> When I opened the door there was a team of police officers with their weapons drawn and what looked to me like Tasers. When I heard “hands out of my pockets” in the video, I was immediately handcuffed!!! I had seen about 10 police officers in front of and in our office, and it wasn't until the following day that neighbors reported that the whole street was full of about 10 (or more) emergency vehicles right up to the next intersection!!! about 10 police cars, 2 fire departments, 1 ambulance, an emergency doctor etc...!!!
I do hope they investigate and find whomever was responsible for this email tip. At the very least I would want this person to repay the costs of this operation.
To anyone else wondering: this comes from the dev's description of the episode in the YouTube comments section. Highly worth a read to get the whole story, it has information not in TFA.
While less dangerous than a US SWATting event, it is still absurd that he was taken away for questioning. They could have made a reasonable observation of the scenario and then given him an invitation to come to the station at a given time the next day.
Taking someone in shouldn’t happen unless there’s an obvious crime and/or the target had a police record which would suggest they were a threat or were likely to flee instead of coming for an interview the following day.
How? Unlike what the news would have you believe, police don't just start shooting willy nilly in America, and cops in his country do have firearms. Most people who get killed in US SWAT operations do so because they open fire on the cops.
The best example is the Breonna Taylor. The media blatantly lied saying her and her partner were in bed initially. In reality, they announced, and had a pretty complex warrant based off of evidenced gathered from prison communications. Even the Wikipedia page is still biased saying her boyfriend fired a "warning shot" mistaking the police for intruders.
The cops in the US absolutely do start shooting willy nilly. There are tons of stories of cops raiding the wrong house, shooting homeowners, their dogs. Police regularly use excessive force, shoot without sufficient reason, kill for no reason. If you think otherwise you’re not paying attention or you’re paying attention in an extremely selective way.
Every swatting should be treated like it could have ended in a death.
The police did not announce themselves. Breonna and her boyfriend WERE in bed and woken up. Neither Breonna nor her boyfriend committed any crimes - the warrant was based off of out-of-date information.
The warrant should've never been issued, but because it was issued, the police decided to perform a no-knock warrant. That's not just a name, that's literally what they do.
Her boyfriend DID fire a warning shot, as his house was broken into in the middle of the night. Any gun owner would in that situation, you included. Breonna was unfortunately shot and killed while she was in bed (bullets go through walls).
Breonna Taylor was likely involved in the drug operations. There were drugs and money seen ins stakeouts funneling through that very house. Had any drugs or money not been moved out, we would even be having this conversation.
I personally know a woman who did Grubhub/Doordash in Louisville. No one liked delivering to that particular neighborhood. She's a school teacher and said everyone in that city knew how bad that part of town is.
Sorry, none of this is true. The search warrants were incorrect as I've already stated - using the search warrants as evidence is not evidence. Using an officer's word, or rather some random YouTuber's interpretation of their word, is also not evidence.
If all the reputable sources are saying one thing, but fringe conservative minds on YouTube are saying another, it might be time to reconsider the validity of your position.
> likely involved
You're basing this on nothing, and "likely" means nothing to me.
> funneling through that very house
Wrong house, wrong warrant
> Had any drugs or money not been moved out, we would even be having this conversation.
Incorrect. Even if there were criminals present (there weren't), the punishment of crime is due process. Not state sanctioned execution. This is a human rights violation no matter how you cut it or how terrible you want to think the victims are.
And that's really the whole crux and the crux of a lot of issues surrounding police brutality. It doesn't matter if there were drugs in this house at one point. It doesn't matter if Floyd was on fentanyl. It doesn't matter if Floyd really did counterfeit a twenty. It doesn't matter if Daniel Shaver really did have a bb gun.
None of those have a punishment of public execution. Police brutality is brutality regardless of if the victims are criminals or not, and regardless of the criminals' race. Or their neighborhood. Or what your buddies in Louisville think of them.
It boggles the mind that you can just send an email to the police and they'd act as if whoever is targeted by that email is in fact a dangerous criminal and they'd arrest them and subject them to all kinds of humiliation and harassment and mistreatment - just based on a single unsubstantiated email.
I thought this idiocy is endemic only to the US police but it looks like German police is the same too? And people just accept it as normal? I mean kudos to German police not rushing in with guns drawn and not treating the scene like they are in the Battle of Falluja, but it is still fscking insane - why did they have to cuff him and subject him to a hour-long questioning at the station - what did it take them an hour to find out? Why is all this considered normal?
