it wouldn't be a valid reason to worry about once a week, and it wouldn't be a single anonymous person calling in a tip that someone is threatening to shoot hostages.
Yeah, as much as swatting is shitty behavior, I think kids behaving egregiously is a lot more understandable than adults whose job is ostensibly the protection of everyone.
Yeah, it seems like they take the seriousness of the threat into account when determining the response, but not the plausibility of the threat.
If there's a 1% chance that the house contains a deranged gunman threatening to shoot his family and then himself, that probably shouldn't be met with the same response as a 30% chance of the same... There are probably a lot of situations where it's a tough call though.
What do you propose? Have you wondered why police here act as they do? Could it be all of the guns, gangs, mass shootings, and crime? We ain't like Europe in this regard.
> Prosecutors say the ... teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response”, and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.
I don't think this is pranks. I had an antisocial stint in my late teens also and it was more about gaining some power over a world that wants to treat you like a cog. I bet it wasn't even about the money (at least it wasn't for me) it's just that having a "hussle" is a persona that you can wear if you want to focus somewhere besides the consequences of your actions.
I guess my friends were weird, but our idea of doing a teenage prank with phone calls was to use our two phone lines (we had 2nd phone lines for our modems) to set up conference calls between each other, and then each of us would call a pizza shop (I might call Domino's, and he'd call Papa John's), and then mute ourselves and laugh while the pizza shop workers would argue about who called who. The smart ones would immediately catch on and say "I think someone is playing a prank on us" and hang up quickly, but the dumb ones would get into an argument with each other.
When Caller ID became the norm, it completely ruined phone pranks like this.
It still works, as evidenced by the very active prank calls my neighbor's son plays on my wife and I.
He is very sweet and sheltered, so it's a good outlet. He literally tried the Prince Albert in a can one. That hasn't been relevant for like what, 50 years?
9/11 policy panic, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan producing surplus equipment, 400 million privately owned firearms in the US, US history of police standoffs, DoD investment in military PR including Navy Seals worship, and much more have ALL contributed to the Swatting phenomenon.
I don’t think we could have intentionally created an incentive structure for swatting more if we had tried.
And it’s going to continue because guess what was one of the major issues in this election? Domestic security!
There's also the super weird (to people outside the US) insistence that the only possible response to gun violence (by gangsters, school kids, or cops) is "thoughts and prayers".
Constitutional amendments are basically impossible in the US. A congress member shot at a congressional event won't even vote change the second amendment (Scalise).
Even conservatives know the only hope is stacking the supreme court.
I didn't do a great job segueing from the parent. I agree with the parent, and my comment expands on why its happening now when it wasn't happening, at least to the same degree, in the past.
Maybe not swatting, but bomb threats were probably the equivalent. My junior high had at least 2 that I can remember where we were all cleared out for hours as the school was searched. Swatting had the internet to fuel it's rise, local news programs didn't use things like reporting on every fake bomb threat to generate views or "engagement" and in turn did not spread the idea to a massive amount of people. But they still happened, quite a bit. Like many things fueled from the internet it rewards the more extremes, bomb threats are childs play now--but at one time they weren't
The earliest it could have started is when SS7 links and the internet were bridged by dodgy / nefarious owners of said SS7 links. That started to take off around the mid 90's to spam phones with spoofed numbers. I wanted to get the SS7 links terminated but my boss in the wireless industry, tied heavily to SS7 would not let me because they were paying their bill. It would have been one phone call to terminate many of them.
I suspect you are probably right about the timeline for swatting as shady VoIP providers started getting popular in the early 2000's and started being used for more than just spoofing text advertisements.
Swatting is something new (popularized by the Internet, made possible by military surpluss gear sold police wanting to larp in tacticool shit) but stupid pranks with deadly consequences are not.
Oh, that could be quite likely, copy cat crimes are a thing after all. I simply mean that people weren't harmlessly interacting before that is all, swatting didn't supplant relatively harmless pranks.
I don't know when your day was, but back in my day (in the 90s) we had to evacuate the high school at least once a quarter for bomb threats. We wouldn't go back in until the FD cleared it.
(There was never a bomb.)
Whatever is wrong with kids these days is nothing new.
I finished HS in 2007. I remember equal, if not worse things growing up online. The internet was less moderated back then and there was a lot of communities that celebrated toxic behaviors (like 4chan).
I don't think they're trying to get anyone murdered by cops.
I think they're really fucking stupid. I think they think that since they are making up claims that everything will be alright. Like the cops are going to bust in, see that there's no drugs/hostages/satanic rituals/whatever, say "My bad", and fuck off.
But there's always the chance that things go horribly wrong. And that chance is actually pretty high.
Pulling the fire alarm, too. Given how many times this happened at my high school, I'm sure that at least one person in the US has died because first responders were at a false alarm rather than available to help them.
I feel like its partly due to our cultural shift for visual media, gags HAVE to be more extreme to get engagement. Back in the day you'd tell the tale to your friends and you could embellish it. Now it's everyone trying to emulate Paul Brother's content to get the reach to FINALLY BECOME AN INFLUENCE. I blame platforms just as much or more than users. Your incentives have driven behavior here.
Regarding "no accountability", it seems 'wrong' that the response to the calls must be immediate, but it seems to have taken at least a little while to identify where the calls were made from / who made the calls. They started some time in 2022.
That level of asynchrony is not how the system should work.
(Admittedly "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence).
I'm probably your age, kids back in my day would kill or injure other kids for being gay or Black. I think a lot of bullying has actually gone down, but because of the internet one sociopathic kid can fuck over people at scale.
I'm unwisely and unadvisedly wading into this half-cocked.
Swatting wouldn't even be a thing if <any number of logical things>
- Anonymous calls should be treated with high levels of suspicion as to their legitimacy
- First response training that's even moderately appropriate
- Situational awareness beyond what one's been informed by third parties
- Empathy for all humans
- Any kind of notion of that a scenario may not actually be as described by a single anonymous voice
A very (un)funny irony is that there are numerous stories I've read about domestic violence victims being arrested, as opposed to the attacker, which implies there's some level of suspicion in some circumstances about the information the police are being fed. Swatting, as a thing, indicates there's some kind of hero-pressure build-up that overrules any kind of <all the things I listed above> whereby that pressure has the possibility of impending release.
That's not mentioned in the article. It does mention that the numbers of the victims were shared, but doesn't specifically say they were spoofed.
If it's that easy to spoof a phone number then that system is completely fucked and not fit for purpose.
And the efforts that a private investigator needed to go to, to track down the perpetrator, indicates that there is no way to track the source of the phone calls - that's ludicrous (but probably the norm).
It's a US cultural thing to either avoid blaming the police for anything, or make excuses for them. Brutal police behavior is seen as either acceptable, or what even desirable. I've seen reddit posts where a protester slightly taunts the police and gets pepper sprayed in the face, and all the commenters were gleefully saying things like "fuck around and find out", without even thinking that maybe there wasn't enough fucking around to warrant any finding out.
When you try and point this out, you're called various names, because apparently you either support the police 100%, or you're a criminal.
There's no fixing the system when there is no onus on the police to act like they care. They enter a home that was a victim of swatting and kill everyone? Tough luck, "it's part of the job", "we told them to stand down and they didn't", "we couldn't risk the life of the first responders".
There's always a reason as to why police violence is fine. Its almost as if the police isn't really there to protect normal people.
> Its almost as if the police isn't really there to protect normal people.
Well, it's not. Even here, the function of the police is to enforce the will of the state, not to protect people. The protection is a side-effect of the enforcement, but enforcement can also be things like terrorizing minorities.
I'm pretty sure there are a number of people in the US who don't support the police in any way at all. There was a whole song a few years ago called Fuck the police, I'm pretty sure.
It's like sweeping categorizations of an entire country are usually not accurate or something.
> I'm pretty sure there are a number of people in the US who don't support the police in any way at all.
Yes, this is so trivially true of any place that it's not worth mentioning, as generalizations are meant as just that: Something that a majority (or at least a large minority) are like. For example, people do say "people in the US speak English", even though there's a number of people that don't. This doesn't make the generalization any less useful than "Americans like baseball" or "Americans wear shoes around the house".
I grew up in a small town and was on the wrong side of law enforcement (sometimes rightfully -- underage drinking, etc., nothing that serious -- but oftentimes not) around 2 dozen times between 16/17 and 21 when I got the fuck out of that town. I haven't so much as spoken to an on-duty cop in over 20 years. To this day I still get nervous when I see a police car. They earned their image problems and they haven't even begun to try to correct it. Even if they started tomorrow, it would still take them decades to fix it. I'm not hopeful that any meaningful change in policing in the US will take place in my lifetime.
And, for anyone who isn't reading between the lines here, without a doubt I'm only so lucky as to avoid their attention today because I made it and have spent the last 2 decades living in nice neighborhoods and driving nice cars.
I live in America and while I have compassion for some individual cops, I hate them as a whole with a burning passion. I know lots of people that feel this way. It’s almost like social media comments sections are not an accurate representation of a population or something.
This is a mischaracterization of what actually happens in the us. Using sensationalism doesn't help, instead let's focus on the actual numbers and be constructive on how to decrease them.
In 2023 it's estimated police killed around 1,248 people. Notice I said killed vs Murdered as words matter. Out of that only 104 were unarmed. Now without looking at each case or example here, you can still account for the mass majority of police interactions ending in a death, the civilian was armed at a minimum.
Using the data provided we could say easily that 1,248 people is way too many. Hell, 1 is too many. That doesn't change reality though, if 1,248 deaths were related to individuals engaging in crime, this is a causality that you can lay solely on the civilian victim, as they chose to engage in this action.
We can argue how many were crimes, that's fair and i'm happy to throw out and say let's assume 25% were not crimes and really were just an escalated interaction. The bureau of justice statistics gave numbers for 2022 that estimated that 49.2 million people or 19% of the US had an interaction with the police. If that's true, napkin math would put the police murders at .0025% of the interactions, and assuming 333,287,557 million people in 2022 (census bureau) places it at .00037% of the population died by the hands of police.
Some related statistic. Roughly 500 people die from falling out of bed or off furniture, 300-400 die from drowning in a bath tub, 4,000 die from choking on food, 150 die from coconuts falling on their head, 500-600 die from falling from a ladder.
Looking at the numbers, it's very hard to say that police "Regularly murder people".
As for the "Everyone having guns" that's a separate debate, but I would posit you're correct with regard to criminals performing criminal acts, that are armed, increase the likelihood of a negative out come. Federal arrests for weapons offenses were around 8,000 with states being at close to 12,000. Putting that at 20,000 or so arrests per year. Even with those numbers if you're arrested with a firearm, you're still at around 6% chance of death. Again given the circumstances and propensity for needless escalation, these numbers while bad aren't crazy.
There are multiple problems in the US. We need better training and funding for police departments, we do need to weed out the bad cops (as with any field), but with all that the most common denominator is criminal behavior.
All of that said, If you've got data points or information that may be counter to the above, i'd be very curious to see it. I'm very much open to having my mind changed on the topic and encourage you to post it up for all of us here.
Also dogs are not any more armed in the US than in Europe, yet American cops shoot a lot more dogs. They do so because they are antisocial and know they'll face no consequences (and even if they get fired from on PD, another will recruit them). I'd say there is both a recruiting issue and an immunity issue.
If police kill an unarmed individual every 3 days, I would actually say that they do, in fact, regularly murder people.
And that's ignoring any of the armed individuals who are not, in fact, threatening anyone or committing a crime.
And the people for whom a crime may be being committed, but for which "death" is not an appropriate punishment - even ignoring the police being judge, jury, and executioner in a society where we presume innocence and require conviction by a jury of our peers.
I'd add that "armed" doesn't mean necessarily a firearm. I don't know what threshold is used in after-action reports (written by those involved or others), but presumably finding a pocket knife on someone counts as "armed".
Would personal protection devices (mace, batons etc) count as armed.
Call me a cynic, but 104 people being 'unarmed' makes me think the reports in those cases simply lack creativity in defining "arms" and, (again cynically) I expect some number of the other cases the individuals were either helpfully discovered to be armed after the fact. (And in some cases actually provided with arms after the fact.)
> In 2023 it's estimated police killed around 1,248 people. Notice I said killed vs Murdered as words matter. Out of that only 104 were unarmed. Now without looking at each case or example here, you can still account for the mass majority of police interactions ending in a death, the civilian was armed at a minimum.
Does the Second Amendment not exist? Which other constitutional rights do you think we should use to justify these murders?
"Armed" is a proxy for criminals being criminals, and almost always reaching for, displaying, or using the weapon in some antisocial way prior to being shot dead.
Legal gun owners not committing obvious crimes are only rarely accosted by police, and shootings are exceedingly rare, and they usually make the news and result in legal action. They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.
"Unarmed" doesn't represent what the suspect was doing that got them shot. Were they resisting arrest or being noncompliant and reaching for their waist or a center console or glove compartment?
There are cases where police shoot suspects, armed or unarmed, unjustifiably. They're not as rare as anyone wishes they were. They're still fairly rare. Behaving civilly, even while recognizing that many police are like barely constrained wild animals, goes a long way toward ensuring that an accidental furtive gesture isn't interpreted as reaching for a weapon.
No, “armed” isn’t a proxy for anything. It means they were found to be carrying a gun. It doesn’t matter whether they were committing a crime or doing something inadvisable — the point is that if merely being armed justifies your extrajudicial murder by police, then the Second Amendment doesn’t actually exist.
It is, because cops never shoot someone just for being armed. They just don't. It's a combination of being armed plus (believed) criminal status, or behavior during the encounter.
(And it's exceedingly rare that cops will believe an upstanding citizen who's legally armed and behaving civilly is a criminal. It happens, for instance in the two cases I cited, but it's rare. They're a rounding error in the police killing stats.)
> They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.
“Not advisable”, of course, being a goalpost on wheels that allows them to justify police misconduct.
Why do you believe that? We routinely see police break the law, harass people and otherwise abuse their power, but when it comes to encounters with armed civilians they become upstanding professionals with perfect judgment?
That feels like a weird category to use IMO. People who brandish are armed but not all armed people are brandishing.
More to the point, if you went to your local PDs website and watched body cam from the last 10 shootings, how many do you think would be involve law abiding gun owners with CCWs using guns in a way consistent with the 2nd Amendment vs people brandishing or using their guns in a criminal and/or dangerous way?
