Two More 'SWAT' Calls in California -- One Involving a 12-Year-Old Gamer (ktla.com) 178
In January an online gamer in California was arrested after at leat 20 fake emergency calls to police, one leading to a fatal shooting in Kansas. But this week in California there's been at least two more fake calls:
- A 12-year-old gamer heard a knock at his door Sunday -- which turned out to be "teams of Los Angeles police officers and other rescue personnel who believed two people had just hung themselves." The Los Angeles Police Department "said there's no way to initially discern swatting calls from actually emergencies, so they handle every scenario as if someone's life is in danger," according to the Los Angeles Times. The seventh-grader described it as "the most terrifying thing in my life."
- 36-year-old David Pearce has been arrested for falsely reporting an emergency at a Beverly Hills hotel involving "men with guns" holding him hostage. A local police captain later said that the people in the room had not made the call and in fact might have been asleep through much of the emergency. The Los Angeles Times reports that there's roughly 400 'SWATting' cases each year, according to FBI estimates, adding that "Some experts have said police agencies need to take the phenomenon more seriously and provide formal training to dispatchers and others to better recognize hoax callers."
Meanwhile, in the wake of a fatal shooting in Wichita, Kansas lawmakers have passed a new bipartisan bill increasing the penalties for SWAT calls. If a fake call results in a fatality -- and the caller intentionally masks their identity -- it's the equivalent of second-degree murder. "The caller must be held accountable," one lawmaker told the Topeka Capital-Journal.
Really "no way to discern"? (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is really no way for a 911 dispatcher to tell that a call is arriving from somewhere outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service, that is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be addressed. Probably all SWATing hoaxes involve that kind of proxy to reach the target dispatch, and probably vanishingly few legitimate emergency calls use those services.
If a dispatcher sees a VoIP call that indicates a high risk of violence or strongly points to heavily armed response, that should be good grounds to watch out for a hoax.
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Last thing I'd want while talking to a 911 dispatcher is for them to be allowed to have doubt in my story.
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Last thing I'd want while talking to a 911 dispatcher is for them to be allowed to have doubt in my story.
Last thing I'd want is a bunch of people wrongfully shot dead because doubt is too scary for some other people who might have a story that "requires" a paramilitary strike.
Re:Really "no way to discern"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last thing I'd want while talking to a 911 dispatcher is for them to be allowed to have doubt in my story.
Last thing I'd want is a bunch of people wrongfully shot dead because doubt is too scary for some other people who might have a story that "requires" a paramilitary strike.
That takes proper training to assess a threat, and has little to do with the problem of fake calls. You either have trigger-happy idiots behind an armed response, or you do not.
This is a two-fold problem. Make no mistake that change needs to happen on BOTH sides.
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That takes proper training to assess a threat, and has little to do with the problem of fake calls. You either have trigger-happy idiots behind an armed response, or you do not.
This is a two-fold problem. Make no mistake that change needs to happen on BOTH sides.
The root of the problem is there are far, far too many laws and regulations, many related to the "War On (some) Drugs". Having so many laws and regulations means you need a large number of jackboots to enforce them. Proper training is too expensive and time consuming for maintaining such a large standing force, so standards and training are minimal. It also means that internal discipline and accountability for mistakes take a back seat to maintaining sufficient numbers of boots on the street.
Strat
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Hmm, sounds a little Randian. SWAT teams aren't generally used for possible zoning or pollution violations, if that's what you were going for.
Re: Really "no way to discern"? (Score:2)
If you are calling from the local area, the cops should be aware of that. If you are intentionally trying to be anonymous then cops should also be aware of that. Not all anonymous tips are bad but they should be approached with caution. Even something as simple as letting the SWAT team know that the tip might not be good should help them case the place properly before busting down a door.
Re:Really "no way to discern"? (Score:5, Insightful)
...that should be good grounds to watch out for a hoax.
The fact that anything could be a hoax is good grounds to watch out for a hoax.
But we don't need "good grounds" for the police to be careful when deciding to shoot at people.
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Sure, any call to the police could be a hoax. The issue is that this kind of hoax is both dangerous and somewhat frequent, so it is worth considering how to identify such hoaxes quickly.