> It boggles the mind that you can just send an email to the police and they'd act as if whoever is targeted by that email is in fact a dangerous criminal and they'd arrest them and subject them to all kinds of humiliation and harassment and mistreatment - just based on a single unsubstantiated email.
Well it kind of makes sense if you believe people are generally going to follow social norms and not make false accusations for no reasons.
Like, all you have to do in a crowded theatre is shout "FIRE", and everyone acts as if there's a dangerous situation and everyone is subjected to being forced out of the theatre based on a single unsubstantiated shout.
Or if you put your mind to it, there are any number of false, anonymous allegations one can make with large asymmetries between the effort to make the allegation and the effort required to clean up the situation.
How do they determine a real situation from a swatting before going on? Domestics are the most dangerous situation you can possibly be in. Imagine if they cops just knocked casually and the incited someone to start stabbing a hostage.
Acknowledging that it could be a fake call should be part of the protocol for responding to the call and it should be obvious when that is the case when they get on-site.
Remember that police can and do kill innocent people when they storm the wrong house for the wrong reason. Expecting them to be more careful with other peoples lives isn't such an unreasonable ask.
People lie to the police all the time though. People invent false accusations all the time. The police has to know it. It's just that they have exactly zero incentive not to do it - because nobody is going to give them any pushback for arresting an innocent citizen, taking him into handcuffs and harassing him for an hour because they got some email. There's no cost to it and that's why they do it. Maybe this should change.
I don’t know about police but most reports to 112/911/999 call centers are real. Probably 95-99% of callers believe they are reporting a real incident and that their report is accurate. Deliberately misleading calls constitute maybe 1-5% depending on the region. So when information is reported, it is assumed that it is reported with best intentions.
There is a cost to false arrests in most situations. At the minimum, police resources are wasted. People also write complaints to the police, which are taken seriously in some countries, and sue the police in others. There are many costs. You are basing your conclusion on an untrue premise.
Probably 9/10 police departments in the developed world know what swatting is. There just isn’t justification to forgo normal procedure when there is a possibility of swatting. The raids are very “choreographed” and much research has gone into how to carry them out safely. So no one deviates until they are 99.99…% certain it’s a swatting.
It’s not so black and white. There are many reasons why police respond to swattings the way they do.
Why would you expect this. These people doing the swatting often aren't even citizens. These are often foreign attacks and the inept police make these attacks very effective.
The problem is that those are not typically accusations, those are reported emergencies.
If you see your neighbor, for example, actively trying to kill his wife during a domestic incident, the last thing the police should do is sit on that report and carefully investigate whether that is true. They should act, because it might be a life or death scenario.
What logically follows, is that false reports like this should come with very heavy punishment. I would say at least as grave as attempted murder.
Make it simple, equal ground rules for police as citizens. If it's illegal for me to point a gun at someone because someone told me a scary, it ought be the same as police. The dichotomy exhibits the standing army effect the founders warned against .
Its more compli ated than that. What percentage of scaries told to you are credible vs what percentage for the police? i dont think this should happen but i also recognize its a complex issue
If it's not typical, it should be seen more skeptical, not less. If I say my neighbors are witches who worship the devil, and are going to summon legions of Hell to earth this evening, then the police shouldn't start with burning their house down, with them inside, just in case. They should first try some other means of verifying this highly unusual claim, before acting on it as if it were true. I am reasonably sure the prior of that email being true, based on all previous emails they've received in that police department, is less than 1%. And yet, after that, and after already finding out there's no murder happening on the scene and no emergency at all, they still behaved as if the victim is the criminal. And I am sure they didn't even get politely reprimanded by that - probably they were praised by their peers and their managament for quick and decisive action.
Proof has never been used to justify arrests, just prosecutions. Or rather it's never been a necessary bar that must be demonstrated. Warrants at least have mildly higher bars
Reasonable articulable suspicion of committing a crime is a bar. Quite low, but "suspicion of committing a crime" is not met based just on an anonymous tip, as SCOTUS said quite clearly. It is enough to investigate, not to arrest and not even to detail someone.
Agreed. I don't think the police response is inherently unwarranted (well except literally, ha ha) but the protocol surrounding how to handle the situations appears completely busted.
> Well it kind of makes sense if you believe people are generally going to follow social norms and not make false accusations for no reasons.