Again, I am not the one using that category; I am responding to its use.
How many were using their guns in a dangerous and/or criminal way? We may never know, because they were deprived of their right to the trial by jury which would have determined that.
Armed during a police encounter. I agree we need more information on the stats, primarily what was the catalyst for the interaction? I would suspect though that most of these stats are based on interactions driven by criminal behavior. This isn't counter to BRUEN and current interpretations of 2a rights.
“Armed during a police encounter” — right, so what? Is there, like, an asterisk on the Second Amendment that says “unless it’s during a police encounter, then they get to summarily execute you, sorry”?
Around 1000 people per year, which I absolutely agree is terrible - but at the same time, the population is over 300,000,000 so it stretches the meaning of the word to call it ‘regular’.
It's an apples-to-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, but England and Wales has a population of about 60 million and averages about 3 fatal police shootings per year. From that perspective, 'regular' sounds like something of an understatement.
Swatting just isn't a thing here - our armed officers are trained completely differently and held to much stricter standards regarding the use of force. American police do have to deal with much more widespread gun ownership and higher rates of violent crime, but that's only one half of the equation.
Policing in the US is exceptionally fragmented across thousands of agencies, with no consistent standards of training and supervision. Even if there was a clear political mandate to reduce the number of police-involved shootings, there's no effective mechanism to change how policing is carried out on the ground.
Extremely limited. Police officers are not legally permitted to join a conventional trade union, because of the risk to public safety that would be posed by industrial action. Rank-and-file officers are represented by the Police Federation, which has many of the functions of a trade union but none of the legal recognition.
More broadly, the British police are a service, not a force. A British officer would never refer to a member of the public as a "civilian", because our police are civilians in uniform. They have powers granted to them by Parliament, but their right to use those powers comes from the consent of the public that they serve. It's a radically different attitude that colours every interaction between police and the public.
According to the cops. The same cops who shoot people for having wallets and sticks. Same cops who beat Deaf people for not following verbal instructions. Same cops who shoot autistic folks.
Yeah, I don't think "armed" means "was an imminent threat to life" in the slightest. It's much more likely it's a cover your ass designation.
Perhaps I made my point a little tactlessly - what I meant to imply is that people shouldn’t live in fear of this. While it happens too often, it’s still extremely uncommon.
The (bigger) problem is that that's the tip of a much larger police brutality iceberg. It's not like the police is 99.9% pleasant and helpful and then just murders the occasional person, the murders are indicative of a disturbing police culture.
Agreeing on facts is always important, because if not, nothing else matters in a discussion.
We should never criticize people for actually bringing real numbers into a conversation to clarify things. I didn't know that statistic, and I suspect many "disagreements" are things where if the actual numbers and facts were known to all, they would actually agree.
The criticism was not about “bringing facts”, it was about pedantically parsing word choices. Whether you think 2.5ish people per day is “regular” is irrelevant to the larger point.
I think many would argue that all deaths by shootings are murder - even if it’s in self defense, and perhaps especially if society grants more power, in the form of immunity, to one ‘side’.
I didn’t want to open that can of worms. Even the inclusive stat I cited is small enough to support the point I wanted to make.
You’re asking me to defend a position I don’t entirely agree with now, which is always dangerous…
I believe the argument is that deliberately killing another person is always wrong. It does’t matter if it’s in self defense - taking a life is such a morally abhorrent thing to do that it’s always indefensible. It’s always murder.
Some who wouldn’t go that far would still argue that for police to do it - people who are in a position of power, and who should know there are risks associated with the job of protecting society - is indefensible even if it would not be for a regular person.
Not my position - self defense if you know you’d otherwise die is, I think, morally justified. But I can see the argument.
You should really qualify what you mean by murder because it’s very disingenuous. When a criminal uses deadly force against a police officer they will be shot.
Disagree - community moderated quality floats to the top under such systems, exposing the better posts to more eyes and downregulating low-quality shitposting.
It can certainly lead to echo-chamber mentality, but without it we'd see more low-effort, low quality posts drowning out discourse.
You're assuming that down-votes are used to assess the quality of the post, and not agreement with the content.
I would suggest that both appear here. Personally I would prefer votes to be on quality of post rather than popularity of position as that leads to the possibility of examining an issue from multiple viewpoints.
(When responding to a post that has been thought out, but down voted, I feel the need to point out that although I disagree, I'm not the one downvoting.)
I do think that voting improves the quality overall. But a better system might be separate options for 'agree/disagree' vs 'quality / pithy' posts. (I also thinkbthis would be horrible UI, so meh)
Yep exactly. I’d argue they create echo chambers far more than we’d like to admit. It’s also not simply voting but also algorithmic of sorting content by likes, and implicitly excluding anything under a certain threshold.
I’ve felt this way for nearly twenty years now, coinciding with the rise of reddit, twitter, and facebook alongside the decline of forums, blogs, and rss.
On any topic with even slight amount of contention, you very quickly see people aligning toward the one-true-belief because they observe and react to the crowd supporting that opinion.
Yeah we've had 20 years or more of sites trying to find a good formula now. Slashdot's ratings and meta-ratings back in the day, where you rated something as Insightful/Informative etc, and then every so often you were asked to review other user's ratings so their future ratings could be weighted ... technically interesting but really cumbersome.
I like HN's choice not to display ratings on other people's posts, and I like the simple UI. I think it's better with up and down votes than without... I don't think we're going to find a perfect scheme but that doesn't mean we should abandon the imperfect ones.
The only time I’ve seen police use pepper spray or aggression are when the protesters become violent. Do a YouTube search for Antifa protesters and tell me who the violent people are again?
I saw countless similar videos of cops violently attacking -- often with permanent, life-altering results -- people who were exercising their constitutional rights or simply minding their own business.
No, because if every call isn’t treated like a real emergency, in the off chance that one of them actually is an emergency then everyone would be crucified by the media and lawyers. Look at all the school shootings as an example, or even the Trump assassination attempt.
Right, but when you smash down someone's door and see them playing games on a computer, instead of cooking meth while making bombs by tying guns together, maybe you shouldn't continue treating the situation as an emergency.
And if they can't find the person who made the call to charge them for door repairs, then they shouldn't have busted down the door (and should pay for the repairs).
Over here (Greece), anonymous reports are generally given very low priority, to the point where if someone anonymous reports a suspicious vehicle, the police might not even investigate. A report by an eponymous reporter does generally get investigated, though, because there's a lower likelihood of the report being frivolous.
That's also observably not a thing. Castle Rock is a rather famous scotus case where the cops failed to do squat about a guy with a restraining order kidnapping his kids despite a law specifically saying that they shall act on said restraining orders and there was no allowable section 1983 claim against the cops just failing to act.
That doesn't cover all the things I'm (maybe poorly) attempting to suggest.
Treat calls that don't have the hallmarks of an emergency as "maybe not an emergency" - I admit that sounds simplistic and requires heavy training, however.
But my commentary was more about the gung-ho-ness of the follow-up. Don't houses have windows that aren't always blocked by drawn curtains? Don't binoulars exist and are relatively portable? Aren't there relatively quick and painless methods to adjudicate a situation prior to knocking impolitely? Even if time may be of the essence. One day maybe the heavy knock on the door is a trigger that blows up an entire Police / SWAT response team - then there might be some new policies around situatonal awareness instituted. (not that I would in any way promote such a grotesque act of violence).
The police are putting themselves in danger by their own behaviour.
Re: Trump assassination attempt, wouldn't that have been averted if someone just "went and had a look"?
Fear of retribution/not wanting to get involved is a real thing. Also are you proposing that 911 operators confirm people's real identities before accepting their call and dispatching someone?
No, but at least have the calling number presented to the 911 operator, with various options categorised as more or less trustworthy. And 911 calls should bypass any 'calling number protection'.
Someone else pointed out that the whole phone system is a dog's breakfast, which also needs to be fixed for various easy-scam-exploitation reasons as well. The only reason not to do it is that the corps that run the networks don't want to have to pay to make their shit fit for society's purpose rather than their own.
Do you tell emergency responders not to turn their lights on en route? To put it at the bottom of the queue after helping the old lady cross the street? To politely knock on the alleged hostage-taker's door instead of kicking it in?
The video of the Wichita shooting was, to me, the most clear cut example of how poorly police can respond to a swatting call. Guy comes out to his porch, having no idea what's going on, and within only a few seconds of time and 2 commands to show hands and walk toward the police, is shot and killed.
I should have been more clear about the question. I am wondering how many of the calls made by THIS GUY resulted in actual swat deployments, how many got someone shot or killed, etc. That gives a scale of the severity of the crime. Like if you fatally shoot someone, that is murder. If you shoot them and they survive, or if you shoot and miss, that's attempted murder and you tend to get a lighter sentence than if you kill the person. It's not an extraneous detail.
The guy in the article obviously belongs in jail. The question is how far up the scale he went in terms of actual damage and injury caused. It's just like if I read an article about Joe pleading guilty to shooting Fred, and facing 20 years in jail, but the article doesn't say whether Fred survived the shooting. I'm not out to make a big moral judgment either way, and I have no stake in it, but it's a natural question for a reader to ask.
Even if nobody died, it depends how you want to classify intentionally swatting someone. 50 counts of attempted murder? 50 counts of inciting violence? 50 counts of assault?
Well, the prosecutors would decide that, and preferably announce what they decided along with the underlying facts. Then people reading the news article would weigh the info for themselves. That's at least part of why we have news articles in the first place.
I don't think there are any numbers published about the % of swatting calls result in a visit from a SWAT team, but I would wager it's higher than you are imagining. The police would be foolish to advertise the efficacy of swatting, so of course the real numbers are not out there AFAICT.
It feels like between this and the prevalence of scam calls, the FCC has been asleep at the wheel for 20 years. There's some signs of the "sleeping dragon" waking up, but I fear all that will get walked back under the next administration.
That's not really how this kind of thing works... As long as they can demonstrate that an older person directed them to make the call, then generally that older person will still have criminal responsibility.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-teenager-pleads-gu...
From the Information he pled to:
Seems like a fun guy. It looks like most of this story was covered a year ago:https://www.wired.com/story/alan-filion-torswats-swatting-ar...
https://archive.is/FozW8
This is the older article. Have this one?
Are you meaning to tell me that people who make references to the Nazis a part of their identity might not be the most well-adjusted people around?
In this case it's also lord of the ring
"Third Reich" is the nazi reference.
Maybe they're talking about the Tolkien references (just kidding)
"Could"? Absolutely should.
> from approximately August 2022 to January 2024, Filion made more than 375 swatting and threat calls, including calls in which he claimed to have planted bombs in the targeted locations or threatened to detonate bombs and/or conduct mass shootings at those locations.
( from https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-teenager-pleads-gu... )
The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
> The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Do you mean for the US, rather than the human race? Some of us live in countries where the only weapons most cops carry are truncheons and tasers.
Its not just the weapons. In parts of Europe you can get arrested for posting the wrong kind of meme online.
As a side note, when trying to research this you'll see weird double speak fact checks like below:
> Fact Check: 11-year-old arrested on suspicion of violent disorder after riots, not ‘mean tweets’
> Sending grossly offensive, obscene, indecent, or menacing messages on public electronic communication networks is a criminal offence in Britain under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003
> Misleading. An 11-year-old was arrested on suspicion of violent disorder, not for social media posts, during a swathe of arrests by British police targeting those involved in rioting.
But then the authors don't write what 'violent disorder' is.
Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson
> The spokesperson said the 11-year-old, one of five juveniles arrested on suspicion of violent disorder by the force on Aug. 28 in relation to the riots, was later bailed.
> Cleveland Police arrested another 11-year-old on suspicion of arson after a police vehicle was set alight in Hartlepool on July 31, according to the spokesperson and an Aug. 1 statement, opens new tab . The child was also released on bail, the spokesperson said.
And this isn't some weird online political rag, it's Reuters. It's all very strange.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/11-year-old-arrested-susp...
If you insist on the original article being very precise and very exhaustive, you should too: “wrong kind of meme” is very vague. A meme of a swastika will indeed land you in trouble in multiple countries, to pick a lightweight example. What kind of meme do you mean?
I just read about a kid being arrested for $2 bill because the cops didn't know such bills exist. Not the first time it happens too. Some of them aren't exactly brilliant, unfortunately. And there are almost never any consequences for doing stupid while in the uniform.
> But then the authors don't write what 'violent disorder' is.
"Violent Disorder" is a specific offence listed in the Public Order Act.
> Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson
The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.
> "Violent Disorder" is a specific offence listed in the Public Order Act.
So the article should explain it.
> The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.
How is this related apart from the person sharing the same age and the town being the same? One is suspected of arson and the other of Violent Disorder? Does this add value to the fact check?
I don’t mind it being illegal.
But I think a lot of it needs to be treated as a significant mental health issue
> And this isn't some weird online political rag, it's Reuters. It's all very strange.
As Musk said: state sponsored propaganda(1).
I don't like the guy, but this one he had it right. (1) NGOs, i know.
[dead]
>And this isn't some weird online political rag, it's Reuters
What makes you think they aren't? All news media is inherently biased if they want or not. Not to mention "fact checker" are a prime candidate for corruption.
FYI this is a reference to the opening statement of the Unabomber Manifesto "Industrial Society and its Future". Don't think OP meant anything by the distinction of US/humans
> The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
https://ia600300.us.archive.org/30/items/the-ted-k-archive-t...
Is this an obvious reference? Do people often know the text of this, or of bits of it?
Fairly obvious for those who've spent enough time online, I'd say most people would only recognize that first sentence. The Unabomber Manifesto has become something of a copypasta
In my four decades or so, I've never seen that.
Are you US-based?
US based, at UCB in the 80s, didn’t recognize it.
The weapons are orthogonal to the culture; most of the police abuse volume is in beating, arrest and confinement, property destruction and confiscation, etc. The shootings make news, but lots of people don't get shot and still suffer lasting material consequences
I agree those are problems in many places (and to some extent will be with anywhere), but would not describe them as militarisation.
