>I don’t understand why you want to let the swatters off the hook. They should absolutely be going to jail.
the police aren't mindless drones -- when they act like they are it's a problem that is greater than the thing that initiated it.
Yes, the swatters are bad -- but the consistency of this response and the absolute trust in the pseudo-anonymous report every single time is absolutely baffling ; like Clancy Wiggums or Frank Drebin baffling; it's just rolling the dice until an innocent is killed while pointing fingers at some boy who cried wolf while knowing that the boy is full of shit.
Care where the idea that we have to let anybody off the hook comes from?
As I see it just because we shift the focus to the lower level (the layer executing the swats) we don't have to automatically let anybody off the hook on the higher levels. We can have both.
My comment was not intended to let swatters of the hook. My point was that the harassment should be called “attempted harassment”, because it should never have been effective, although still punishable.
That’s still harassment - the clear intention was to at best harass and at worst get them killed. You can support more responsible use of force by police while still recognizing that these guys were looking for a weapon to hurt someone and SWATing was the option they chose.
And even if they were not acting in that intention, knowingly calling emergency when there isn't one is a drain on resources that might be needed elsewhere.
Nobody mentioned letting anyone off the hook. That's a very internet thing to claim your opponent has said.
The question is pragmatic: are you going to surveil and psychologically analyze everyone in the world in order to detect and pre-crime imprison everyone who might potentially call in a false tip anonymously, or are you going to control your police forces so they don't attack people with sometimes deadly force based solely on anonymous tips?
> are you going to surveil and psychologically analyze everyone in the world in order to detect and pre-crime imprison everyone
No one suggested this; strawman.
There are a whole lot of ways to harass someone using proxies beyond swatting and the traditional ordering of 40 pizzas to their house. Even if any given proxy only falls for it once it can be really bad.
Coming up with ways to counter these kinds of harassment campaigns is important, but it probably doesn't involve "pre-crime imprison[ment]".
Many police departments have upper IQ limits for officers that’s only slightly above average. Since leadership is promoted from internal ranks, that also causes ineffective leadership.
This sounds crazy but this has been documented at least once, as far as I can tell. This link describes a court case where a candidate for a police force was rejected on the basis of having too high an IQ:
If you look at the culture of police in the US, the department policies that they enforce, and the laws that they enforce, it begins to make more sense. An intelligent person would not fit into existing police culture very well (because of the IQ restriction policies that have been in place). There are many police departments with awful internal policies (racist, illegal, anti-civilian), that a smart person wouldn't want to enforce, and of course so many laws in the US are just bonkers. Civil asset forfeiture, no knock raids, broken windows policing, drug evidence planting, CYA charges, these are all awful practices that are routinely done at PDs across the US, in some case documented as PD policy. An intelligent person would want to fix these problems, make a difference. This would of course hurt the PD's bottom line, their arrest stats, would cast former and current police in a bad light.
To further one of your points, there is very much pressure to keep closure rates up by pinning it on the most-plausible suspect even if you have doubts, and letting the DA sort it out. The DA does not always sort it out, and if it looks like an easy case then that someone gets railroaded.
Obviously this is not ideal at the police level (who should find the truth, not someone to blame) but some more accountability is warranted within the judicial system too. All incentives here are perverse, yet lack of them results in fuckall getting done.
The inability or unwillingness of so many people to accept that multiple actors all be to blame for their part without that necessarily leaving one side off the hook is so frustrating and I think also very dangerous
>I don’t understand why you want to let the swatters off the hook. They should absolutely be going to jail.
Because they're irrelevant to the situation. The swatters could be a compulsive person with mental illness.
Or dozens of different people, because it become some internet fad or something to target this person, that's impossible to stop.
Or untrackable "hackers".
The police has no excuse to come in SWATing in the first place without verification of the actual situation, much less keep swatting additional times, and in no civilized environment would it do it even 10 times, much less 47.
>They’re not irrelevant to the situation. In fact, they’re the people who have malicious intent.
Let's put it this way, they're not irrelevant to the particular situation, but they're irrelevant to the real problem, which is the "open for abuse" system of SWATing, and the problematic management it gets from the police.