It kinda doesn't. If one in 10,000 people watching livestreams would do this kind of shitty thing, then at one million people watching livestreams, you can expect 100 instances of this crap.
It's small relative to global population but not small enough to ignore completely.
It doesn't make sense even then since the police are the last people to believe people are generally going to not make false accusations, and even if they did believe that, it wouldn't make sense to target the average when the cost of mistake is so high
The fire hypothetical is also incorrect (you can start with the people near a clear/easy exit and some visibly crazy/drunk shouting: people might look around, but unlikely to run around, then progress to more challenging situations), though I don't know a practical % of how many of "everyone" would act like it. People might indeed be forced out, but that's the result of a policy implemented by a few people, not the behavior of everyone, just like in the case of this idiotic SWAT policy
I'm sorry but everyone getting up and leaving a public place because of one person shouting fire is not and should not be the same threshold we expect the police to have for a full on military assault on a residential area.
Do you think false accusations are a uniquely american attribute? Have you never heard of Europe's (and very much Germany's) long history of lynching alleged witches?
Im not sure what you’re trying to imply with these questions. You started your comments talking about “this country” and providing links to American lynchings. That has nothing to do with Germany. I’m not stupid. Every country has evil shit in their history and everyone is well acquainted with germanys historical shit list but let’s not try to turn around your dumb mistake as some moral grandstanding okay? Link German lynchings and false accusations when talking about Germany.
??? We're discussing the assumption that people don't make false accusations? Nobody is making any moral claims about germany, it's just historically an equally terrible assumption as in this country. I do agree this is likely a terrible assumption in every country!
> I mean kudos to German police not rushing in with guns drawn and not treating the scene like they are in the Battle of Falluja,
Sounds like the second half yes, but according to his story in the YouTube comments they did have weapons drawn (one being maybe a taser, but presumably the rest were firearms?):
> Unsuspecting - I assumed someone else was missing or there had been a break-in - when I opened the door I was confronted by a good 10 police officers with drawn weapons and at least one with what looked to me like a Taser.
German police really likes raiding homes for trivialities. This is a completely underdeveloped issue in Germany and legislative, judicative and executive branches are misbehaving here.
Old and fearful population will ensure this doesn't change in the near future. If they had a button to just gas home inhabitants...
In general you have not been the only one, but I don't see many difficulties in that post.
The OP wrote that «unsubstantiated» accusations are sufficient for some police forces to take an abusive stance forgetful of the principle of general cautiousness, of "innocent until proven".
I replied that the neglect of Presumption of Innocence can not only be seen in the attitude of some police forces, but in chunks of society, such as enterprises - notably, in some systems firms will openly fire people hit by accusations of the class "Tom says that Dick" (which entails, "of thin grounds").
Now, given that anybody could be randomly accused, and given other logical collaterals such as involving the principle of reciprocity ("the employer discharging the accused could be next"), that "practice" is especially barbaric - those who employ it paint themselves in a most vile coat. And given the absurdity of the practice from points of view of reason, I suggested that speaking of "two-digits IQ" for lurking social phenomena like this one may not be enough.
As can be seen from the comments, the person concerned probably felt that he was being treated disproportionately.
Regardless of the fact that it would of course be better for the police if they were better able to recognize fake reports, I found the situation to be handled rather well.
This can be an example of how the average police interaction can go in a country where not every second citizen is expected to carry weapons or pose other threats.
Being in handcuffs for a bunch of seconds in this unclear situation is not the fault of the police, but the swatter.
He was greeted at the door by 10 police officers with their weapons drawn who immediately ordered his hands out of his pockets and handcuffed him. That's about how a swatting episode in the US usually goes. I see no evidence in the dev's description that would suggest that this incident was less likely to lead to a death than the typical police response in the US.
I agree that just from the picture side, this looks very similar.
However, in Germany, police is taught in a very different way than US:
They are only allowed to use firearms as a last resort, and only to use it after non-lethal measures like the taser have been used beforehand.
They are also asked to only use it to wound, not to kill suspects.
In contrast, US police is e.g. trained to shoot at the center of mass as they argue that anything else would be more difficult under stressful circumstances.
I see the situation itself as the problem (that fake reports can lead to it), but realistically, there is probably no way to avoid them compeletely, so just looking at the way how such interactions are going on from there on can make the difference as well.
Just to be clear what we're talking about: I can find evidence of exactly three swatting deaths ever, with one being a heart attack, not gunfire. So two cases of police opening fire due to a prank call in the entire US in the entire history of swatting.