It's a bit more complicated than just equipment I reckon. Australian cops don't necessarily use literal military equipment (as frequently as US cops) but they sure know how to and make time to beat and rough ride someone within an inch of their lives, harass and arrest political youtuber staff members (friendly jordies) for literally no reason, or tase people to death (a tiny ~92 year old demented lady at a nursing home with a blunt steak knife, for example) at impressive scale. Aboriginal Australians couldn't be the most incarcerated peoples on earth without the dedication of our repugnant police forces. It speaks to militarisation or being a disaster to me despite not rolling out the tanks because of the severity of responses is still utterly beyond reason and has basically the same outcomes including no repercussions for going so far beyond what could possibly be justified even when there actually is danger or a crime happening.
It would obviously fuck with the cultural reference replacing US for the world in the phrase.
But if you believe that only the US has this problem, I am sad to inform you that Taylor Swift and Hollywood Movies are not the only American cultural exports eagerly consumed around the world.
Whats bad for the US is bad for the rest of the world. America uses its outsized influence to impact the entire world
Plenty of countries are benefiting from U.S. mistakes and ‘badness’…
And yet your country may have an NYPD office.
This is at best naive, and reads pretty smug and self-satisfied. You likely still have a military, and policing isn't really about the weapons a cop carries. Ironically less deadly weapons can encourage more liberal use, so maybe you can be proud of your higher rate of non-lethal beatings?
Someone subjected to a non-lethal beating can complain, and be a witness to what happened. They can be medically examined to determine what happened. Its far harder to cover up.
I am pretty happy with the police hardly ever killing anyone, and that almost always someone who is a real danger to others. I am happy fewer people being killed by police so far this decade (and that includes road accidents involving police!), than have been killed by police in the US so far this month.
Your comment is a bit off topic IMO. Swatting can occur regardless of how "militarized" a police force actually is.
The whole point of swatting is to cause massive over-reaction by the police endangering victim's life. If it would just cause a regular visit by a cop nobody would do it - what would be the point of it, waste 5 minutes of person's time? The whole premise relies on the massive militarized response.
Can it?
Do you really think that dressing in military special ops tactical clothing, with advanced and powerful weaponry, balaclavas, helmets and responding to a call in a armoured vehicle doesn't create any weird expectations on the mind of police officer of how they should behave in a call?
Does playing dress up make any difference to how much murdering they do? I don't think that outcomes would be any different if they were sent in in their regular uniforms with their regular weaponry.
How is this even related to militarization? The perp is abusing emergency response systems with a total lack of empathy for the damage it did to the victim and the department.
The separation of empathy from an 18 year old online kid from his peers is the true tragedy here.
I think they are saying in the US the SWAT team shows up ready for war, while a more measured response would be a couple cops knocking on the door to see what's going on. Obviously the cops don't have a crystal ball and there's not going to be a clean solution here, outside of catching the person earlier.
It sucks this person was so angry and unfeeling to the world at a young age.
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> They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols.
This is not accurate.
The timeframe is not wrong; it is true that the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s. But saying it evolved from "warehouse guards and slave patrols" is ahistorical. Most modern police forces modeled after London's Metropolitan Police replaced night watch systems that have been around for literally all of recorded history.
> the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s.
There are some pretty big differences between the UK policing model and the one used in the US.
The UK model was set up against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars (the French police's role included monitoring dissent, suppressing political opposition [1] and even censoring books) and the Peterloo Massacre [2] (where cavalry were set on a peaceful protest campaigning for more than 2% of people to be allowed to vote)
The Peelian model [3] is one of 'policing by consent' where the police focus their efforts on the sorts of crimes the average citizen wants solved - rather than on suppressing political dissent, or censoring books, or launching cavalry charges against protests. Peel's police aren't a military force, which is why very few of them have guns.
If the American police are based on Peelian principles, then an awful lot of the principles have gotten lost in translation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fouch%C3%A9#In_Napoleon... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles#The_nine_pr...
> If the American police are based on Peelian principles, then an awful lot of the principles have gotten lost in translation.
"Peelian police, but with guns!" isn't that far off, I believe.
The previous comments weren't specific to America. This is a global website.
> the modern police, at least in the US,
Oh, how did I miss that!?
While some night watches were public safety distributed among community members, they were often there to protect the goods of merchants rather than protect the ordinary citizens of an area from petty crime. As merchants grew, and their goods became more valuable targets, the merchants would hire on guards, but saw the opportunity to turn the existing night watch systems in place to their favor, essentially insisting on distributing the cost of guarding their goods across the community.
I'm not saying the night watches didn't evolve into police departments, I'm saying the night watches were co-opted prior to them becoming uniformed departments.
And slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US. I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments.
For the warehouse guards, to summarize, you're saying that night watchmen and city watchmen were de facto warehouse guards before the formation of professional police forces? That seems a far cry from "evolved out of warehouse guards". Police still put resources into protecting property, but this does not make them "warehouse guards" any more than resources put on petty crime make them "cutpurse chasers" unless you're just making rhetorical points.
For the slave patrol point, I would appreciate a single example of this phenomenon. Is it the claim that there exists at least one professional police force that was created to replace a "slave patrol", which previously performed some subset of the civil duties of police officers? I have not been able to find an example; can you point me to one?
The establishment of the Charleston police department directly traces roots into slave patrols. The department was formed from city guard, who were used to round up spaces and put down slave revolts.
From my admittedly cursory reading, this does not appear to be accurate.
The antecedent organizations to the modern Charleston police department, notably the Town Watch and the City Guard, were both dissolved in the aftermath of the civil war, while civil order was kept by federal forces until the end of reconstruction.
But regardless of whether we can chase down a chain of organizations that meets the colloquial meaning of "evolved", it does not appear that either the City Guard nor the Town Watch were principally slave patrols, although they did enforce the slavery regime as part of their policing functions.
An organization that participates in the suppression of slaves as part of its function is not a "slave patrol". If the statement "[modern police forces] evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols" is to be parsed as "modern police forces evolved out of earlier organizations that sometimes protected private property or enforced slavery laws" then I grant the accusation, but it is rather hollow and meaningless at that point.
> For the slave patrol point, I would appreciate a single example of this phenomenon
Potter, Gary "The History of Policing in the United States"[1] references Platt, Tony, "Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 18"
1. https://www.academia.edu/30504361/The_History_of_Policing_in...
Did you read Platt? Its a mistake to grant any assertion as valid, especially given what we now know about academic fraud. The Platt article is freely available and does not reference slavery in any way that I can see from searching (the bad OCR) and quickly reading through the paragraphs.
Potter: The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982).
Potter: Platt, Tony, “Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 18 (1982).
1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29766165I have noted we have shifted from "I can't find a single example" to "I don't trust the first provided source", and yet there are plenty of other sources, if you're searching in good faith.
The history of the United States is well documented - it was only for a brief period during reconstruction that policing was deracialized in the American South, and even saw a number of formerly-enslaved lawmen. There were numerous violent revolts against this, and in support of white supremacy in places like Oklahoma, Louisiana[1], Mississippi and elsewhere where egalitarian leaders were ran out of town, and the law enforcement (along other administrative leadership) was reconfigured against the then "new", post-civil-war ways.
Do you see any functional differences between slave patrols (membership free from white land owners or their nominees) and the group that overthrew and reconstituted reconstruction-era law enforcement (mobs drew from white landowners, or their hired grunts).
https://naucenter.as.virginia.edu/blog-page/1761
Don’t “good faith” me with a reference that you claim supports your assertion but in actuality does not. You made an assertion and can defend it or abandon it.
If evidence for your claim was as plentiful as you claim, you would just add another link. You didn’t.
> If evidence for your claim was as plentiful as you claim, you would just add another link.
I gave examples of 3 southern states (and a link to one, detailing how the law enforcement was devolved to antebellum mores in Louisiana)
Did you post these under a different username? I see no evidence here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sangnoir
Again, if evidence was as plentiful as you claim, a person would add a link instead of typing about examples and links elsewhere.
What sort of falsifiable evidence would be sufficient to convince you? That specific named individuals who were on slave patrols later became sheriffs?
I’ve been thinking about it since asking for evidence. I studied 17-1800’s US history a long time ago and was oriented toward drawing insight from census and other quantifiable records and plugging them into SPSS.
Post-Belesiles [0], I would want to see a body of relatively objective records that can be independently verified in the form of adversarial cooperation. Say some significant number of individuals of slave oriented occupations moving into net new police-specific occupations.
Your use of the word “sheriff” is significant here because sheriff and constable are occupation terms that predate the Atlantic slave trade. These were civil enforcers for what represented law and justice in the English system. They still exist today in name and function. Moving from slave patrol to sheriff doesn’t necessarily support the thesis since sheriff and constable are not net new police forces.
0. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.016/--why-foo...
Marxist references are valid?
I suppose if you dismiss an article out of hand due to the ideology of the author without even seeing what historical facts they claim or their references, they might not be valuable to you.
Should progressive academics declare all CATO papers invalid because they are ideologically misaligned with the institute?
Given the origin of modern police forces in the Met, the principles set down by Peel would indicate that the aim was to have a force that was backed by the public - "policing by consent".
One of their predecessor organisations was the Bow Street Runners which was set up by magistrates with the aim of providing a less corrupt system than that of "thief takers" and a more professional one than parish constables.
>>> That concept is from the mid 1800s. They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols.
>> This is not accurate.
> I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments.
What percentage of current police departments were conversions from slave patrols? What is the source of this data?
>> And slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US.
> What is the source of this data?
https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=police+departments+were+conv...
Ok, first link in results contradicts "slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US":
While it is true that slave patrols were a form of American law enforcement that existed alongside other forms of law enforcement, the claim that American policing “traces back” to, “started out” as, or “evolved directly from,” slave patrols, or that slave patrols “morphed directly into” policing, is false. This widespread pernicious myth falsely asserts a causal relationship between slave patrols and policing and intimates that modern policing carries on a legacy of gross injustice. There is no evidence for either postulate.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...
And did not mean to imply exclusively. Plenty of police departments don't have roots in slave patrols.
Can you tell me more or more about where I should look? What did people do about crimes like robberies etc?
This seems like a genetic fallacy. Police might have been former slave patrollers at one time in some places. That doesn’t mean all US police are the same or have anything in common with them.
I’m not sure what it means for US police to have “evolved out of” slave patrols in places that never had slaves, like New York City (northern states didn’t want to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act), or even in places like Hawaii that were founded well after slavery was abolished.
Police forces have roots in protecting capital, for example warehouse guards or for another slave patrols.
They still exist for that purpose in the US.
They do not exist to protect people. They are a tool of the state and capital.
The years post slavery still were used to enforce Jim Crow laws, segregation, and violence against minorities. They still used dogs to attack peaceful protestors. SWAT teams are a continuation of an ethos of being warriors, willing to do violence at the behest of the government and capital at the expense of the people.
This is a genetic fallacy. The origins of policing don’t give you sufficient information to judge its present quality. Further, as many have also pointed out, many places didn’t even have slave patrols. Drawing a connection between contemporary Waco cops and Jim Crow is dubious but drawing that connection to e.g. LAPD is entirely unjustified. Bad police departments resemble something more akin to the Catholic Church than the KKK.
Assuming you are not making the entirely reductionist argument that requires every law be tied back to capital (in other words, murder is illegal because it brings down property values or something) this is an extremely narrow view of the purpose of police. This everything-is-capital framing doesn’t explain consumer protections or environmental laws or labor laws.
The purpose of police is to enforce the laws. Many of those laws have been significantly and disproportionately controlled by corporate and monied interests but again there are too many clear counterexamples to conclude as you did.
Specifically, SWAT teams didn’t exist until the 1960s. I’d wager their escalated use against civilians in their homes likely coincided with the War on Drugs in the 1980s.
The story I’ve heard is the North Hollywood shootout led to increased militarization when police were outgunned by two bank robbers.
https://www.policemag.com/weapons/article/15348048/how-the-n...
Of course, there must have been many other causes. It wasn’t the first time in US history that police were outgunned.
> Cops are a relatively recent phenomena. (Cops as a uniformed, central office, patrolling force.)
Not at all, Spain for example had local "brotherhoods" who were meant to protect the local communities against bandits and other unwanted people, and this was back in the 12th century. I'm sure other countries could have been even earlier with their early versions of a police force. "Santa Hermandad" is a term you can look up to find some history about it.
Accidentally, I read about the Romans recently. They had the Cohortes Vigiles, which was mostly a night time fire watch but it included night watch duties. Daytime was the responsibility of the Praetorian Guard. They were more kind of a part of the army but under the mayor's control (to some degree at least). I think they meet your definition of uniformed, central office, and patrolling.
A very interesting piece on the history and development of modern policing https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/sarah-seo-how-cars-tra...
>That concept is from the mid 1800s. They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols.
Isn't this just guilt by association? Whether police are bad or not should be judged on its merits, not what its history is. The Autobahn and VW was built by Nazi Germany, but it'd be absurd to bring that factoid up when discussing road transport or the German car industry.
It's guilt by association and that narrow nationalistic perspective that the US is the entirety of the world. Turns out, most of the planet managed to form similarly-operating police forces without first having slave patrols.
> slave patrols
Yeah, right. Those were distinctly US-ian things; somehow, the rest of the world managed to develop a similar form of police force at similar time, too.
The and was not meant to be exclusive. It should maybe be read as or. It's not meant to imply all police forces were slave patrols. Plenty evolved to protect other capital interests.
> They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols.
Are we still spouting this nonsense? They do come from the mid 1800s. Modeled after the London Metro Police, where there were so many slaves to catch. American cities soon imitated, based on how many slaves were recovered.
It would be fair to say that early US police were mostly about protecting the interests of the powerful. Over time that diminished and police protected an increasing number of less powerful groups.
During my childhood, it was common for police to defer to husbands regarding domestic abuse. And kids all over knew to not go to the police - for any kind of abuse from authority figures.
> Are we still spouting this nonsense? They do come from the mid 1800s. Modeled after the London Metro Police
All of the above is true. In the US, slavery enforcement evolved into police forces and police forces were modeled after UK police.
Many police forces, many origin stores.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...
The article you point to is explicitly debunking the idea of slave patrols evolving into police forces.
> The claim that modern police originated from slave patrols is a dangerous slur designed to delegitimize policing ... Bad policing must be criticized, but we should not do so by resorting to historically flimsy myths, especially myths that unfairly tarnish the reputations of those in law enforcement and cast aspersions on their motives.
