Authorities brought 20 police cars, five SWAT officers, and drones to her house
https://www.twitch.tv/grammacrackers/clip/CharmingSolidNoodleKevinTurtle-CCpMMy7EX_W4v7_S
update: Found this video from local news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGeb3cuqLxE
All cops are idiots.
Everyone blames swatting on the person who called in a fake report, but swatting only works because the are idiots. Someone actually decided to bring 20 cars to an house legally owned by an 85 year old with a single unverified repot as their only evidence.
It’s not that they’re idiots, though many cops are. It’s that they don’t get punished for falling for a SWATting attempt.
If you could lose your career if you fell for it, they’d try a lot harder not to fall for it. But, instead, they never face punishment for being overly aggressive, and might face punishment for not being aggressive enough in the case of a real emergency.
In fairness, the police don’t have a list of who is in every house at all times. They don’t exactly have X-ray vision. All they know is that they got a call saying that someone is holding someone at gunpoint in this house.
Of course, 20 cars is comically overkill
This sort of overreaction isn’t rare though. People have died from it.
It’s also not exclusive to the U.S. We had a guy here in Sweden who got assaulted and practically kidnapped by masked men in the middle of the night. Guy thought he was going to die, and didn’t find out that they were police until they got him in the car and drove to the station.
What was his horrible crime? He’d shared images via Yahoo mail of him and his 30 year old boyfriend having sex. Some American organisation trawled through Yahoo mail, flagged these images and videos as possible CSAM, and forwarded it to Swedish authorities. Our authorities, instead of you know, doing any kind of investigation, or summoning the guy to the police station, or even just arresting him in a calm and peaceful manner, decided that sending masked goons to raid his home in the middle of the night was the way to go.
Oh yeah, I’m fully aware. My own city made national headlines in my country a few years back when bastard pig Justin Rapp shot and killed Andrew Finch. SWATting should be considered attempted murder, and if a pig murders someone during a SWATting, they should be charged as well.
Fun fact! Bastard pig Justin Rapp sued the city when they placed him on leave, and won. Now he’s a detective whose salary is paid by my tax dollars. Fuck the police
Never ceases to amuse me how they send a ridiculous amount of deputies to one situation. They couldn’t agree on a team or maybe two qualified people, no, let’s send the whole fucking department and have extras just incase.
Meanwhile, when an actual credible threat is ongoing: “We’ll send our best confrontation avoider and check back in about 3 hours from now”
I will never forgive Uvalde police for that school shooting situation. Not only did they do nothing to stop the shooter, they actively held back parents who were going to do the cops jobs for them.
If I remember right, 23 kids, and 3 staff members died that day in an attack that took hours, but should have been stopped in minutes. They arrived on the scene 6 minutes after being called. Then they let it go on and on and on.
I will never forgive Uvalde police.
Yeah but like… Weren’t most of the kids brown-ish? /s
When seconds count, they’re an hour away
I was paid a dawn visit many years ago by an armed unit (UK). The way they ran it was two plainclothes (handguns only) officers knock on the door to assess the threat, with a van full of tooled up guys in balaclavas just outside, just in case. It was all very chill and no unnecessary stress/escalation for anyone. Seems like this would be a more sensible approach.
That sounds very nice. I’m honestly jealous. However, there were 408 mass shootings in the USA last year. That’s more than 110 people shot per day. While I in no way support the policies of the police in the USA, I do have to admit that given the likelihood that the residents of any particular home might be armed, I personally would not want to be a lightly armed and unarmored cop knocking on a door here. I mean, people here have literally been shot just for knocking or ringing a doorbell.
While all cops are indeed bastards, many of the other people in this country aren’t any better. The left end of the bell curve in this country is very heavily armed and doing their part to help police turn the nation into the war zone they think it already is. Until common sense gun laws are passed and the dumbest and most violent among us are disarmed, it’s not going to change for the better.
Yeah I get it, it’s a silly comparison as the potential threat landscape is completely different. It’s a sad situation over there.
It would indeed be a more sensible approach.
I’m frequently amazed that despite your countries declining standard of living it is still light years ahead of that of my own. I’m actually jealous. Please rejoin the EU as soon as it’s convenient.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see there is a episode of something where someone needs to do a crime in area so they pull this so all the cops are in other side of town.
I mean if they had been told there were gunshots, several dead in the street and hostages. That might be a fairly reasonable response.
If they’ve been told that there are several dead in the street, and they get there, and there’s nobody dead in the street, it’s time to not go in going pow pow pow.
Well yes, but its an example of a call you can make that probably results in extreme responses. Would be interested in knowing what they thought they were going to for that kind of response though.
I can’t think of any call where they need to go in guns blazing unless they can actually see that someone’s shooting, or in the process of being killed.
Anything else and there’s time to peek in windows, send a drone up to upper floor windows, and so-on.
Even if it is an actual situation where someone is in mortal danger, doing that will mean they’re not walking into a dangerous situation blind.
If they do that and can’t see anybody in any kind of distress or danger, then the logical thing is to calmly knock on the door and ask some questions.
Ok, so granny got swatted, why?
What was the police told about the situation?
Is there an article about this which explains the cause of this.
Those questions would only matter if this kind of police reaction wasn’t almost exclusive to the US. So American police are idiots.
In Europe there were a few cases in France, but they led to changes in police procedures to verify reports more thoroughly before busting through doors.
There are a lot of things that can be pointed at as to why this happens so much in the US. But I think most people forget that this is a problem that can literally be fixed using laws and technology.
Swatting can only happen because the US telecom system is so full of holes and because the US legal system isn’t doing its job.
The primary thing you have to do is fix it so that the emergency operators can know where a call actually originated. And all we need to do to make that happen is to change the law so that telecom companies are held criminally and civilly liable when a person uses their infrastructure to fake where an emergency call is coming from.
Calls that come from foreign sources or from internet sources would harbor great suspicion. Imagine that the operator gets a big flashing notice that the call is suspicious right from the start.
I’m not saying that police and gun nuts and police gun nuts and incompetent police and nazi assholes don’t have a lot of culpability, or that we shouldn’t have severe penalties for people who do the swatting but the core fault lies in our elected representatives being too corrupt to hold telecom companies to account.
Your argument is almost exactly the same as the ones being used to rationalize things like age-verification, surveillance, deanonymizing platforms, etc.
The people supporting these measures are going after operating systems, VPNs, web browsers, everything but targeting the actual people committing the crimes that they’re pretending to be trying to prevent.
Holding telecom companies primarily responsible for how their platforms are misused is a very large step towards the dystopian future that we’re already sliding towards.
When you call emergency services, they need to know your location. You know, because you’ve got an emergency, which is almost always where you are, and you might not know exactly where you are.
And, this is information that the telecom companies should already know. And it’s information that the caller might not know.
This isn’t a “very large step towards [a] dystopian future.” It’s your vision that is dystopian here. In your vision, people can have emergencies and die because the emergency services don’t know where to go. In your vision, people can easily fake emergencies and swat innocent people. You have a choice between a good thing and a bad thing, and you’re actually choosing the bad thing. It’s hard to fathom.
You gotta love people who would create a dysfunctional government just because they don’t realize that similar things can be good or bad depending on context, and that emergencies are exceptional circumstances.
I don’t think giving the police more surveillance options is the best option. The main problem is the extreme militarisation of the US police. This amount of force is a ridiculous response to almost any likely scenario they would have encountered.
That’s not surveillance. That’s basic service, allowing the recipient of a call to know who is actually calling them. The same thing would also stop a lot of scammers.
they also get alot of surplus equipment from the military that is outdated, which makes it even worst.
“ACAI”???