Those cases are unacceptable, but how confident are you that it's not that Germany hasn't had one yet by dint of much smaller population sizes and therefore fewer police calls, rather than different police training? Again: these ten police officers had their weapons drawn.
It could be that there is no such case of someone being swatted and killed in Germany because of smaller population, or because of differences in police training.
In the end, the pathway to police not having to draw their weapons is the path where unexpected threats are minimal on the side of the average citizen.
Police is also a victim in case of swatting. Imho no need to be overly emotional about preventive actions focused on the weapons only if they are not possible easily, or if small number of problematic cases suggests lesser priority. I see different things to discuss first: Police blaming swatted victims. Police not allowing submission of warnings by victims beforehand.
> Unfortunately, the police seemingly have no idea who did it and acted based on a tip sent with an email.
I understand the need to take anonymous tips seriously, but I mean come on... an email? I hope there was more than that.
If I assume the counterfactual where someone's attempt to tip police was ignored and an incident results, the public will criticize the police undoubtedly. Still, at some point there needs to be a minimum for verifiable, trustworthy communication if such a tip results in swatting. If I effortlessly generate dozens of plausibly-sounding scenarios, tip off the police in intervals spaced far enough and automate it, when would the police start categorizing anonymous emails as noise?
Of course an email is easy to fake, but you really have to put things in perspective: We, as internet regulars, hear of swatting quite often, but for your average police officer, this is probably an once-in-a-career type of event and therefore the threshold for believability is quite low.
Also, as you pointed out, if it turns out to be a real situation, it will look horrible if the police knew of it beforehand. Even more, a victim in a situation that requires a swat team might have a quite limited ability to communicate, lowering the reasonable threshold even more.
Lastly, there isn't really a measured response. If you think there might be an actual dangerous situation, sending a few normal officers to check it out is reckless at best and might actually make the situation worse, as the attacker is alerted of the impeding police response and the police doesn't have the ability to respond swiftly.
When I reported a person in my neighborhood for screaming about hurting people and herself for hours with open windows, I called the police (didn't find any email or something) and they wanted to know who I am, where I am and why I am there.
At some point I felt like they're not trusting me.
Why do they trust an email?
They can gather more information from you. They can't gather more information from an email. It forces a decision based on exactly what the message said and no more - and they'd presumably want more information in order to ignore it. For a closer comparison you'd want to call from a payphone, make your report, then hang up.
I have no idea if this would actually work similarly but it is at least what people do in movies when they want to provoke a police response! And it does make sense.
If you committed that crime, the police would probably try to find you and stop you, not just give up on anonymous tips :) As you said, they're obligated to respond, as they have a monopoly on violence.
How many people do you know who would get a threatening email about imminent violence and play it off because it's likely a fake? Perhaps some the most zen among us! The rest of us would almost definitely want to (hire mercenaries to) take reasonable steps to stop it. A few hours of police time in exchange for preventing a potential terrorist event seems like a fair trade, anyway...
Given the fact that the police ignores a lot of real crimes (like this false reporting crime will just be ignored) just the fact that they're obligated doesn't explain anything
> How many people do you know who would get a threatening email about imminent violence and play it off because it's likely a fake?
That would be every single popular political pundit on social media (if you're not a stickler for "email"), then every celebrity, etc, so a huge number of people
I get lots of spam emails threatening all sorts of things, according to my spam email, Scotland Yard, the FBI & Secret Service are all after me if I don't give them my personal information. So yeah if I got a threatening email about imminent violence, I would probably assume its some sort of weird spam email and ignore it.
SWAT doesn't have a lot to do. So it's going to be exceptionally difficult to establish a working "graduated response" system within that department. In reality there should be two separate sources of information that suggest a SWAT response is necessary before they're dispatched, otherwise, standard police response to verify the information first.
Dood, thats not remotely SWAT. This isnt even some kind of special police. This is german normal police. And usually they are pretty damn overwhelmed by everything because they are horrible undestaffed.
The difference between swatting in the US and Germany is pretty shocking. No one was forced to the ground, the developer had a calm chat with the police and the whole incident didn't look all that terrifying.
I loved how the police explained that the live stream had to be shut down due to an ongoing investigation, but he might resume it soon, because the issue might get resolved quickly.
Still a horrible and dangerous thing to do to somebody, but I'm glad the police were calm, polite, and professional.