It does not matter... he believes it, so it must be true. But it does feel weird to wander among humans, listening to the nonsense being discussed so earnestly.
The truth of the matter is this: if you refuse to believe that modern policing evolved directly from slave patrols, it means you are a racist and you voted for Trump. This is undeniable, and by denying it you prove it true. Nuanced and sophisticated descriptions of how historical circumstances came to be are repressive and the enemy of social justice. Thomas Jefferson ate babies and George Washington stomped on little latinx children.
> But it does feel weird to wander among humans, listening to the nonsense being discussed so earnestly.
It's even weirder when you're from any place on Earth other than the USA.
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> Whatever that means
Look, if you're not even willing to understand the argument, your refutation of it is toothless at best, worthless at worst.
Not to mention, your own claim is vague and without evidence. In point of fact, there's plenty of evidence to the counter. There are ample studies to choose from, but from just this year: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/police-budget-crime-...
Are you willing to understand the argument? What does militarization mean? Because I’ve seen no evidence of police responding to a crime scene with an Apache helicopter or a howitzer. It’s remarkable that completely obviously false claims of militarization are accepted here.
As for your link: the claim made by the “study” is false since it is ignoring virtually every obvious confounding factor to claim that the number of police officers doesn’t affect crime rates. Per capita police count is a measure of how effectively a city can respond to crime. If they can’t respond that means there aren’t consequences. When there aren’t consequences you end up with the disaster of public safety you see in west coast cities like SF, Portland, and Seattle.
You seeing no evidence of it firsthand != A refutation. It's a globally decried phenomenon unique to the American Police Forces.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-9-11-helped-to-milita...
https://apbweb.com/2023/10/the-use-of-military-assets-by-u-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/why-are-some-u...
The driving force behind it is this LESO; established to facilitate the "1033 Program", which transfers excess weapons, equipment, and vehicles from the United States Armed Forces to civilian law enforcement agencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Support_Office
From 1997 until 2014, $5.1 billion in military hardware was transferred from the DoD to local American law enforcement agencies. 1/3rd of the equipment was brand-new.
This gives this 2020 post about Queensryche's "Empire" a different perspective.
https://livinglifefearless.co/2020/features/queensryches-emp...
Them receiving surplus military gear is one aspect.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/06/1...
> This is a vague claim made by the anti policing activists
Probably a conclusion people come to when they compare US police looking more like the US military every day, while their local police doesn't go in that direction at all. At least that's true for me as a person living in Spain but sometimes seeing the really crazy equipment US police seems to have.
Having semiautomatic rifles or armored vehicles isn’t militarization. Private citizens can get those too. Police forces don’t have M1 Abrams tanks or F35s or nuclear carriers. This claim that the police are problematic is an entirely emotional activist response to a few incidents. That sentiment then led to hyperbolic claims like militarization.
They have Bazookas, Grenade Launchers, Predator drones, and mine resistant vehicles up to and including Armored Personnel Carriers. None of these are available to private citizens.
Obama went so far as to say the following when trying to reign in the 1033 program in 2015
"We've seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like it's an occupying force as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them ... So we're going to prohibit equipment made for the battlefield that is not appropriate for local police departments."
> None of these are available to private citizens.
Private citizens can actually buy mine resistant vehicles. We can even buy main battle tanks - though the turret needs to be disabled without a Destructive Device permit.
With a Destructive Device permit, you can also buy a grenade launcher.
We don't sell predator drones to local police departments. Police use the same commercial drones any other private citizen can buy - though cities often restrict whether non-police can fly them.
Doesn't the police in the US frequently end up with hardware the military used to use? I've seen bunch of pictures/videos of police using Humvees and similar stuff, which I thought was originally made for military use, not domestic policing.
It also seems like in 2015 there was limits added that made it so "the military was restricted from transferring some weapons, such as grenade launchers, weaponized vehicles, and bayonets to police". Why was that restriction needed if the police isn't becoming more and more like the military?
Humvees (HMMWV) aren't anything special. They were sold new for a while on the US civilian market. It's just another truck. The military surplus ones didn't come with weapons. Lots of other countries also sell off military surplus trucks, I've seen regular people in Europe driving comparable vehicles like a Unimog.
> This claim that the police are problematic is an entirely emotional activist response to a few incidents.
Really? Do you realize that the amount of civil asset forfeiture has exceeded burglaries? The militarization of police is absolutely a huge problem. As is mass-incarceration for non-violent crimes, over-criminalization, no-knock raids, etc. They just raided a dudes house for a squirrel.
And no, I don't advocate for the idiocy in CA where they legalized violent crime as a petty response to having their budgets threatened.
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I don't pay nearly enough attention or care about police quality outcomes to comment on whether trends have been a disaster, but critiques of militarization are definitely not something that arose out of BLM. A huge amount was coming from Radley Balko and reason.com over 15 years ago. It was a major libertarian talking point for a long time. As soon as Iraq surplus donation programs started giving free MRAPs and full plate personal armor to police, it was making people uneasy. Early justification for beefing up police armament largely came out of the North Hollywood bank robbery shootout in what? 1998? We didn't want police being outgunned by common criminals, but it's never been clear they need to deal with paramilitary insurgencies that exist in active theaters of combat. Nobody was ever putting IEDs in the streets to blow up squad cars in the United States as far as I can remember.
> It was a major libertarian talking point for a long time.
It’s amazing how the main voices of the libertarian right have changed over the last 25 years.
Not at all. It’s good that law enforcement have the tools to deal with serious threats. You’re just throwing around a fear word.
The big guns are hidden from sight anyway, and only brought out when need be. We don’t need any Oct 7th type attacks happening on home soil.
> We don’t need any Oct 7th type attacks happening on home soil.
Well homegrown attacks happen DAILY. "Averaging almost 50,000 deaths from firearms annually". But no, once they're not on the news like the Oct 7th attacks where, it's fine I guess.
https://www.statista.com/topics/10904/gun-violence-in-the-un...
The number you’re citing is much higher than the number of firearm-related homicides on your linked page; I believe that’s because it includes suicides, which are not relevant to this conversation.
2023 which was the peak had homocides at 14,244.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/249803/number-of-homicid...
So you want police to deal with 10k+ gun related homicides using only batons and pepper spray?
If there are guns, there is death. Frankly, if there are no guns, there's still death.
You pulling an argumentative sleight of hand here conflating your run of the mill gun violence with terrorist attacks or mass shootings isn't cool.
It doesn't matter how the police is equipped, they can't stop a guy from walking up to his neighbor and shooting him in the face unless they're already there pointing guns at him. Although, maybe some sort of remote mind control chip is the answer there?
Also, I'm certain every shooting ends up on local news.
If they can be summoned by just placing an anonymous phone call with an unverified claim, that might be a problem though.
This. There are valid reasons to have the big guns, though I still think we’ve overreached. It is terrifying that a damn teenager managed to trick the cops into whipping out the big guns hundreds of times.
Despite that the teenager will likely be going to jail, the most damning indictment is of the police forces that were repeatedly co-opted by the teenager. It should really take something much more clever to trigger this kind of systemic response repeatedly.
What's the alternative? Waiting for New York Times to verify a home invasion has indeed taken place before sending over cops?
Maybe just sending out a single squad car first to get a credible assessment?
I'm not sure who aided in constructing this mental representation for you that the number of cops is directly proportional with the scale of conflict that's about to happen.
I'd challenge that view by claiming that if the threat is of someone holding their family hostage threatening to kill them (just a guess at what these "swatters" might say to the dispatcher to get cops to actually kick in some doors, I don't know what their state-of-the-art accusation is), then sending one cop car, poorly equipped, sounds a bit silly for multiple reasons.
Just to be clear, your version of the ideal response to an unverified claim of a hostage situation is to immediately escalate?
It's because they have to assume it's real. Same reason behind weather warnings. They can't know for sure if it's real, but it's 'better' to assume it's real and respond accordingly only to discover it's a hoax, than it is to assume it's a prank and show up unprepared only to have it be real and they aren't ready to handle it. It's Schrodinger's hostage.
> We don’t need any Oct 7th type attacks happening on home soil.
USA has 1-2 mass shootings everyday on average. This is far worse than a singular big attack. And how long would the reaction of police to any big attack even take? Is it actually realistic that they will have a useful impact with big guns?
>USA has 1-2 mass shootings everyday on average.
2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition so while what you say is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader as the typical mass shooting of the FBI definition consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.
The USA is the only first-world country I'm aware of where many people are happy to argue that a 2+ victim shooting (in any context) is NOT a mass shooting.
"2" being a large number of people to be killed in a crime does not necessarily make it sensible (to me, a Dutchman, very much not American) to call that crime a "mass shooting". If the crime was e.g. a bank robbery (sorry for the unimaginative example), and they shot a member of staff and later a civilian to get away, then that's a robbery with two dead, not a mass shooting. What people imagine when you say "mass shooting" is sensational stories from (predominantly) the US where some mad kid takes a gun to a school and shoots around. If that kid shoots 2 people, that's a mass shooting with 2 dead.
Gun control advocates will say things like:
> Mass shootings like Columbine happen every day in America.
The guy you’re replying to (and I as well) are saying that this is an intentionally misleading statement. Three people being wounded but not killed in a shootout they started is still considered on the same level as dozens of innocent children being hurt and killed. IMO that’s straight up misinformation. It’s designed to illicit the strongest emotional reaction possible, while being not even technically wrong.
America has lots of problems, and guns are definitely one of them. Everyone agrees with this, we just disagree on how to fix it. Twisting words and lying is never helpful.
Mass shootings as defined to inflate statistics by groups like the Gun Violence Archive aren’t what people usually think of when they think of mass shootings. Those figures include anything with four victims including gang violence, robberies, etc. The more accurate measure is from the Mother Jones database, which lists just two this year.
Or 1948-onwards-style genocides. One Palestinian child has been killed every 2 days since Oct 7th by the way.
The military model is that they are organized into units with training, and obey a central authority. On the whole, it's been an improvement over forming ad hoc posses of farmers and shopkeepers and arming them, or the medieval hue and cry model where someone screams and then everybody in town comes over and beats a stranger to death for having a different accent after dark. I'd love to see some statistics about how much worse it is now that we have professional police, though, if you've got any to share.
The "military model" goes so much further than that. They are "officers" and have military ranks as their position/title. They wear military-styled uniforms and headwear. They engage in military-style ceremonies.
> I'd love to see some statistics about how much worse it is now that we have professional police,
How fortunate that they're willing to collect statistics on their own performance for you.
> The "military model" goes so much further than that.
Claiming that police are being militarized is a very broad statement. Depending on your perspective it can be positive or negative.
You could argue that consistency and having a common operating model with accountability is a good thing. Unfortunately many would argue the adopted model is very flawed and that the level accountability is tied to public outrage or scrutiny.
I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate. Some argue that sensitivity and deescalation training are where the focus should be, while others are arguing for the warrior training.
The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because doing it badly will be more harmful than not having done it at all.
> You could argue that consistency and having a common operating model with accountability is a good thing.
Why would that require that a "captain" has several subordinates ranked "Lieutenant" and "Sergeant"? Why do the highest ranked police have caps with brocade, and gold braid on their shoulders? Is that part of the consistency? Why does the NYPD have dress uniforms? Why do they give military style funerals for those who die, or x-gun salutes? We're often told they're out there fighting "wars", though everyone is always vague about who the other side is.
I'm not making the claim that they've been militarized recently. It seems to have been the case no matter how far you go back.
> I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate.
I don't think this is a training problem. When they shoot some grandma or shake down travelers for the cash in their wallets, I don't think this could ever be corrected no matter how much or what sort of training they are required to undergo. This is some baseline ethics problem, that could only be corrected with initial selection, and then only if the selection process itself were relatively uncorrupted (and it's not).
Your comment doesn't just suggest you are mistaken about this or that, but that you aren't in a frame of mind where you could recognize or appreciate that there is a problem.
> The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because
What if the task were something absolutely morally abhorrent? What if the task was to efficiently and artfully carve the hearts out of newborn babies and toddlers, and to terrorize the parents with the mutilated remains of their children? But you've been doing this task for so long, that you and everyone else just assumes that it's something that needs to be done. You're sitting around arguing "ok, maybe we need to do only have as many satanic baby sacrifices, and I won't listen to the people who say we need to have more not less". And there's another guy sitting next to you saying "I don't know why we need the terror... we could kill just as many babies without being cruel, they could get anesthesia, and we could do grief counseling for the mom and dad".
And you endlessly yammer about this stuff, for decades, never noticing that you're all lunatics. The concept that this just shouldn't be done at all, in any manner, it's something you can't possibly hear. Even those who can understand this like to whine that they're powerless to stop it, that they don't have the tools to put a stop to it, etc. The truth is we all have the power to stop, none of you want to.
> Your comment doesn't just suggest you are mistaken about this or that, but that you aren't in a frame of mind where you could recognize or appreciate that there is a problem.
Popping in here to say that it's funny how you said this then go on about baby sacrifice.
In Europe this would have been a completely different story. It's highly unlikely (compared to the US) that a SWAT team equivalent would kill anyone. The guy could have got away with 5-7 years max. I know it's a museum, but I prefer to live here.
I have been following swatting incidents of content creators for years and I have learned that police jurisdictions where this happens frequently in are becoming wiser and spreading information around, so the threat of getting killed from a swatting incident has gone down. Places with pockets of content creators like Austin Texas have become very aware of these types of things.
If you are a content creator, or someone who might be at risk for swatting you can call your local PD and explain the situation. You can let them know that you understand they must respond to those types of calls, but just wanted to call in and let them know it could happen. Most are happy to hear from you and take note.
Before swattings became popular, people used to send pizzas (popularized by old 4chan) and you would have to call all the pizza places in your area and get your address blacklisted. That was a pain.
I'd recommend that if you receive threats of a swatting, whether you're a content creator or not, it's a good idea to talk to your local police department about it the moment it happens.
Unfortunately, I speak from experience. I received a credible threat, called my local PD, and they began to investigate immediately. They also put notes in their dispatch system (which is shared by the local SWAT team) indicating that this had happened before, and to proceed with extreme caution.