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Really? Two examples in two months in a population of almost 40 million people is "somewhat frequent"???
Assuming that the two examples mentioned were representative, that would imply that your chance of being the victim of a swatting in your lifetime are on the order of 0.001%. Hardly "somewhat frequent"....
Re:Really "no way to discern"? (Score:5, Informative)
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If someone makes an emergency report to a non-emergency number, that would be another good indicator.
My understanding was that SWAT hoaxers typically use (somewhat shady) VoIP services because VoIP effectively hides both their identity and their actual location, so that they could call 911 and make it appear as if they were really at the location they want to be SWATted.
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The calls are often to a NON-EMERGENCY number
[Citation Required] The problem is that there are many services that don't route your call source, and even more where that call source has nothing to do with your current location. Welcome to the world of VoIP.
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In my area non-emergency numbers are forwarded to 911 if you call after normal business hours. Want to call in a noise complaint, you're going to end up talking to a 911 operator.
Re: Really "no way to discern"? (Score:2)
Plenty of services use VoIP. If you have "digital telephone" with your cable or dsl provider, you have VoIP. If you have true 4G/5G (Europe and Japan only, not the US 2.5G that is sold as 4G) your calls are probably packet based.
Many people use Vonage or a number of other VoIP providers, anytime you need a little box to talk to your POTS or if your phone line goes dead during a power outage, you have VoIP.
The nice thing about VoIP is that you don't need to have a physical line, any SIP phone can talk to any
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That is the kind of thing I was trying to address with my statement about calls from "outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service". Mobile phone companies are probably sufficiently careful with e911 to be trusted. So are incumbent and competitive local carriers.
How does a 911 call work with SIP? Exactly which services relay from SIP to the emergency dispatch service? That's the point where I think there needs to be sufficient authentication of the originator, and where their location should
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They make money on all of those telemarketers, you know.
Yeah. But how? They obviously can track and bill all these telemarketing calls. Or they wouldn't let them through. But it seems that they have given law enforcement the second-tier interface to their tracking/billing system.
This could easily be solved with a few subpoenas and a few telco execs spending some time in prison for contempt of court and lying to law enforcement officials (essentially what an intentionally broken interface is doing).
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Yeah. But how? They obviously can track and bill all these telemarketing calls. Or they wouldn't let them through.
That's not how it works. The connecting phone company pays the receiver's phone company a small termination fee. The caller pays the connecting phone company, and how much is outside the receiver's phone company's control or knowledge.
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So how does my phone company know to bill me $5.99 per minute for calling that "Hot and Sweaty Sex" 1-900 number? And how does the sex service know who to go after if the money isn't paid? I assume that phone companies have some method of blocking or flagging VoIP number spoofing from entering their system so as not to be on the hook for an hour of heavy breathing owed to the phone sex service.
In the case of a VoIP call to 9-1-1, I know I had to register my IP address with my home location to get emergen
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Lying to law enforcement is not illegal, yet. Not even in your fucked up legal system.
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Really, I would imagine that lying to a law enforcement officer would be obstruction of a police investigation in most jurisdictions. Way safer to say nothing than lie. Though saying nothing is the best policy regardless.
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Martha Stewart
Re: Really "no way to discern"? (Score:2)
Lying to law enforcement has always been illegal:
http://blogs.findlaw.com/blott... [findlaw.com]
Did you not notice headlines about Gates in court for lying to FBI?
https://www.pressherald.com/20... [pressherald.com]
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It helps to read the articles of the links you posted.
The first one, http://blogs.findlaw.com/blott... [findlaw.com]
Has nothing to do with "lying" but giving wrong statements to authorities.
If a police officer asked me where I was at 20:00, and I say in a pub, while I actually was in a red light district: that is a lie. And that is completely legal.
Filing a "wrong accussion" is technically a lie too, but first of all it is a "wrong accussion", and this is covered by law, while a simple "lie" is not.
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Re: Really "no way to discern"? (Score:2)
Silly troll - in Soviet America, *everything* is illegal.
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If there is really no way for a 911 dispatcher to tell that a call is arriving from somewhere outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service, that is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be addressed. Probably all SWATing hoaxes involve that kind of proxy to reach the target dispatch, and probably vanishingly few legitimate emergency calls use those services.