Fixing that helps society at large (plus helps this guy).
Whereas getting those guys just solves this particular guy's problem.
I just want to highlight: we really need to do both.
Police response to these types of calls is faulty. The Milwaukee police are definitely particularly deficient in continuing to fall for this and not taking corrective action.
But there's myriad ways to harass people through proxies-- SWATing is only one. We need to be put in the effort to catch and punish people engaging in these stalking and harassing behaviors, because we'll never harden our society against all of these.
We have laws in place for this type of thing, but that's not to say that law enforcement generally cares.
It would take _years_ to get the police to put their house in order. So why not go after swatters as well in the meantime? Most swatters are repeat offenders.
And once the police have cleaned up their act… do you believe former swatters will quietly become law abiding citizens? I don’t. They’ll find some other way to ruin people’s lives, hopefully a less dangerous way.
We could also ask, why do swatters swat in the first place anyway? How could we prevent them from wanting to do such a thing?
Shutting down communities (as in shutting down a subreddit in this case) is not a popular idea but I wonder if it's not the only viable response.
I think communities can police themselves if there is an incentive to do so (or rather disincentive not to). I know of plenty of communities with strict rules of conduct because frankly they worry about being shut down. Any community around MAME for example will likely have rules against "asking for ROMs".
> don’t understand why you want to let the swatters off the hook. They should absolutely be going to jail.
Care to explain why criticizing the police should amount to "letting the swatters off the hook"? This is nothing that automatically follows unless we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
If you jail one swatter there will be another one, and one after. If the police/dispatch gets their house in order you fix the problem on a systemic level and swatting becomes harder for all swatters.
So yeah if this should be fixed: punish swatters and avoid situations where one guy gets 47 swats without the police realizing they are played for fools each single time.
As much as I dislike police and as weird as I find the idea that police in the US kicks down doors without checking whether the danger even exists — the officer on the ground might not be the one to make that judgement.
Sure, if it happens 47 times I would expect them to add a big red flag aka "first check if danger is present" to the dispatch adress after the second false alarm — and one can blame dispatch for that. But if you are a different officer each time and you are told there is a sociopathic murder taking place in that house that you have never seen, how is it your fault to assume dispatch did their job here.
This is a systemic issue:
- anonymous contacts of emergency services is possible, so swatters abuse this without having to fear immidiate punishment
- dispatch aparantly has no mechanism of linking knowledge between different calls. E.g. if this is the 3rd time we are dispatching swat to that address they should tell the officers that it might be a fake, or don't even dispatch officers at all. However attackers could use this to then go there for real and punch/kill our victim without having to fear police being called there
- police officers don't do a good job at the assessment of the situation before they kick doors in. This isn't always an easy call to make
Ok yeah people have tried several times to unsuccessfully SWAT sitting members of Congress. Like clearly there is a list of addresses like "this address belongs to a Congress person, proceed with caution." Dispatch should add OP to this list.
However, it is the job of the officer to investigate. I doubt it is the officer's first day in life in the United States. They know how things work here.
Yeah, cities hate paying out for police officers who get hurt and disabled on the job and have decided it is cheaper to pay for "bad apples" than to have a police force that shows humanity. This we have this situation where police officers shoot to preserve their own life just in case the suspect is armed (a valid assumption when getting hold of a gun is easy).
> police officers don't do a good job at the assessment of the situation before they kick doors in. This isn't always an easy call to make
The officer on the ground is indeed the one making a determination to kick the door in over nothing but a phone call. I don't see why they shouldn't be held accountable.
I'm tired of all the QI and associated bullshit. Violating someone's constitutional rights should come with consequences.
A funny thing to note, QI only applies to civil lawsuits. So, it only applies in circumstances where they've already decided there is no criminal activity. So a secondary issue here is the legal system has decided that pretty much anything a cop does is legal.
I agree that he’s being terrorised by the police. The police should face consequences for allowing themselves to be used like this.
I don’t understand why you want to let the swatters off the hook. They should absolutely be going to jail.