The "swatter" never did follow through on the first attempt, but did follow through about 6 months later. I didn't get any threats from the swatter that time, but did get a call from my local PD while I was at work, and they let me know they'd driven by my place and called it off after being confident it was a false alarm.
Anticipating questions: no, there's no sort of protocol I setup with the PD. They have to investigate every threat, and even if we setup some sort of "shared secret" ahead of time, if a swatter says I'm cutting up my family in the basement, the PD can't know with certainty that I'm not. About the best I can do is make sure to answer the door when/if the PD shows up so they can more quickly establish things are safe.
Also: the attackers were after some OG Twitter accounts I used to use, and they thought they could intimidate me into giving the accounts to them.
Ye olde 4chan's reputation for being an evil website is funny in retrospect. The mortality rate on phony pizza deliveries is pretty close to zero and harmless compared to what goes down on the internet these days.
A European swatting may be highly unlikely to succeed in killing somebody, but the murderous intent is still there. It should be punished as attempted murder both in America and Europe.
6 years is the baseline for attempted murder in denmark.
What's the baseline for 100s of attempted murders?
Nevertheless European, especially German police, is obviously also prone to go all in without establishing any kind of context. One email is sufficient.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550043
i kind of remember a journalist having a heart attack 10 years ago during a swatting event in france but i couldn't find it anymore
remarkably similar story to JStark1809, creator of the FGC9 [1] and thus a great boon to the people in Myanmar fighting against a tyrannical government. JStark died of a heart attack during a european swat raid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9
That's probably about what he'll get here.
It seems statistically rare (highly unlikely) that a SWAT team would injure or kill someone in the US too. I can only find references to 3 - of which only 1 is a result of a direct shooting by law enforcement. The other two are a shooting of law enforcement and a heart attack.
Here is my reference for 3 events in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...).
It’s a nice museum!
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Couldn’t this fellow been identified after ten, rather than 200+?
Cops were too busy swatting.
Tor, VPNs, and other solutions work, and are simple enough for a motivated 17 year old to use.
Plus calls all over the country require national level investigation, not local police efforts. And that's what happened: the FBI had to step in.
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Why so bitter? Any source on that 90%?
So 98%... https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major...
I've made this comment before but technology could help here. If the call was tagged as landline, cell, or VoIP along with approximate location info it would help a lot.
A landline call tagged as "same town" or cell call tagged as "pinged tower near reported location" could be treated more seriously than a VoIP call from "Fly-by-night VoIP Gateway Plc".
The phone system is sufficiently easy to spoof this kind of info, even if the dispatch does receive it (which they probably already do) it doesn't mean that the origin is reliably accurate. Furthermore, there is no way to be sure that police actually pay attention to the signals they have available.
They like opportunities to play with their tech toys and rough up some "suspects." A compelling story about someone in distress is the perfect excuse, whether the message comes in via VOIP, TOR or 4chan.
No, just no. The solution here is to not show up guns a-blazing. The reason why swatting exists is because it seriously harms the victim.
This is no more complicated than grade school playgrounds: don't give the bully what they want.
"No, just no"? Really? Do you think we're in some Realtime Strategy Game where we have to choose one option and then press "end turn"?
This is really off topic, but you are confusing real-time strategy with turn-based strategy.
Does swatting only exist in the US? By swatting I mean “causing life threatening police action to innocent people by giving false information to said police”.
the linked article is very light on details, here is a better one:
https://www.wired.com/story/alan-filion-torswats-guilty-plea...
Thanks! We've changed to that from https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/18/teenage_serial_swatte... above.
Not sure why swatting isn’t treated like attempted murder
Ideally sending cops anywhere shouldn't be treated as a murder attempt, no matter the persons intent. They should be trained to recognize if there is true threat or not.
If our legal system started recognizing that sending the police somewhere is equivalent to calling an assassin then we've got larger issues to address.
Well he is facing 20 years
He's probably not facing anything resembling 20 years. Charged as an adult under the fact patterns we know about, I get something like 15 years. But he's being charged as a juvenile.
It seems like he was a child when he made most of these calls.
Regardless, this is unlikely to be much of a deterrent. The police need to be held accountable at some point.
The police didn't hurt anybody in this case, despite this person's attempt to make them do so. What are you holding them accountable for?
In criminal law, attempted crime is treated the same as successful completions. That’s because we don’t want to encourage people to make attempts: many such attempts could be successful.
Imagine a world in which someone is trying to murder you or your children. You know who they are, and you even have incontrovertible evidence they are doing it. Yet they get off scot-free every time because their bullets missed the mark.
(This is covered in the mandatory first-year criminal law course in law school, BTW.)
Yes, I agree. The SWAT-ter attempted to kill people. The police did not. I'm not sticking up for the accused; I'm saying the facile "this is a police problem" argument doesn't apply in this story.
I never said the police's problems were on display with this case. In fact i think the case is largely meaningless to the topic. the threat of swatting is going to remain until the police can be brought under some kind of democratic control.
I don't know, you brought it up. I'm asking: in this case, what do you want them held accountable for?
That's more than a decade less than what Chelsea Manning or John Kiriakou was sentenced to. It's absurd that the punishment is much harsher for unspecified theoretical harm caused by whistleblowing than the very real harm caused by literal murder attempts.
Perhaps, but 20 years is a significan portion of someone's life.
The courts wanting to make an example of those that have embarrassed the government is a different issue entirely.
There's a 0% chance he spends the next 20 years of his life incarcerated.
Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months not 30 years.
As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people who cooperated with the US or the Afghanistan government against the Taliban. When the Taliban found out about such people they would go after them.
We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks because there is no way to know if the Taliban found them out through the leaks or through some other source. The odds are pretty good that it was more than one, probably a lot more.
The swatting teen on the other hand is known to have not actually gotten anyone killed.
A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you. They were there to do something that sometimes goes wrong and does kill, but most of the time that doesn't happen.
Someone coming to your house because the Manning leaks identified you as cooperating against the Taliban was there to kill you.
> Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months not 30 years.
My bad, but still egregious nonetheless.
> As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people
You're after different people. It's Luke Harding and David Leigh from the Guardian that published the password to the unredacted files.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/unredacted_us...
> We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks
This is exactly what I meant by "unspecified and theoretical." The government had over 2 decades to point to any instances of harm. Where are they?
Also again, Chelsea Manning didn't publish the unredacted files. It's rich to blame her for Afghanistan deaths while ignoring the actions of Bush and every president after him, where the ultimate responsibility lies.
> A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you.
No, the crucial difference is intent. Swatting kills people, swatters know that, but they do it anyways for their own pleasure. Obviously, swatters aren't sending trigger-happy cops so that their victims can survive.
Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes. This is whistleblowing, not some selfish "leak." The intent here is to save lives, the exact opposite of swatting. I don't know how anyone can demonize whistleblowing while trivializing swatting.
Crimes against the state or that that thumb their nose at the authority of the state always carry disproportionate punishments because the state is who's writing the rules, running the systems, creating the sentencing guidelines, etc.
That's a pretty light sentence for 375 murder attempts and threats.
Not to mention the opportunity cost: victims of real violent/urgent situations who couldn't access timely protection, as well as the cost to society of perpetrators who marginally escaped while law enforcement were occupied tending to fake call outs.
He could face local charges in those jurisdictions? Does double jeopardy prevent each county seeking their own sentence?
Yes, they can't charge him again for the same physical act.
His federal guilty plea appears to admit to 375 swatting calls. So I don't think the state or local courts can subsequently charge him for any of those calls - they would need to find evidence of some separate calls.
IANAL, but some googling suggests you are wrong about that:
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/federal-crimes/is-it-doubl...
You're right, I stand corrected.
There are at least 30 countries that would apply the death sentence for that.
It's only attempted murder because American SWAT is trigger happy, equipped literally like an army and shoots before asking questions or establishing context, that's hardly his fault.
It's his fault if he knows his actions may result in the targets death and does it anyway.
"It's hardly my fault the police doused pluc with gasoline, all I did was throw a match"
If you have smart police officers who do smart police work this is a mild annoyance at best. Not trying to defend him, but SWAT is just as guilty as he is.
AFAIK the swat teams involved in the OP incidents didn't kill anybody, so they more or less did their jobs properly. Nonetheless, the intent was there; this guy committed hundreds of attempted murders.
I agree that he is complicit, but I find it hard to view him as solely culpable for a death. If a child feeds law enforcement false data, and law enforcement then kills someone, both parties should have known better but I have much higher expectations of our law enforcement than a teenager.
The kid needs to be punished, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have a glaring hole in our law enforcement procedures so large that even children can exploit them. That’s insane. Children are always going to do dumb shit, we need to have policies and procedures to guard against that.
Equipped like an army, unfortunately not trained like one.
My response is in the context of the parent comment saying that it should be treated like attempted murder, and then the response citing the 20 years of sentence reading to me like it was implying that the crimes were being treated seriously enough. The premise you seem to disagree with was established by previous comments and isn't something I proposed myself.
If there's one thing to take away from the last, idk, ten-ish years, it's that the US court system is remarkably forgiving, even on things it really shouldn't be.
He's not facing 20 years; he's facing a small fraction of that.
That requires not only people wrapping their mind around the fact that death is likely when the cops kick in a door but also the state overtly codifying that reality.
It'll happen when pigs fly.
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Sometimes they even drop bombs from them -- on to residential blocks with families no less.
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> In January 2024, an individual affiliated with the Torswats Telegram account and claiming to be a friend of Filion suggested that he was part of a group aiming to incite racial violence and that he sought money to “buy weapons and commit a mass shooting.” The allegation aligns with a written tip, placed to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in April 2023 and obtained by WIRED, alleging that the person behind the Torswats account was involved in a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles.
I wonder if this was supposed to be Nine Angels. Copy editing on the web is so sloppy that I'm going to assume so because it makes more sense (to me).
Wow, neo-nazis are a fun bunch. Their ideas about accelerationism and trying to induce race riots have got to be our biggest semi-organized domestic threat. It's encouraging to see authorities seemingly beginning to catch on to this, as well as widespread recognition of what swatting is. Five years ago was a very different story, especially on the latter.
Probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles
You could have Googled it. First result https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles
>I wonder if this was supposed to be Nine Angels. Copy editing on the web is so sloppy that I'm going to assume so because it makes more sense (to me).
I'm going to assume that wired got it right and it's the neo-nazis that misspelled it; it's much funnier that way.
It should really not be possible for a single anonymous phone call to dispatch a heavily armed response team to break down someone's door.
Aside from that, people who do so are despicable. 20 years is a light sentence. Taking money to put people in situations that could easily become deadly.
It wouldn't be a problem, if the "heavily armed response team" was properly held to account when they killed innocent people.
Cops kill people on the basis of ludicrous anonymous phone call because they know they'll get away with it when it turns out to be false.
And they like it that way.
There needs to be a few very public cases of entire SWAT teams getting 20 year sentences.
ACAB
While the acab is kind of rough, I'm absolutely with you on police accountability.
If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time. Training only goes so far. After that, you're investigating mistakes versus violent intent.
I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
> While the acab is kind of rough
> If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
To be clear, your 2nd statement is why ACAB. The police are the people fighting against the open & honest accountability you are asking for. When accountability comes up, they refuse to do their jobs[1], inflate crime numbers & incident severity[2], harass the few cops trying to improve accountability until they quit[3], and actively campaign against accountability[4].
If some cops are bastards, and people who shield those bastards from accountability are also bastards, then all cops are bastards. ACAB is not rough, it exactly describes the situation.
[1] https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...
[2] https://minnesotareformer.com/2020/12/15/the-bad-cops-how-mi...
[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/only-minneapolis-...
[4] https://apnews.com/article/elections-police-minneapolis-a1ce...
> The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time.
In the US, police officer does not even rise to top 10 most dangerous jobs. Groundskeeper is a more dangerous job than being a cop.
The lack of training and toxic culture of policing is far more dangerous to cops than criminals are. The average US citizen simply does not, and should not, trust the average cop.
>In the US, police officer does not even rise to top 10 most dangerous jobs.
Which is really impressive for how much time cops spend standing on the side of highways.
Danger =/= high stress/pressure situations
But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves.
For instance, several officers have been treated for severe symptoms after coming into contact with fentanyl. Except that there is no way, biochemically speaking, the kind of contact they had with fentanyl could have produced anything resembling those symptoms. It was an entirely psychosomatic reaction, brought on by the police's own utterly false propaganda about how terrifyingly dangerous fentanyl is.
Similarly, so much of their "high stress" is because they expect to be attacked/shot/killed at any given moment even when, by any reasonable analysis, they are 100% safe. Furthermore, a lot of the actual danger to them is manufactured by this exact phenomenon: they expect a physical confrontation, so, in order to ensure they "win" it, they create it, striking preemptively in one fashion or another.
> But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves.
This is conjecture with no measurable basis.
....It is supported by specific facts in the rest of my post.
I'll grant I didn't cite sources, because this is HN, not a scientific journal, and if you're interested enough you can Google it (or DDG it, or Kagi it) for yourself, but the basis really is right there in my post.
None of your "facts" support your claim that the large majority of stress is manufactured by the police.
Even if that were true, and it's not, it would be mitigated by better training and careful psychological filtering.
> and it's not
At least try to be persuasive. There are a myriad of ways that jobs can be stressful without endangering your life, that should not be difficult for you to imagine. Shift work, demands for quotas and metrics (sales people can tell you this), dealing with violent and erratic individuals in the public with sometimes insufficient support, etc.
Correctional Officers face similar circumstances and have a life expectancy of 58-59 years old. High divorce rate too, but people want to content themselves with the truism that "only bad people work these jobs", with no consideration for environmental effects. The divorce rate is higher among medical assistants and some skilled trades, for reasons that can just as easily apply: long hours, on-call, fatigue, etc.
> it would be mitigated by better training and careful psychological filtering.
Only on the conceit that any and all stress is imposed by lack of training and bad psychology.
You're not demanding evidence that the job of police officer is high stress. Interesting, that bias. On what basis do you support that claim?
All of which would be self-reported and not persuade you. But behaviors that correlate with stress (like I provided) are present.
> Training only goes so far
Compared to other countries American cops aren't really trained at all.
In Germany the training period for a police officer is 2 to 3 years, in the US it's usually less then 6 months.
It's not quite that bad.