If a dispatcher sees a VoIP call that indicates a high risk of violence or strongly points to heavily armed response, that should be good grounds to watch out for a hoax.
The problem with your "easy" fix is when you're wrong, and someone dies as a result.
With the popularity of cloud-based phone services, WiFi calling, and the number of people who have no "home" phone, it's hard to use VoIP as a delineation point.
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Guess what: People could die in response to any 911 call. The point is to reduce how often people unjustly or preventably die.
I am not proposing that 911 automatically treat any VoIP call as a hoax, or that they not respond if a VoIP call is placed using a shady service that has been known to falsify caller locations. I am only pointing out that many (most?) SWATing incidents actually do have a fact pattern that sets them apart, even a priori, from legitimate calls; that emergency dispatchers should have
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> I am only pointing out that many (most?) SWATing incidents actually do
> have a fact pattern that sets them apart, even a priori, from legitimate
> calls; that emergency dispatchers should have the tools to detect that
> fact pattern; and that responders could use the presence of that fact
> pattern to dial back their response rather than go in with guns blazing.
This will merely result in something similar to the spamblocking wars. As filters discovered spam patterns versus "real mail" patterns
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This. Haven't had a "home phone" for at least a decade. Ditto siblings. I don't think my parents do either, but I could be mistaken there - Dad is old-fashioned....
Threat Levels and AI and spam filtering (Score:2)
1) Call tracing and source profiling -- perfect for a simple algorithm or AI to do, just as we do for email servers, black lists etc. Obviously, no black list but a bad source impacts confidence levels.
2) Spam-like filtering. Threat levels or confidence ranking on the credibility of the call. This can be pure statistics for the crime and the area involved, but time of day, time of year, observer type/location, incident type/location are things best done by machines. Going further one could analyze stress in
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I think your #2 is too hard to practically solve. The problem is underdetermined: There are too many possible variables and too few training cases. This means that your #3 will give unreliable numbers.
That is why I only suggested the equivalent of your #1, which may depend on parts of #4: If VoIP is appropriately standardized, #1 becomes relatively simple and very robust, leading to reliable information for people to factor into their judgment about the situation at hand. It is better to provide simple,
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not a problem: 1st off, the degree of accuracy would be a factor in any half done system. Part #1 would get more influence!
Just like a spam filtering system today, it's all statistics... if you just keep it simple, you have RULES like spam assassin does which have huge factors of influence then you have a lesser impact from the Bayes classifier. I'm not saying to make the Bayes classifier more important or even equal to other factors. (which works with tiny training sets unlike what you're thinking as t
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it can be defended; maybe people are 2 stupid? (Score:2)
People SUE for every stupid thing imaginable; it is not a reason to avoid doing something. The cops ultimately decide and while it does give the cops something to use an excuse, the city gets sued regardless! Rarely does it ever come down to just the cop who gets sued for money.
It's just a ball park which WILL reduce how many innocents are harmed. Right now you have an INFORMAL process at best. "Black man seen climbing into window" already has a % bias being applied which is NOT in writing. Lawsuits ha
Re: Threat Levels and AI and spam filtering (Score:2)
The simple number is a good idea, just give a guideline, have police respond anyway. Still it's ridiculous that police would go into any dangerous situation with their guard down because of these clowns. There's a story about a boy who cried wolf, it encodes the Bayesian nature of human behavior. If you allow endless fake bombs into secure areass as a "joke" without punishments, it becomes easy in time to bring real ones in.
That's how IP works, you can't tell location well (Score:2)
> If there is really no way for a 911 dispatcher to tell that a call is arriving from somewhere outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service, that is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be addressed. Probably all SWATing hoaxes involve that kind of proxy
Well that is indeed how IP works. You can't reliably distinguish the location if the person has made an effort to mislead. The most popular geoip service, Max mind, claims 90 percent accuracy when nobody is trying to be tricky. That's
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Right. Almost no legitimate emergency call will involve people "trying to be tricky". If a VoIP call comes in to an emergency dispatcher with any "someone is trying to be tricky" indicator, that is a strong hint that it's a hoax. Identifying the call as a likely hoax should reduce the risk of the hoax getting anyone hurt.