Your characterization is a bit more tame than their description of the interaction in the YouTube comments [0]:
> I thought about making the incident accessible to a wider public through YT for 24 hours and ultimately decided to do so in order to document to us Germans and Europeans that SWAT'ing is not a phenomenon limited to the USA and is dangerous. also to document what kind of criminal energy there is and how completely inappropriately the police acted in my case in my opinion.
> During a live stream while bi-secting a SPARC Linux bug in our ExactCODE GmbH office, the bell rang, the door was banged and the police were called. Unsuspecting - I assumed someone else was missing or there had been a break-in - when I opened the door I was confronted by a good 10 police officers with drawn weapons and at least one with what looked to me like a Taser. After I was identified, I was immediately handcuffed when I heard “hands out of my pockets” in the video!!! I had seen about 10 police officers in front of and in our office, and it wasn't until the following day that neighbors reported that the entire street, right up to the next intersection, was full of a dozen (or more) emergency vehicles!!! about 10 police cars, 2 fire departments, 1 ambulance, an emergency doctor etc...!!!
> According to the conversation with the police, an email was sent to the police and another to other rescue workers saying that I had killed my wife and now wanted to take my own life. I assume an email of the type Hans Musterman 6345234@xyz? With his real name @t-oline, hardly anyone would provoke such an action. I find it completely disproportionate that the police go out with such a number of devices and personnel to a registered company registered as a GmbH and not first Google the name and company in order to presumably find my YouTube (and Twitch) activities directly.
> A team of two or four officers, and if necessary a test call to the company, would have been more than sufficient given such low-quality evidence. Likewise, neither to identify myself nor to put handcuffs on me immediately. The police should act more prudently and balanced here and not allow themselves to be paraded like this.
> But I would like to express my gratitude that I was otherwise treated reasonably humanely, that I survived it and that there was no other damage to property. It could have been much worse. If we had all just been on our lunch break, for example, the office would probably have been forced open by the fire department. To be honest, completely unacceptable for an IT company...! :-/
> I find it completely disproportionate that the police go out with such a number of devices and personnel to a registered company registered as a GmbH and not first Google the name and company in order to presumably find my YouTube (and Twitch) activities directly.
What purpose would this serve? If you receive an emergency tip like this, extensive research on what might be registered on that address and then check whether someone happens to be active on social media right now doesn't seem to be that good of a call. I don't mean to blame the developer - if I just had a few guns pointed at me, I would not be calm about this, either. But this isn't reasonable research given the time constraints.
SWAT = Special Weapons and Tactics. Which usually involves blasting out the door, jumping inside while covered with body armor and / or tactical shields, expecting unusually fierce resistance with military-grade weapons, etc. This is warranted in special cases, like storming a building held by terrorists.
What was that is very regular tactics and barely any weapons. It was a polite visit by police expecting reasonable cooperation from the target person, not heavy armed resistance.
The SEK/MEK (i.e. German SWAT equivalent) operates differently. Shocking, I know, different countries, different procedures. Their daily operations look pretty much like this.
A different notion of special, I suppose. If they do not expect fierce armed resistance, or special environment like an unlit derelict factory, or a need to interact with unusual machinery / electronics, I wonder what makes their job "special". I suppose that SEK/MEK are capable of tackling special circumstances, but in this case they didn't need to, they just had to do a job of a police inspector, only with a large safety margin.
Presumably the cars were just there to witness the reasonable cooperation?
> the whole street was full of about 10 (or more) emergency vehicles right up to the next intersection!!! about 10 police cars, 2 fire departments, 1 ambulance, an emergency doctor
For one, if you look at the types of firearms, in Germany you will find extremely few in the "self defence" or "assault rifle" category, mostly they are in the "hunting" or "marksmanship" categories.
Then you have safe gun storage, which is mandatory in Germany and is subject to routine inspections.
It is also mandatory to have an ownership license for any type of gun. You will be automatically denied this e.g. if you are formerly convicted of a serious crime, have mental health issues, or a history with drug use or violence. And you need to provide a reason for owning a gun, where "self defence" does not count.
If you can prohibit people from owning guns made for killing lots of other people, and prohibit people who obviously should not own guns from getting them, you've made substantial progress.
Fgc-9 + 'what about ammo' guides by deterrence dispensed are engineered to build reliable 9mm firearm out of non-regulated components in EU. No one shady involved.
Videos of unlicensed Germans doing this are online.