That US 6 month number excludes field training (typically 1 year) whereas the 2-3 year German number includes it (6 months I believe).
This largely stems from a difference in how academies work. In many countries, field training is required to graduate. In the US, field training is required after you graduate in order to get a permanent job. This skews the total training time numbers.
That said, American police are still undertrained by comparison.
>The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time.
Police mostly act as professional witnesses taking reports and engage in revenue generating law enforcement.
The most high pressure situations they deal with with any regularity involve mediating domestic disputes or wrestling angry drunks.
Police absolutely are not dealing with violent criminals on the daily. And when they do go out of their way to deal with people who many become violent they show up with the kind numerical advantage that would make Stalin proud.
Your average beat cop probably un-holsters their handgun once a month to once a year depending on where and when they patrol. These high stress high stakes split second judgement call situations are not a daily or weekly thing.
>I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
They do accept this and did for decades. The only reason it's no longer being blanked accepted is because the modern media landscape makes it much harder to hide the fact that a huge fraction of these "honest mistakes" were in fact not so honest and not so mistaken.
Basically nobody has a problem with honest mistakes by themselves. What people have a problem with is thug behavior. Spending decades classifying various degrees of thug behavior as honest mistakes is why nobody wants to tolerate honest mistakes.
> It wouldn't be a problem, if the "heavily armed response team" was properly held to account when they killed innocent people.
You’re right, but it is a problem and people who choose to abuse that fact deserve to have the book thrown at them.
Before the people that make this possible and carry out the raids in an unsafe manner and without due dilligence? Before the ones protecting the police from any accountability?
The kid should be punished, yes, but a quarter of his lifespan is not exactly a light sentence.
Before, after, concurrently - it doesn’t matter.
Both issues need to be addressed and addressing one doesn’t relate to the other.
This kid shouldn’t get off easy just because his crime shouldn’t be possible. It is possible, and he chose to do it. Most people are good and choose not to do it.
I’m finding very few cases of actual Swatting itself leading to deaths.
Here is a reference for 3 events in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...).
You are asserting quite a lot here.
Have you spoken with SWAT team members?
The few I know would find this attitude of “killing is fine because we won’t be sued” abhorrent
> Have you spoken with SWAT team members?
Not only do I have zero interest in speaking with SWAT team members, I have very real reasons why I choose wherever possible to not talk to any cops at all.
https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE
The fact that you "know a few" SWAT team members immediately makes me strongly suspicious that you are part of the problem, perhaps not directly corrupt yourself, but very likely to be complicit in hiding the misbehaviour of police you know who are corrupt.
ACAB
How many police officers do you know? Have you been on a ride along or attempted to understand their job?
Swatting victimizes the police as well, they’re responding to a potential hostage situation and do not have the benefit of hindsight. I guarantee these officers are horrified that the man was innocent and frustrated that they were put in this situation.
I encourage everyone who is adamantly “ACAB” to go on a ride along- contact your local department. At best, you get first hand experience to justify your beliefs and can virtue signal even more to your friends. Or you may be able to humanize the police.
> I guarantee these officers are horrified that the man was innocent and frustrated that they were put in this situation.
How many cops do you know? They might say they're horrified to the media, but that's not how they operate when no one's watching. There's a reason these SWATting events keep happening: cops enjoy them just as much as the SWATters do. They get to bust out their fun military surplus toys and do their SEAL Team 6 cosplay. If they wanted to stop these SWATting events, they would have found a solution by now.
Check out these highlights (lowlights?) from the Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department:
https://racketmn.com/human-rights-report-mpd-needs-major-ove...
These are not people known for nuance or remorse.
Link to the full investigation report:
https://mn.gov/mdhr/assets/Investigation%20into%20the%20City...
man who do you think joins swat teams
Do you know why ACAB? Is not because they are rude, it's not cause they mean. It's because they participate in a societal role that requires them to do bastardly things.
They have to enforce unjust laws and unjust outcomes, and statistically do so more heavily across minority populations.
The institution requires them to be bastards, ACAB is a statement about the institution of police and the people who elect to join that institution.
> It's because they participate in a societal role that requires them to do bastardly things. They have to enforce unjust laws and unjust outcomes
The problems with American policing aren't merely that the cops have to enforce the law.
It's the qualified immunity, the get-out-of-jail-free cards for their buddies, and the dog shootings.
If the police never shot the wrong guy, always replaced your door after breaking it down, and were polite and apologetic when a mistake was made - people in this thread wouldn't be equating swatting with attempted murder.
If one were to believe there are actors in our society bad enough to justify a service existing then one would also have to believe there are actors bad enough to abuse that service with a view to kill anyone. It’s paradoxical that such a thing exists.
Or you just believe (correctly, so far) there are far more instances that warrant it than there are people abusing it
A service where four counts of this offence can be committed before any action is taken?
To be ever so slightly sympathetic to American cops, unlike just about anywhere else in the developed world, it is plausible that the person behind the door is armed with anything up to an automatic rifle, and any random person they stop may be carrying a concealed firearm.
Given that, if I was busting down doors in the US, I’d want to be armed to the teeth, equipped with the best body armour money can buy, and wouldn’t waste a lot of time on niceties until I was sure that nobody was going to attempt to kill me.
Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted.
Why would we want to incentivize and optimize for busting down doors? Sounds more like the Bill of Rights working as intended here.
When the cops think they are actually likely to encounter genuine armed resistance they ambush the suspect outside their home. If that's not practical they set up a perimeter. Police are not profession combatants. Their tactical doctrine is dominated by "gotta go home safe." SWAT raids exist mostly for the image and spectacle.
Simple solution: only allow weapons that existed during the creation of the Second Amendment.
And the First should only cover religions, forms of speech, printing technologies, venues of public assembly, and petitioning grievances that existed before it was "created"?
The argument that the grandparent is making is that the U.S. Supreme Court recently created legal president that only restrictions on firearms that have similar laws that were enforced during the creation of the Second Amendment can be considered constitutional under the Second Amendment. The argument that that means only firearms similar to those available at the time of the passing the Second Amendment sounds largely similar to the thinking.
And be careful about brining the First Amendment into that... the First Amendment as it was understood by its creators was not about your write to say anything you wanted without government response, it was about your right to publish your own newspaper (or broadsheet/advertisement) without the government issuing you a license or collecting a tax (both of which the colonial government did).
The second amendment was ratified in 1791, and just 7 years later (1978) the Alien and Sedition Acts were ratified by congress, in large part other silence critics of the federal government by making it illegal to say "false, scandalous, and malicious" about it (with the exception of about the Vice-President). And it was absolutely used as a political tool, and this was approved of by the Supreme Court at the time.
So I don't think that anyone really wants this horrible president that the modern Supreme Court has yoked us with. Unfortunately, given the election results, it appears we are going to be subject to these horrible ideas for a whole generation.
That's actually a bad solution. Weapons weren't much less brutal then, mostly just less precise. You'd have people accidentally shooting bystanders in armed conflicts.
We already have that: spray-and-prey is common, as are bystanders killed (even those who are just going about their lives in their own homes). But the weapons of the day were single-shot before reloading. In your argument we would only be reducing the number of bystanders reasonably shot.
The repeating air rifle with a 20 round magazine that Lewis and Clark brought on their expedition was invented over a decade before the ratification of the US Bill of Rights. If you're worried about capacity for indiscriminate violence, there were also cannons and grenades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girardoni_air_rifle
Old problem: AR-15 behind door. New (old) problem: 18 pounder loaded with grapeshot behind the door.
I'd take the AR.
Ban mechanical printing presses too then.
The printing press predates the 1st Amendment
Not the fully automatic machine presses. The founding fathers had printing presses that had to be hand loaded one page at a time. Clearly, they had no ability to conceive of more advanced technology than that.
>Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted.
It's been largely interpreted this way throughout most of our history, until around the 1960s when civil rights activists started carrying them. All the modern gun regulation started then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
Of course 1934 gun control came about due to people like Al Capone and the like.
No, you have history on its head. It was not seen as an absolute until the , and 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, then strengthened in 2010 in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Prior to that reasonable regulations were allowed (and what is reasonable was hotly debated) were permitted, so long as there were legitimate government interests.
The main point of the Second Amendment from the framers perspective was to prevent the need (or even the existence) of a standing army. Of course from a modern perspective this is near-ridiculous.
You could have fully automatic Thompson sub machine guns mailed to your house before 1934. You could have any other type of gun shipped to your house before 1968. All this is (relatively) recent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Control_Act_of_1968
Anonymous being the key word here
I'm sure a lot of consideration was put into how to deal with this problem. It's probably not cheap or easy running specialized SWAT teams for calls and there's nothing police would hate more than being taken advantage of by criminals.
But they seem to have decided this is the least bad option. They have a duty to respond to serious phone calls about armed situations.
The main issue is the insecurity of the old telecom system where spoofing is so easy. But we're heavily invested in it as a society.
> The main issue is the insecurity of the old telecom system where spoofing is so easy.
I disagree.
The main issue is qualified immunity.
The phone companies never killed anybody in a SWAT raid. The phone companies never claimed to be building a "secure telecom system", nobody ever offered to pay for them to ensure high grade authentication and integrity checking of phone calls.
And the cops know that. And don't care. They are the people showing uo with military weapons to people's homes. It's their responsibility to know and understand the reliability of the information they're acting on, and the ease with which the phone system can be made to show them misleading information.
Cops with guns and police unions and qualified immunity who now they're never going to be held accountable for killing people based on false information are the problem, not the phone system.
Those two things should not exist in combination.
One must not result in, or be able to cause, the other.
Let's say we have to deal with the fact that they do co-exist and interact. Maybe there should be additional protection and safeguards, and if there are some (which there probably are), don't stop there until the percentage of illegitimate calls is below a certain threshold.
And maybe it is already below a certain threshold, and I'm getting all hot under the collar about an incredibly rare scenario. Maybe it's better than it was. 20-year sentences should go part-way to reducing the frequency.
I'm mostly on the side of "letting a guilty person walk free is better than imprisoning (or arresting or shooting to death or even just violating the freedoms of) an innocent person".
It looks like the 20 years is a theoretical maximum. Isn't it pretty rare for anyone to ever get the maximum sentence?
Yes. He's being sentenced as a juvenile, which will further complicate (and likely mitigate) his sentence.
If I had to guess, he'll do a couple years.
This type of behavior is why I am so adamant about not doxxing myself on the internet. I had a belligerent internet-goer track me down last year through some open profiles. Luckily, they were the non-swatting type, and it allowed me to fix the gaps. It sucks to live in fear of these people.
Also, HN seems to have a bad echo chamber on both policing and gun control.
Just like the evolution of sim swapping and how it went from hijacking celebrity accounts for a day to stealing millions from crypto investors, cybercriminals slowly realized that it's far more easier to get personal data through bribing/hacking companies (telecoms, amazon) or even by directly sending emergency data requests from stolen law enforcement email addresses.
No amount of opsec can save you from corrupt employees making below minimum wage.
this is a police problem. as usual.
Okay so like, genuinely not trying to do a "back in my day" fuckin thing here, but also: what the fuck is wrong with kids? Back when I was coming up, pranking at it's absolute worst was like, filling a dudes shoes with yogurt in the locker room, or like, putting plastic bugs in people's desks n shit. Why the fuck are teenagers trying to get each other murdered by cops!?
Fair question, but I would also like to ask "What the f** is wrong with cops?".
Receiving an anonymous call claiming some not-particularly-plausible threat at a particular location probably DOES deserve a police investigation. I see no reason why it impels police to drag people from their house in chains, threaten to shoot them, or actually shoot them.
If police responses were reasonable and proportionate to the plausibility of the threat then swatters would not be able to use them as a weapon.
What is the reasonable and proportionate response?
"Swatting" isn't really a thing in Germany, but we've always had other disproportionate responses to single phone calls. One call (or even an email) that threatens to blow up the air port, or some particular air plane, and it's shut down for hours until they've looked in all the places you could hide a serious bomb (presumably, I have no idea what their "okay, I guess it was a hoax" signal is).
But what's the alternative when somebody plausibly describes a situation that indicates someone is in extreme danger? Send out a single cruiser the next day to check out what was up?
What happens in Germany when someone plausibly describes a situation that indicates someone is in extreme danger? Over here (in Greece), police officers will knock on your door, say they had a report and need to check, and then walk in and look around.
I've heard of reports of domestic violence, child molestation, things like that, and it's always the same. They rush to the place, knock on the door, look around, and arrest the people they need to arrest. What they don't do is start shooting.
What if in the call they claim the suspect is armed and threatening to start shooting hostages if the police show up? Do they still just knock on the door?
What if in the call they claim the suspect has a nuclear bomb and is threatening to blow up the city? It's kind of a similar scenario, given that I can't remember either of these ever happening. People here don't tend to have guns.
People in the US "don't tend to" take hostages and threaten to shoot them either. "Don't tend to" isn't the same as "it never happens".
Yeah, this never happens here. Even if it did happen once a decade, it wouldn't be a valid reason to worry about once a week, and it wouldn't be a single anonymous person calling in a tip that someone is threatening to shoot hostages.
I'm pretty sure that the US is unique in it's propensity for SWAT teams to shoot first ask questions later.
Same way as the US is the only nation in the world where it's impossible to prevent weekly school mass shootings.
Yeah, as much as swatting is shitty behavior, I think kids behaving egregiously is a lot more understandable than adults whose job is ostensibly the protection of everyone.
Yeah, it seems like they take the seriousness of the threat into account when determining the response, but not the plausibility of the threat.
If there's a 1% chance that the house contains a deranged gunman threatening to shoot his family and then himself, that probably shouldn't be met with the same response as a 30% chance of the same... There are probably a lot of situations where it's a tough call though.
The cops are reflective of the system that they operate in. Same as everyone else. Change the system, change behavior.
Extremely valid points there.
Should be using plainclothes officers to scout out situations prior to sending in swat.
Yeah wtf is wrong with cops being on edge when they think they're responding to a mass shooting. How dare they!
Future headline: Police ignore mass shooting because they thought it was a prank
'there's no way to stop this' says the government of the only country where this happens regularly.
source: the onion [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
You only linked the image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
What do you propose? Have you wondered why police here act as they do? Could it be all of the guns, gangs, mass shootings, and crime? We ain't like Europe in this regard.
From: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/swat...
