While swatting is a shit thing to do, I feel that police departments that treat these calls as legit without their own due diligence is a much bigger problem.
They call, gunman sees caller ID, freaks out, shoots everyone.
If they don't, gunman lies. They send a cop over. Cop get shot, gunman freaks shoots everyone.
I think the more pressing issues are:
Demilitarize the police. Sure they can have body armor. They don't need fucking assault weapons and armored personnel carriers though.
Criminalize swatting. We already know that since the Dubya era that federal US has had their hands on all communication in the US. Find out who the swatter is and prosecute the twatwaffle
I think if you got a jumpy gunman scenario they're going to start shooting when the police come roaring into the neighbourhood. A call might lead to a hostage negotiation scenario which will more likely to have people surviving than a gunfight between a jumpy gunman and even more jumpy cops with some hostages in the room.
Sure there are scenarios where a call back probably wouldn't be a good idea, but the 9/11 operator has a description of the scenario, and I'd think for most of them a call back would be fine.
The problem is that they don’t have time in the situations that get called in to
Police can dick around for hours between receiving a call and taking any kind of action. Just ask the kids at Uvalde Elementary School.
The issue isn't about time, its about police training that dictates anything that makes them nervous is a target for gunfire. There is no sense of public preservation, its all just Cops-Against-The-World mentality. That's one big reason why cops will always, always, always shoot the family dog. There's simply no incentive to treat any animal as something other than a deadly weapon coming for their throats.
The same officers that spend thirty minutes dicking around outside playing one more round of Candy Crush on their phones will dome you through a window because you spooked them.
In a lot of ways, SWATing isn't a bug in the system but a feature. The ability to basically call in an airstrike on your neighbor creates a sense of terror that keeps people alienated of one another and absolutely horrified of what the local police might do to them.
I am sure there are measures taken to ensure clebs and other prominent people don't have their doors broken down anymore.
Fuck the peasants though. The commoner is probably going to have their house seriously damaged and will still be arrested anyway. If they were doing anything illegal, like smoking weed, charges will be filed but eventually dropped but not after significant expense to the victim. Shit like that can happen, ya know?
For schools that get swatted, I could see this contributing to PTSD in kids in a big way as the MO for cops is to assume that the threat is actually mixed in with the rest of the kids. (That is assuming that an evacuation plan is even implemented.)
Wait... what was Hans Gruber's plan if McClane didn't throw a chair out the window and shoot a bunch of rounds? He needed the FBI to shut off the power. If Carl just left then the FBI wouldn't show up and the power wouldn't have been cut and he wouldn't be able to open the vault.
I guess he could've called the cops himself later, but they made serious effort to make sure everything looked normal when Carl came in the building.
You know your country is fucked when your first thought is, "if someone dies when the cops show up at the home of someone completely innocent, then whomever called them should be charged with murder."
Yeah they should. But if while committing a crime you cause the death of someone, then that's murder.
Like if I'm robbing you and you get so scared you have a heart attack and die, I can say, "well I expect people to exercise more and keep in better shape so they don't have heart attacks. I guess I have high standards." I can say that, but I'm still getting charged with murder in most places, because if I didn't commit that crime you'd still be alive.
No, I understand the legal concept. My point is that police, and especially SWAT, should be trained well enough that the idea that anyone would be in danger if they were to show up at an innocent person's house would be so ridiculous that we wouldn't even be having this discussion. In the US, it takes about 650 hours of training to become a police officer on average, and 3000 to become a cosmetologist. That's fucked up.
I guess I don't understand what we are talking about, sorry. This thread is in reply to:
I mean, it should be true for any country. SWATting isn't a US only phenomenon.
Which I know wasn't your comment, but I took that to mean that because it happens in other countries then the US isn't that fucked. My original comment didn't specify the US and was a benchmark that could be applied to all countries, so the reply sounded argumentative to me.
Maybe I was reading something into it that wasn't there? Sorry for being a dumbass!
There needs to be a decent charge/punishment absolutely, but harsher punishment will not stop this.
The monopoly of violence lies with the government and they need to treat that with much more tact and finesse than they currently do in the US. No knock raids, SWAT teams filled with former veterans trained to kill by the military are employed without hesitation, this is wrong. The responsibility lies with the government and law enforcement to be more careful and know what they are getting into before even considering employing deadly force.
I know a bunch of vets that swear that police rules of engagement are insane and they would have gotten in deep shit for acting in a fucking war zone the way cops do here.
For one thing, opening fire on a civilian or other non-combatant that hasn't already fired live rounds at you will get your ass court-martialed, dishonorably discharged, and imprisoned faster than you can say "Miranda rights"
And somehow that happens dozens of times per day in American police departments
I wanna know how she imports them from the mushroom kingdom, and how much does koopa rent them out for? It'd be neat to have little mushroom guys patrolling my property.
Swatting (plural swattings)
1- A motion or gesture that swats; a swat.
2- (US, slang) The action of making an illegitimate call to the police so as to have a SWAT team dispatched to a location.