I would argue that firearm ownership per 100 people is very misleading, you have more guns than owners in US. Comparing ownership per household (how many house holds have guns vs total number of households), the difference is way smaller, maybe less than 2x.
For example I know a guy that has more than 400 firearms. For him it is a business, not a passion, he does not even carry one, but he is giving a wrong impression of gun ownership.
Do you think that is the only statistic that might have some correlation with this? Are there perhaps other things than race that might be just as or more relevant?
I was recently reading about violence in schools in Boys Adrift by Dr. Leonard Sax and he mentioned several correlations that are common suspects: economic "level", race, and a few others, and race was the highest correlation by about 20%.
I share your curiosity and have dug into the issue quite a bit, but obviously it's difficult since it's a bit of a taboo topic.
> Sure, but Germany has had one of the higher genocide rates of disarmed people in the past century, to the point it exceeds the past century death by firearm inside the US.
They weren't "disarmed" you absolute knob. "They" had guns and weapons and fought back against the nazis and lost. It turns out a bunch of civilians with small arms does not actually pose a meaningful threat to a state level military.
What makes this comment so obnoxious, aside from getting all the facts incorrect, is it helps promote this awful notion that you can be immune to state oppression if you just buy a gun. Shockingly, it does not work that way on real life. If you want the state to not oppress people you have to actually put in work to prevent it from happening, because if a state level military is coming to kill you it doesn't really matter how many guns you have in your closet or how cool your black temu tactical gear is. Artillery from 2km away will just kill you.
(Also as far as I know, when the vast majority of native americans died, they had plenty of guns.)
You need to get close to them to check their identity, their Covid passes, or whatever. You need to get close to confiscate contraband. You need to get close to prevent them from organizing and assembling, and so on.
Of course with nuclear bombs and F-16s you can blow everything to bits, but that's not how governments typically oppress people. You generally don't want to exterminate your tax base, you just want them to have the "right" opinions and beliefs.
The Russians blew Grozny to bits but the issue is they started fighting militia with mostly small arms, then they ended up with a bunch of dead civilians plus a bunch of dead militia plus a bunch of surviving militia who now has... their own artillery pulled from the rubble.
In the end deploying the artillery in Grozny and elsewhere during the first Chechen war was a pyrrhic victory that ended in years of Chechen independence.
Then there's the alternative as my compatriots saw in the YPG -- small arms bought them enough time to ally with the USA.
> a state level military is coming to kill you it doesn't really matter how many guns you have in your closet or how cool your black temu tactical gear is. Artillery from 2km away will just kill you.
I've fought in a non-state militia that held off a nation state, in a civil war. About half the people I met died, but yet, the rest remain. So you're wrong.
>They" had guns and weapons and fought back against the nazis and lost. It turns out a bunch of civilians with small arms does not actually pose a meaningful threat to a state level military.
... Those in the Warsaw ghetto did with smuggled arms, and held out for several days, meanwhile their disarmed brethren did not last nearly as long.
>"They" had guns and weapons and fought back against the nazis and lost
Jews were virtually disarmed in Germany before the genocide started. In conquered states,they occasionally held off longer with smuggled arms. (In some cases like Malka Zdrojewicz, fighting even seems to have possibly save her life as officers admired her courage and sent her to a non-genocide destination.)
Forgive my ignorance, but can the police not get the identity of the people calling these in from the phone companies? Swatting would be over very quickly if we just started handing out 5 year prison sentences to every moron who tries this.
The police apparently chose to do this based on an emailed tip, not a phone call. If the attacker was the least bit competent there will be no way to uncover their identity at all. Even NSA-level traffic and timing analysis would not necessarily be effective against a well-constructed anonymous email setup.
Unless there was something specific about the email's contents justifying it, the police seem very much at fault here for attacking someone based on an entirely unauthenticated, unverifiable, untraceable message. Society readily holds people who fall for obvious phishing attacks responsible for their negligence, and this seems similar.
They shouldn't be bursting down peoples doors and placing them in handcuffs based on tips with such poor veracity. If there is no way to verify the identity of someone making a serious claim, then it shouldn't be taken this seriously.
Clearly the system as it exists today is ripe for abuse.
To be fair this is very likely the work of "an angry troll", so I have some hope that they'll get caught. People don't tend to be at their best when they're raging, especially when that rage is directed at someone so seemingly non-offensive.