> Prosecutors say the ... teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response”, and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.
I don't think this is pranks. I had an antisocial stint in my late teens also and it was more about gaining some power over a world that wants to treat you like a cog. I bet it wasn't even about the money (at least it wasn't for me) it's just that having a "hussle" is a persona that you can wear if you want to focus somewhere besides the consequences of your actions.
I guess my friends were weird, but our idea of doing a teenage prank with phone calls was to use our two phone lines (we had 2nd phone lines for our modems) to set up conference calls between each other, and then each of us would call a pizza shop (I might call Domino's, and he'd call Papa John's), and then mute ourselves and laugh while the pizza shop workers would argue about who called who. The smart ones would immediately catch on and say "I think someone is playing a prank on us" and hang up quickly, but the dumb ones would get into an argument with each other.
When Caller ID became the norm, it completely ruined phone pranks like this.
*67 could have enabled your shenanigan for years.
It still works, as evidenced by the very active prank calls my neighbor's son plays on my wife and I.
He is very sweet and sheltered, so it's a good outlet. He literally tried the Prince Albert in a can one. That hasn't been relevant for like what, 50 years?
By the time Caller ID became ubiquitous, we were past the time when we found that prank really funny.
Also, *67 also caused a lot of people to simply not answer calls that were blocked this way.
I suspect its more about how much national information you're exposed to today than any sort of time based moral failing.
I cannot be convinced that swatting is something that used to happen. Is there a history of this?
I legit do not remember seeing anything on the evening national news about that in the past, like from before 2000.
9/11 policy panic, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan producing surplus equipment, 400 million privately owned firearms in the US, US history of police standoffs, DoD investment in military PR including Navy Seals worship, and much more have ALL contributed to the Swatting phenomenon.
I don’t think we could have intentionally created an incentive structure for swatting more if we had tried.
And it’s going to continue because guess what was one of the major issues in this election? Domestic security!
There's also the super weird (to people outside the US) insistence that the only possible response to gun violence (by gangsters, school kids, or cops) is "thoughts and prayers".
The solution is obvious, but we unfortunately continue to choose not to do it.
Constitutional amendments are basically impossible in the US. A congress member shot at a congressional event won't even vote change the second amendment (Scalise).
Even conservatives know the only hope is stacking the supreme court.
None of what you mentioned backs up the idea that swatting used to exist in the past as it does now.
I didn't do a great job segueing from the parent. I agree with the parent, and my comment expands on why its happening now when it wasn't happening, at least to the same degree, in the past.
Maybe not swatting, but bomb threats were probably the equivalent. My junior high had at least 2 that I can remember where we were all cleared out for hours as the school was searched. Swatting had the internet to fuel it's rise, local news programs didn't use things like reporting on every fake bomb threat to generate views or "engagement" and in turn did not spread the idea to a massive amount of people. But they still happened, quite a bit. Like many things fueled from the internet it rewards the more extremes, bomb threats are childs play now--but at one time they weren't
The earliest it could have started is when SS7 links and the internet were bridged by dodgy / nefarious owners of said SS7 links. That started to take off around the mid 90's to spam phones with spoofed numbers. I wanted to get the SS7 links terminated but my boss in the wireless industry, tied heavily to SS7 would not let me because they were paying their bill. It would have been one phone call to terminate many of them.
I suspect you are probably right about the timeline for swatting as shady VoIP providers started getting popular in the early 2000's and started being used for more than just spoofing text advertisements.
Swatting is something new (popularized by the Internet, made possible by military surpluss gear sold police wanting to larp in tacticool shit) but stupid pranks with deadly consequences are not.
It became really easy and cheap to use a VPN and VOIP number.
Oh, that could be quite likely, copy cat crimes are a thing after all. I simply mean that people weren't harmlessly interacting before that is all, swatting didn't supplant relatively harmless pranks.
I don't know when your day was, but back in my day (in the 90s) we had to evacuate the high school at least once a quarter for bomb threats. We wouldn't go back in until the FD cleared it.
(There was never a bomb.)
Whatever is wrong with kids these days is nothing new.
I finished HS in 2007. I remember equal, if not worse things growing up online. The internet was less moderated back then and there was a lot of communities that celebrated toxic behaviors (like 4chan).
I don't think they're trying to get anyone murdered by cops.
I think they're really fucking stupid. I think they think that since they are making up claims that everything will be alright. Like the cops are going to bust in, see that there's no drugs/hostages/satanic rituals/whatever, say "My bad", and fuck off.
But there's always the chance that things go horribly wrong. And that chance is actually pretty high.
To me it feels more like someone wanting control/power over others without being physically capable of bullying.
We would order pizzas to one person who complained about our skateboarding.
Not sure about your neighbors but if I get a random pizza delivery I would just pay for it and eat it. :)
swatting is older than I am, and kids have been calling in bomb threats to get out of school for the better part of a century
Swatting and bomb threats are different things. The rise of live steaming also seemed to encourage swatting as you could see the results live.
Pulling the fire alarm, too. Given how many times this happened at my high school, I'm sure that at least one person in the US has died because first responders were at a false alarm rather than available to help them.
I suspect because now everyone is in front of a camera. It's all become a show.
I feel like its partly due to our cultural shift for visual media, gags HAVE to be more extreme to get engagement. Back in the day you'd tell the tale to your friends and you could embellish it. Now it's everyone trying to emulate Paul Brother's content to get the reach to FINALLY BECOME AN INFLUENCE. I blame platforms just as much or more than users. Your incentives have driven behavior here.
It’s not all kids, it’s one particularly sociopathic kid and the fact that he suffered no accountability until now.
Regarding "no accountability", it seems 'wrong' that the response to the calls must be immediate, but it seems to have taken at least a little while to identify where the calls were made from / who made the calls. They started some time in 2022.
That level of asynchrony is not how the system should work.
(Admittedly "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence).
Bullshit. You just didn't hear about the kids like this from your generation.
I'm probably your age, kids back in my day would kill or injure other kids for being gay or Black. I think a lot of bullying has actually gone down, but because of the internet one sociopathic kid can fuck over people at scale.
And that's not even enough time.
20 days per swatting. Yeah, a couple of months would be more appropriate.
I always thought that SWATting was done by a foreign adversary to try to make people lose faith in their government. Guess I was wrong.
> "According to court records, Filion was also part of a high-profile international swatting group that targeted several prominent figures"
...or was I right?
I'm unwisely and unadvisedly wading into this half-cocked.
Swatting wouldn't even be a thing if <any number of logical things>
- Anonymous calls should be treated with high levels of suspicion as to their legitimacy
- First response training that's even moderately appropriate
- Situational awareness beyond what one's been informed by third parties
- Empathy for all humans
- Any kind of notion of that a scenario may not actually be as described by a single anonymous voice
A very (un)funny irony is that there are numerous stories I've read about domestic violence victims being arrested, as opposed to the attacker, which implies there's some level of suspicion in some circumstances about the information the police are being fed. Swatting, as a thing, indicates there's some kind of hero-pressure build-up that overrules any kind of <all the things I listed above> whereby that pressure has the possibility of impending release.
Apparently you can even (unintentionally) swat yourself:
https://www.google.com/search?q=lv+killed+for+calling+the+po...
(Google link for choice of news sources...)
And yet choosing to weaponize that against innocent people is as bad as those other illogical things.
Yes, the police response in this country is often absurd. Using that to harass and harm people is equally awful.
These are not "Anonymous" calls though.
The SWATer kids call into 911/e-911 centers using a spoofed number of the victims.
That's not mentioned in the article. It does mention that the numbers of the victims were shared, but doesn't specifically say they were spoofed.
If it's that easy to spoof a phone number then that system is completely fucked and not fit for purpose.
And the efforts that a private investigator needed to go to, to track down the perpetrator, indicates that there is no way to track the source of the phone calls - that's ludicrous (but probably the norm).
> using a spoofed number of the victims.
Open telephone system security holes seem as much a malpractice as the militarization of police.
It's a US cultural thing to either avoid blaming the police for anything, or make excuses for them. Brutal police behavior is seen as either acceptable, or what even desirable. I've seen reddit posts where a protester slightly taunts the police and gets pepper sprayed in the face, and all the commenters were gleefully saying things like "fuck around and find out", without even thinking that maybe there wasn't enough fucking around to warrant any finding out.
When you try and point this out, you're called various names, because apparently you either support the police 100%, or you're a criminal.
Exactly this.
There's no fixing the system when there is no onus on the police to act like they care. They enter a home that was a victim of swatting and kill everyone? Tough luck, "it's part of the job", "we told them to stand down and they didn't", "we couldn't risk the life of the first responders".
There's always a reason as to why police violence is fine. Its almost as if the police isn't really there to protect normal people.
> Its almost as if the police isn't really there to protect normal people.
Well, it's not. Even here, the function of the police is to enforce the will of the state, not to protect people. The protection is a side-effect of the enforcement, but enforcement can also be things like terrorizing minorities.
I'm pretty sure there are a number of people in the US who don't support the police in any way at all. There was a whole song a few years ago called Fuck the police, I'm pretty sure.
It's like sweeping categorizations of an entire country are usually not accurate or something.
That song was released in 1988 by NWA, a hip hop group from Compton, California.
I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think that song was colored by their experiences with the notoriously corrupt LAPD of the 1980s.
> I'm pretty sure there are a number of people in the US who don't support the police in any way at all.
Yes, this is so trivially true of any place that it's not worth mentioning, as generalizations are meant as just that: Something that a majority (or at least a large minority) are like. For example, people do say "people in the US speak English", even though there's a number of people that don't. This doesn't make the generalization any less useful than "Americans like baseball" or "Americans wear shoes around the house".
I grew up in a small town and was on the wrong side of law enforcement (sometimes rightfully -- underage drinking, etc., nothing that serious -- but oftentimes not) around 2 dozen times between 16/17 and 21 when I got the fuck out of that town. I haven't so much as spoken to an on-duty cop in over 20 years. To this day I still get nervous when I see a police car. They earned their image problems and they haven't even begun to try to correct it. Even if they started tomorrow, it would still take them decades to fix it. I'm not hopeful that any meaningful change in policing in the US will take place in my lifetime.
And, for anyone who isn't reading between the lines here, without a doubt I'm only so lucky as to avoid their attention today because I made it and have spent the last 2 decades living in nice neighborhoods and driving nice cars.
I live in America and while I have compassion for some individual cops, I hate them as a whole with a burning passion. I know lots of people that feel this way. It’s almost like social media comments sections are not an accurate representation of a population or something.
I've also seen reddit posts where the cop did everything right and people still criticized.
Cop didn't do everything right. A cop who does everything right leaves the force.
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This is a mischaracterization of what actually happens in the us. Using sensationalism doesn't help, instead let's focus on the actual numbers and be constructive on how to decrease them.
In 2023 it's estimated police killed around 1,248 people. Notice I said killed vs Murdered as words matter. Out of that only 104 were unarmed. Now without looking at each case or example here, you can still account for the mass majority of police interactions ending in a death, the civilian was armed at a minimum.
Using the data provided we could say easily that 1,248 people is way too many. Hell, 1 is too many. That doesn't change reality though, if 1,248 deaths were related to individuals engaging in crime, this is a causality that you can lay solely on the civilian victim, as they chose to engage in this action.
We can argue how many were crimes, that's fair and i'm happy to throw out and say let's assume 25% were not crimes and really were just an escalated interaction. The bureau of justice statistics gave numbers for 2022 that estimated that 49.2 million people or 19% of the US had an interaction with the police. If that's true, napkin math would put the police murders at .0025% of the interactions, and assuming 333,287,557 million people in 2022 (census bureau) places it at .00037% of the population died by the hands of police.
Some related statistic. Roughly 500 people die from falling out of bed or off furniture, 300-400 die from drowning in a bath tub, 4,000 die from choking on food, 150 die from coconuts falling on their head, 500-600 die from falling from a ladder.
Looking at the numbers, it's very hard to say that police "Regularly murder people".
As for the "Everyone having guns" that's a separate debate, but I would posit you're correct with regard to criminals performing criminal acts, that are armed, increase the likelihood of a negative out come. Federal arrests for weapons offenses were around 8,000 with states being at close to 12,000. Putting that at 20,000 or so arrests per year. Even with those numbers if you're arrested with a firearm, you're still at around 6% chance of death. Again given the circumstances and propensity for needless escalation, these numbers while bad aren't crazy.
There are multiple problems in the US. We need better training and funding for police departments, we do need to weed out the bad cops (as with any field), but with all that the most common denominator is criminal behavior.
All of that said, If you've got data points or information that may be counter to the above, i'd be very curious to see it. I'm very much open to having my mind changed on the topic and encourage you to post it up for all of us here.
Going in details on how they were armed would be interesting. How many people with a limp "armed" with a cane...
Pretty sure they managed to sneak this one (https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/john-fauver-harford-c...) in the armed category
Also dogs are not any more armed in the US than in Europe, yet American cops shoot a lot more dogs. They do so because they are antisocial and know they'll face no consequences (and even if they get fired from on PD, another will recruit them). I'd say there is both a recruiting issue and an immunity issue.
Looks like they changed the URL https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/john-fauver-harford-c...
If police kill an unarmed individual every 3 days, I would actually say that they do, in fact, regularly murder people.
And that's ignoring any of the armed individuals who are not, in fact, threatening anyone or committing a crime.
And the people for whom a crime may be being committed, but for which "death" is not an appropriate punishment - even ignoring the police being judge, jury, and executioner in a society where we presume innocence and require conviction by a jury of our peers.
I'd add that "armed" doesn't mean necessarily a firearm. I don't know what threshold is used in after-action reports (written by those involved or others), but presumably finding a pocket knife on someone counts as "armed".
Would personal protection devices (mace, batons etc) count as armed.
Call me a cynic, but 104 people being 'unarmed' makes me think the reports in those cases simply lack creativity in defining "arms" and, (again cynically) I expect some number of the other cases the individuals were either helpfully discovered to be armed after the fact. (And in some cases actually provided with arms after the fact.)
> In 2023 it's estimated police killed around 1,248 people. Notice I said killed vs Murdered as words matter. Out of that only 104 were unarmed. Now without looking at each case or example here, you can still account for the mass majority of police interactions ending in a death, the civilian was armed at a minimum.