After we make sure no one is hurt by the emergency response, the question becomes tracking down the hoaxer. Maybe the company or service that connected the VoIP call to the emergency di
Non-trivial, but sometimes possible with uncertain (Score:2)
> If a VoIP call comes in to an emergency dispatcher with any "someone is trying to be tricky" indicator, that is a strong hint that it's a hoax
Such indicators are not reliable, and not always present, but there ARE indicators that could be used to *sometimes* suggest that something suspicious *might* be happening. For example, I have a list of virtually every open proxy used by hackers. Not all suspicious traffic comes through an open proxy, and not all traffic from open proxies is illegitimate, but i
Re:That's how GEOIP works, i.e. badly (Score:2)
> The most popular geoip service, Max mind, claims 90 percent accuracy when
> nobody is trying to be tricky. That's their marketing claim for their own service;
> the real number is probably closer to 80 percent when no proxies are involved.
You mean THIS MaxMind http://www.bbc.com/news/techno... [bbc.com] that decided to geo-locate "unknown" US IP addresses somewhere near the geographical centre of the USA? Unfortunately for the inhabitants of a farm located at those co-ordinates, that meant a constant stream
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In Germany basically all new phone lines are VoiP.
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In Germany are basically all new phone lines using weird providers that allow their customers to lie about their address, and then the provider passes that false address for emergency calls?
If so, then my proposed hoax detection might not work well in Germany, but I suspect that Germans are not so foolish as to allow companies with significant market share to behave like that.
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VoiP does not imply lying about your address. ...
Actually you can pinpoint one down to his floor in a flat
And in most european countries, ordinary emergency calls have no address atached anyway, people calling an emergency service are supposed to know where thay are.
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Okay, then catch up with the story and let us know when you have a clue.
Unregulated (Score:2)
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SWATing would be a lot less of a problem if the problem was restricted to "we can only tell roughly what area of a cell sector this call was made from". It means that hoaxes could only be perpetrated from the target's neighborhood, and that the mobile operator could record the calling phone's identity (IMEI) and perhaps the subscriber (from the SIM's IMSI, if the caller left a SIM in the phone -- and if they didn't, that would be another pointer to a hoax). Between those identifiers and cell site location
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Exact location is difficult unless the phone itself provides GPS for the 911 call (and really, when a cell phone calls 911, it should even if the user turns GPS off in general), but it shouldn't be that difficult technically to provide at least some locality information, such as which tower handled the call to sanity check emergency calls. In the case of cable VOIP services, the modem's MAC can be used to somewhat localize the call.
MAC address isn't visible after the first hop (Score:2)
The Media Access Control (MAC) address isn't visible once it's an IP packet being routed over the internet. The "media" in "media access control" is the coaxial cable, for a cable modem. As soon as it hits the first router and transitions from coax to fiber or cat6 that's a new medium, and a new MAC. In other words, MAC is a layer 2 address.
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I know how layer 2 works. But since the cable company controls the entire last mile, and the other endpoint of the first hop is the cable co.'s head end, they know the MAC address (that's how they avoid servicing unregistered modems and track usage). Further upstream, they know the IP address to MAC association (they own the DHCP server)
In other words, they know the MAC address.
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That would help for calls made via a ISP-provided VoIP service (AT&T uVerse, etc.) , but wouldn't do anything for other VoIP providers like Vonage where the packets could be sourced from any network in the world.
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That's why I said cable VoIP services rather than VoIP services in general.
Re: Really "no way to discern"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Since when? I have certain phones at my work I mask behind a xxx555xxx number to prevent robo calls into the phone. Any PSTN call made from this phone shows the receiving end a "555" number, which is not legitimate. This allows me to make out going phone calls from an e164 formatted number, but to not allow anyone on the outside to call back in.
Good job (Score:5, Funny)
Congrats to the LA police for not killing any innocent people when responding to those incidents. Keep it up.
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"Congrats to the LA police for not killing any innocent people when responding to those incidents."