Re: the last point, I would definitely not vote to have my police ignore anonymous tips, if it ever came up in a referendum. I think it's a pretty damn good use of tax dollars, as far as these things go.
Wouldn't it have been better to do the typical thing of sending a patrol unit out to see what might be going on, and then send out the rest of the squad if they request the back up?
What percentage of tips like this do you think are fraudulent? How long is it worth delaying all the real ones as a matter of practice on the off chance that the tip is bad?
A lot actually, including this one. How many bomb threats are real? Ohio is struggling with this now because of some stupidity about eating pets. From a student wanting to delay an exam, or whatever else, they are rarely real. The Secret Service filters threats against protectees, the FBI is forwarded threats as well. The problem is that local coppers just don't have the training, and the SWAT teams are always needing something to do, so there's no delay to sending a full on response.
What actually constitutes a "well-constructed anonymous email setup"? From my understanding I'd expect that with 'NSA-level analysis' that things like fingerprints from creation/usage would show up, making it rather difficult to evade entirely.
It's not only difficult to verify the identity from phone companies or ISPs (worst case you'd need a court order), depending on the nature of the report and the situation, it might also be straight up dangerous for the caller.
Besides, it's pretty damn simple to just a stolen phone or compromised computer to do this sort of thing. If you really were to get the identity this way, you now likely have two victims instead of one...
"This phone number was used to make a fraudulent 911 call, here is the recording" should more than enough to secure a warrant.
You have a complete recording of the phone call, so you can verify if the person speaking in it was the owner of the phone number. If it's not a match, then you can start investigating friends and family of the owner who would have had access to the phone.
If police can't figure out how to do this basic shit then why are we trusting them with SWAT gear?
1. How the hell do you plan to tell the difference between some prankster using voice modulation and a genuine caller stuck in a situation with weird acoustics? Or are you too dense to realize that emergencies don't always happen in perfect sound conditions?
2. Are you seriously okay with giving police dispatchers godlike powers to decide if your desperate plea for help is "real enough" for them? And if they get it wrong and write you off as a scammer while you're bleeding out, I guess that's just tough luck, huh? Still feeling smug about your brilliant plan now?
A part of me thinks that SWATting should be considered attempted murder (IANAL); you're sending in a bunch of heavily armed men into a house for no real reason, what the fuck do you think is going to happen?
Maybe "murder" is a bit strong, but it certainly has led to people dying in the past, and it's not like "death" is a bizarre, unforeseeable consequence of sending in a dozen heavily armed people into an innocent person's house. If I shot a gun into the crowd in Times Square, and someone got hit and died, I don't think it'd be a very good defense to say "I was just trying to shoot into the crowd, I didn't mean to kill anyone!"
Frankly, I don't get it, it's really not very funny, and carries a risk of jail time in the process.
Seems like SWATting investigations are a lot more effort than just claiming it as suicide by cop and calling it a day. So I'm slightly impressed that the requires effort option is taken at all
The perpetrator of the fatal 2017 Wichita swatting pled guilty to manslaughter, so it does seem that the (American) legal system treats it as a homicide.
But that was involuntary manslaughter, which means it wouldn't have been attempted murder if it didn't result in a death. Or at least it would mean that if charges and events were more than loosely related.
SWATting lets unimportant and powerless people, who may never have got much attention in real life ... suddenly get LOTS of attention, which feels validating and good. Like many crappy things, it originated in the world of gaming.
I never understood the appeal of streaming. Sure, you get lots of positive attention. And most people are honest, friendly, and kind. But the more attention you get, the more you attract bad actors and jerks. There's a reason why many celebrities don't read social media comments or reviews, and why they have security.
Seconded. I don't want to veer into victim blaming here but live streaming from my home where I have a publicly registered business address sounds to me like a bad idea.
I don't think that anyone from that community would ever stoop so low.
For years now Germany is having an issue with organized trolls who target live streamers with swatting. A live stream of the resulting police action appears to be the main motivation.
There definitely are tensions and the rust bros are extreme drama lovers but swatting seems a bit extreme for that beef. The rowdy troll seems most likely, no?
"Rust bros" have been involved in approximately 0% of the Linux kernel drama that has surfaced to the level of being covered elsewhere, historically speaking.
Linus Torvalds is not averse to "drama", and given the needlessness of your phrasing neither are you apparently. Stones and glass houses, etc.
I do hope they investigate and find whomever was responsible for this email tip. At the very least I would want this person to repay the costs of this operation.