Does the Second Amendment not exist? Which other constitutional rights do you think we should use to justify these murders?
"Armed" is a proxy for criminals being criminals, and almost always reaching for, displaying, or using the weapon in some antisocial way prior to being shot dead.
Legal gun owners not committing obvious crimes are only rarely accosted by police, and shootings are exceedingly rare, and they usually make the news and result in legal action. They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.
"Unarmed" doesn't represent what the suspect was doing that got them shot. Were they resisting arrest or being noncompliant and reaching for their waist or a center console or glove compartment?
There are cases where police shoot suspects, armed or unarmed, unjustifiably. They're not as rare as anyone wishes they were. They're still fairly rare. Behaving civilly, even while recognizing that many police are like barely constrained wild animals, goes a long way toward ensuring that an accidental furtive gesture isn't interpreted as reaching for a weapon.
No, “armed” isn’t a proxy for anything. It means they were found to be carrying a gun. It doesn’t matter whether they were committing a crime or doing something inadvisable — the point is that if merely being armed justifies your extrajudicial murder by police, then the Second Amendment doesn’t actually exist.
It is, because cops never shoot someone just for being armed. They just don't. It's a combination of being armed plus (believed) criminal status, or behavior during the encounter.
(And it's exceedingly rare that cops will believe an upstanding citizen who's legally armed and behaving civilly is a criminal. It happens, for instance in the two cases I cited, but it's rare. They're a rounding error in the police killing stats.)
>It is, because cops never shoot someone just for being armed. They just don't.
So you don't know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile
They do, they mentioned him earlier:
> They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.
“Not advisable”, of course, being a goalpost on wheels that allows them to justify police misconduct.
Why do you believe that? We routinely see police break the law, harass people and otherwise abuse their power, but when it comes to encounters with armed civilians they become upstanding professionals with perfect judgment?
The 2nd Amendment doesn't give you the right to brandish at cops (or anyone else, outside of limited situations like self defense)
GP merely said “armed”, not “brandishing”.
That feels like a weird category to use IMO. People who brandish are armed but not all armed people are brandishing.
More to the point, if you went to your local PDs website and watched body cam from the last 10 shootings, how many do you think would be involve law abiding gun owners with CCWs using guns in a way consistent with the 2nd Amendment vs people brandishing or using their guns in a criminal and/or dangerous way?
Again, I am not the one using that category; I am responding to its use.
How many were using their guns in a dangerous and/or criminal way? We may never know, because they were deprived of their right to the trial by jury which would have determined that.
Armed during a police encounter. I agree we need more information on the stats, primarily what was the catalyst for the interaction? I would suspect though that most of these stats are based on interactions driven by criminal behavior. This isn't counter to BRUEN and current interpretations of 2a rights.
“Armed during a police encounter” — right, so what? Is there, like, an asterisk on the Second Amendment that says “unless it’s during a police encounter, then they get to summarily execute you, sorry”?
> In 2023 it's estimated police killed around 1,248 people.
Holy shit and we don't fire these maniacs?
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Around 1000 people per year, which I absolutely agree is terrible - but at the same time, the population is over 300,000,000 so it stretches the meaning of the word to call it ‘regular’.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
It's an apples-to-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, but England and Wales has a population of about 60 million and averages about 3 fatal police shootings per year. From that perspective, 'regular' sounds like something of an understatement.
Swatting just isn't a thing here - our armed officers are trained completely differently and held to much stricter standards regarding the use of force. American police do have to deal with much more widespread gun ownership and higher rates of violent crime, but that's only one half of the equation.
Policing in the US is exceptionally fragmented across thousands of agencies, with no consistent standards of training and supervision. Even if there was a clear political mandate to reduce the number of police-involved shootings, there's no effective mechanism to change how policing is carried out on the ground.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shoo...
https://www.college.police.uk/about
Can I ask you about the political power of police? Is there an equivalent to our police union? My mayor is downright afraid of them.
Extremely limited. Police officers are not legally permitted to join a conventional trade union, because of the risk to public safety that would be posed by industrial action. Rank-and-file officers are represented by the Police Federation, which has many of the functions of a trade union but none of the legal recognition.
More broadly, the British police are a service, not a force. A British officer would never refer to a member of the public as a "civilian", because our police are civilians in uniform. They have powers granted to them by Parliament, but their right to use those powers comes from the consent of the public that they serve. It's a radically different attitude that colours every interaction between police and the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Federation_of_England_a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
Of those 1000 people, the vast majority are armed and actively threatening either the public, the police officers themselves or both.
According to the cops. The same cops who shoot people for having wallets and sticks. Same cops who beat Deaf people for not following verbal instructions. Same cops who shoot autistic folks.
Yeah, I don't think "armed" means "was an imminent threat to life" in the slightest. It's much more likely it's a cover your ass designation.
No, according to third party police use of force tracking projects: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
That’s more than two people per day. But sure, let’s nitpick the definition of “regular” because that’s absolutely the important issue, here.
Perhaps I made my point a little tactlessly - what I meant to imply is that people shouldn’t live in fear of this. While it happens too often, it’s still extremely uncommon.
The (bigger) problem is that that's the tip of a much larger police brutality iceberg. It's not like the police is 99.9% pleasant and helpful and then just murders the occasional person, the murders are indicative of a disturbing police culture.
Agreeing on facts is always important, because if not, nothing else matters in a discussion.
We should never criticize people for actually bringing real numbers into a conversation to clarify things. I didn't know that statistic, and I suspect many "disagreements" are things where if the actual numbers and facts were known to all, they would actually agree.
The criticism was not about “bringing facts”, it was about pedantically parsing word choices. Whether you think 2.5ish people per day is “regular” is irrelevant to the larger point.
That stat includes all shootings, not just murders
I think many would argue that all deaths by shootings are murder - even if it’s in self defense, and perhaps especially if society grants more power, in the form of immunity, to one ‘side’.
I didn’t want to open that can of worms. Even the inclusive stat I cited is small enough to support the point I wanted to make.
Why?
You’re asking me to defend a position I don’t entirely agree with now, which is always dangerous…
I believe the argument is that deliberately killing another person is always wrong. It does’t matter if it’s in self defense - taking a life is such a morally abhorrent thing to do that it’s always indefensible. It’s always murder.
Some who wouldn’t go that far would still argue that for police to do it - people who are in a position of power, and who should know there are risks associated with the job of protecting society - is indefensible even if it would not be for a regular person.
Not my position - self defense if you know you’d otherwise die is, I think, morally justified. But I can see the argument.
You should really qualify what you mean by murder because it’s very disingenuous. When a criminal uses deadly force against a police officer they will be shot.
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Disagree - community moderated quality floats to the top under such systems, exposing the better posts to more eyes and downregulating low-quality shitposting.
It can certainly lead to echo-chamber mentality, but without it we'd see more low-effort, low quality posts drowning out discourse.
You're assuming that down-votes are used to assess the quality of the post, and not agreement with the content.
I would suggest that both appear here. Personally I would prefer votes to be on quality of post rather than popularity of position as that leads to the possibility of examining an issue from multiple viewpoints.
(When responding to a post that has been thought out, but down voted, I feel the need to point out that although I disagree, I'm not the one downvoting.)
I do think that voting improves the quality overall. But a better system might be separate options for 'agree/disagree' vs 'quality / pithy' posts. (I also thinkbthis would be horrible UI, so meh)
Yep exactly. I’d argue they create echo chambers far more than we’d like to admit. It’s also not simply voting but also algorithmic of sorting content by likes, and implicitly excluding anything under a certain threshold.
I’ve felt this way for nearly twenty years now, coinciding with the rise of reddit, twitter, and facebook alongside the decline of forums, blogs, and rss.
On any topic with even slight amount of contention, you very quickly see people aligning toward the one-true-belief because they observe and react to the crowd supporting that opinion.
> I would suggest that both appear here.
They do. It's not a perfect mechanism.
> But a better system might be
Yeah we've had 20 years or more of sites trying to find a good formula now. Slashdot's ratings and meta-ratings back in the day, where you rated something as Insightful/Informative etc, and then every so often you were asked to review other user's ratings so their future ratings could be weighted ... technically interesting but really cumbersome.
I like HN's choice not to display ratings on other people's posts, and I like the simple UI. I think it's better with up and down votes than without... I don't think we're going to find a perfect scheme but that doesn't mean we should abandon the imperfect ones.
The only time I’ve seen police use pepper spray or aggression are when the protesters become violent. Do a YouTube search for Antifa protesters and tell me who the violent people are again?
The first thing that came to mind:
https://www.kxan.com/investigations/everything-we-know-about...
I saw countless similar videos of cops violently attacking -- often with permanent, life-altering results -- people who were exercising their constitutional rights or simply minding their own business.
I see news stories like this all the time: https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/caron-nazario-army-lieutenant-...
No, because if every call isn’t treated like a real emergency, in the off chance that one of them actually is an emergency then everyone would be crucified by the media and lawyers. Look at all the school shootings as an example, or even the Trump assassination attempt.
Right, but when you smash down someone's door and see them playing games on a computer, instead of cooking meth while making bombs by tying guns together, maybe you shouldn't continue treating the situation as an emergency.
And if they can't find the person who made the call to charge them for door repairs, then they shouldn't have busted down the door (and should pay for the repairs).
Over here (Greece), anonymous reports are generally given very low priority, to the point where if someone anonymous reports a suspicious vehicle, the police might not even investigate. A report by an eponymous reporter does generally get investigated, though, because there's a lower likelihood of the report being frivolous.
That's also observably not a thing. Castle Rock is a rather famous scotus case where the cops failed to do squat about a guy with a restraining order kidnapping his kids despite a law specifically saying that they shall act on said restraining orders and there was no allowable section 1983 claim against the cops just failing to act.
That doesn't cover all the things I'm (maybe poorly) attempting to suggest.
Treat calls that don't have the hallmarks of an emergency as "maybe not an emergency" - I admit that sounds simplistic and requires heavy training, however.
But my commentary was more about the gung-ho-ness of the follow-up. Don't houses have windows that aren't always blocked by drawn curtains? Don't binoulars exist and are relatively portable? Aren't there relatively quick and painless methods to adjudicate a situation prior to knocking impolitely? Even if time may be of the essence. One day maybe the heavy knock on the door is a trigger that blows up an entire Police / SWAT response team - then there might be some new policies around situatonal awareness instituted. (not that I would in any way promote such a grotesque act of violence).
The police are putting themselves in danger by their own behaviour.
Re: Trump assassination attempt, wouldn't that have been averted if someone just "went and had a look"?
That is the same bullshit logic used for zero tolerance policy for "preventing lawsuits" but somehow even worse.
If it’s real you don’t need to be anonymous.
Fear of retribution/not wanting to get involved is a real thing. Also are you proposing that 911 operators confirm people's real identities before accepting their call and dispatching someone?
No, but at least have the calling number presented to the 911 operator, with various options categorised as more or less trustworthy. And 911 calls should bypass any 'calling number protection'.
Someone else pointed out that the whole phone system is a dog's breakfast, which also needs to be fixed for various easy-scam-exploitation reasons as well. The only reason not to do it is that the corps that run the networks don't want to have to pay to make their shit fit for society's purpose rather than their own.
What specific effect would you expect “categorize as less trustworthy” have?
Agreed on telephone infra in general
Non-spoofable and local number: trustworthy
Spoofable local number: slightly less trustworthy
Non-local number: less trustworthy
International number: barely trustworthy
VoIP: maybe slightly more trustworthy than international.
Said infra probably limits the ability to distinguish between these, however, so that becomes the primary issue.
I wasn't clear: what does that change?
Do you tell emergency responders not to turn their lights on en route? To put it at the bottom of the queue after helping the old lady cross the street? To politely knock on the alleged hostage-taker's door instead of kicking it in?
Yes, change the response appropriately.
And if "kick the door in" is Standard Operating Procedure, then change the SOP, or have some more conditionals prior to "kick the door in".
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Good
I'd be interested to know if any actual SWAT operations happened from these calls. I know that it does happen sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting?wprov=sf...
The video of the Wichita shooting was, to me, the most clear cut example of how poorly police can respond to a swatting call. Guy comes out to his porch, having no idea what's going on, and within only a few seconds of time and 2 commands to show hands and walk toward the police, is shot and killed.
I should have been more clear about the question. I am wondering how many of the calls made by THIS GUY resulted in actual swat deployments, how many got someone shot or killed, etc. That gives a scale of the severity of the crime. Like if you fatally shoot someone, that is murder. If you shoot them and they survive, or if you shoot and miss, that's attempted murder and you tend to get a lighter sentence than if you kill the person. It's not an extraneous detail.
The guy in the article obviously belongs in jail. The question is how far up the scale he went in terms of actual damage and injury caused. It's just like if I read an article about Joe pleading guilty to shooting Fred, and facing 20 years in jail, but the article doesn't say whether Fred survived the shooting. I'm not out to make a big moral judgment either way, and I have no stake in it, but it's a natural question for a reader to ask.
Even if nobody died, it depends how you want to classify intentionally swatting someone. 50 counts of attempted murder? 50 counts of inciting violence? 50 counts of assault?
Well, the prosecutors would decide that, and preferably announce what they decided along with the underlying facts. Then people reading the news article would weigh the info for themselves. That's at least part of why we have news articles in the first place.
This is a very sad read.
Lol they charged the indended swatting victim but not the police officer.
Swatting is pretty common:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting_of_American_politicia...
I don't think there are any numbers published about the % of swatting calls result in a visit from a SWAT team, but I would wager it's higher than you are imagining. The police would be foolish to advertise the efficacy of swatting, so of course the real numbers are not out there AFAICT.
It feels like between this and the prevalence of scam calls, the FCC has been asleep at the wheel for 20 years. There's some signs of the "sleeping dragon" waking up, but I fear all that will get walked back under the next administration.
Bonus good read on the topic:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/02/why-arent-police-doi...
"Love of the game", Jesus Christ.
Swatting people has gotten people killed… by swat
You could get 10 year olds to make these calls for you and there would be no legal repercussions.
That's not really how this kind of thing works... As long as they can demonstrate that an older person directed them to make the call, then generally that older person will still have criminal responsibility.
It’s so much easier to blackmail a 10 year old over the internet while remaining completely anonymous.
Maybe not for them