As if the LA police could actually hit someone. Remember Christopher Dorner? Remember that blue truck they shot up with two women inside, thinking he was in that truck? 40 something rounds and ZERO fatalities?
The LA police are so shitty with their guns, that they had to beat Rodney King point blank - they know they're too fucking incompetent to even hit the broadside of a barn with a firearm.
Roll up for the Mystery Tour (Score:2)
The world is going to hell in a handbasket and I'm unsure what to put in my carryon bag.
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The world is going to hell in a handbasket and I'm unsure what to put in my carryon bag.
There's an extra fee for carry-on luggage.
Attempted murder (Score:2, Informative)
Anything that elicits an armed SWAT response should be considered an attempt to kill the SWATee.
There is no other reason you'd send an armed response team into a situation that split second decisions mean more people may die.
Once swaters start publicly getting 20+ years for single swat attempts it'll put off a fuckton of others.
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Re: Attempted murder (Score:2)
Feed the Gulag!
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To stop people from using these dangerous phones to SWAT other people, we must ban assault phones. Any phone with a collapsible antenna, removable battery, customizable software, screen visibility suppressor, pistol grip or bayonet mount is FAR too dangerous to allow in civilian hands.
Write your Congressperson today to tell them you support the Assault Phone Ban!
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Locking up people that use guns to kill has dramatically reduced the number of mass-shootings. Or not.
Most people that commit such crimes don't survive the process. The few that do are generally crazy, or completely baked on some hateful ideology. And since there are very, very few such incidents, your willingness to make assertions about it all is pretty pointless. Murders of all kinds have been going steadily down for decades. They're nearly half what they were in, say, the late 1980's. And the numbers of deaths caused by people using rifles or shotguns or any sort of long gun are a pale shadow of the nu
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Next you'll be telling me that I can't trust [cnbc.com] (warning: autoplay video) Michael Bloomberg's pet anti-gun group when it comes to statistics about how often school shootings occur!
Wasting Police time (Score:2)
In the UK we have an offence of wasting Police time, it is minor offence, dealt with by fixed penalty fine. Then our cops down storm houses with guns. What choice are American's going to make?
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-g... [cps.gov.uk]
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No in England and Wales you have a system. Here in Scotland we have a completely different legal system and any references to the Crown Prosecution Service are an immediate flag to that fact. There is no such thing as a UK legal system.
Easy Solution (Score:2)
Take away qualified immunity and watch the problem go away.
Stupid; the POLICE are responsible for a shooting (Score:3, Interesting)
You should NOT rely on data from UNCONFIRMED and potentially unreliable sources to initiate violence against another human being. This is a training issue- not an issue with someone placing a fake 911 call. What this does is it misplaces blame and diverts responsibility for shooting someone to that other than the shooter. The person who placed the fake call should be held responsible for abusing resources- not a murder committed by a poorly trained or over-reactive officer. But no, we can't ever hold the people with guns responsible for there own poor decisions, officers in blue can't ever make mistakes. They're our "heroes". The sad fact is government kidnaps and murders more people every year than all the serial murders and terrorists combined. The problem isn't prank calls or terrorism. It's poor training and an excessive number of police and military personal.
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It isn't just a waste of resources, it's deliberatey endangering others. No matter how well trained the officers are, there's the possibility of someone getting shot. The officers may think they're in danger, and all it takes is one officer making the wrong decision to create a tragedy. Obviously, the officer concerned should be held responsible, but if the swatter hadn't created the situation to allow the officer to kill someone with a wrong decision there wouldn't have been a death.
Post-mortem courtesy (Score:2)
A 12-year-old gamer heard a knock at his door Sunday -- which turned out to be "teams of Los Angeles police officers and other rescue personnel who believed two people had just hung themselves." The Los Angeles Police Department "said there's no way to initially discern swatting calls from actually emergencies, so they handle every scenario as if someone's life is in danger,"
And they didn't suspect something was amiss when someone answered the door?
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And they didn't suspect something was amiss when someone answered the door? ... oh, that was not what you meant?
If I have a hang over, I don't open doors
Phone systems should have traceroute (Score:2)
We need to update our phone systems to allow a traceroute like command, rather than just looking at the claimed sender phone number.
Knowing that a call that supposedly came from Chicago first entered the phone system in Alabama would be very helpful.
This needs a technological solution (Score:2)
My B.S. detector just went off. (Score:2)
"Some experts have said police agencies need to take the phenomenon more seriously and provide formal training to dispatchers and others to better recognize hoax callers."
I was a 911 dispatcher for 8 years and I can tell you this line is 100% B.S. You can NEVER treat a call like a hoax due to liability issues. I don't see the "experts" risking jail time for blowing off a call that was real. One of the first things you are taught is that lives are depending on how fast you can get the appropriate help to them in an emergency situation, and if you had a duty to react and fail to do so you can face CRIMINAL charges.
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I was a 911 dispatcher for 8 years
Then you know false or misleading calls happen all the time.
It doesn't have to mean blowing off calls like when Michael B Jordan [wordpress.com] tries to order a pizza. I can mean noticing that the house you're going to doesn't match the description being given over the phone so the first person who walks out the door isn't shot in two seconds.
Go back to old policing tactics (Score:3)
Back in the day they wouldn't just kick the door down and go in with tactical teams every time they got a call. Obviously use SWAT when you need "Special Weapons And Tactics"... but if what you actually need to do is send some officers over to knock on a door.. .maybe do that instead.
One of them wasn’t actually a swatting... (Score:2)
"teams of Los Angeles police officers and other rescue personnel who believed two people had just hung themselves."
I understand that this one turned out to be just a pair of Hollywood plastic surgeons practicing on each other.
military response? (Score:3)
return to civilian policing (Score:3)
America does not need SWAT teams. We don't need an occupying army with tanks and machine guns rampaging through our city streets.
Disband all SWAT team is now! Return to civilian policing!
For that once-a-year situation that's too much for normal cops to handle, that's why we have a National Guard. In the other 99.999% of the situations there is no need for a paramilitary response.
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The tragedy in Wichita was because an officer screwed up and shot. I've read that the officer wasn't a part of the SWAT team, so, as far as the incident went, the SWAT team did exactly what they should have.
The National Guard is often called "weekend warriors", because they train during weekends and another two weeks a year. When you need the National Guard right now, odds are everybody's off at their jobs or their homes or bars or something. It takes time to call the Guard up.
Once the National Guar
Re: return to civilian policing (Score:2)
Remember the old Republic, back when America was still a free country? Somehow that worked just fine without paramilitary police death squads lurking in every city. Really I don't give a shit if a few criminals get away, if that's the price for living in a free society.
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Yeah, back when the crime rate was higher? There are rare situations that come up in which a specially trained police unit is extremely useful. I'm not claimed that they're necessarily trained or equipped properly, or used appropriately, but a SWAT team is useful.
Given equivalent situations, are a SWAT team more likely to kill an innocent than a regular police officer? In the Wichita shooting, someone here claimed (I didn't follow it up and check it myself) that the officer who shot the fatal bullet w
12 year old streamer (Score:2)
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You would think they would at this point be privy to what is going on with the SWAT calls by now. But oh no. That's not how it works. The police get the latest and greatest machine guns, tanks, tactical outfits, and all the chicks, and they have ZERO accountability for being the soldiers on the streets.
You when it will get fixed?
When they start SWATting top US Federal and State officials, office-holders, their families, & friends. Until that happens, this is just something that happens to those 'deplorables' in 'flyover country' so who gives a fuck.
When they're looking into their own kid's/spouse's eyes as they bleed-out on the floor of their own family room because of a SWATting, *then* they'll care.
Strat
A mayor was swatted in maryland in 2008 (Score:2)
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If a dispatcher sees a VoIP call that indicates a high risk of violence or strongly points to heavily armed response, that should be go
Re: You know what else gets Swatted? (Score:2)
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Not that difficult (Score:3)
Take every call seriously, but don't shoot the first person within two seconds of him walking out the door. Far too many cops are scared chickenshits, or get-their-gun-off types, neither of which has any business being a cop or possessing a firearm.
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Yep. I really want to see what happens to the cop that blasted the wrong SWAT'd non-gamer. They were set soo far back and behind cover. I dunno what the risk really was to them beyond what we should expects cops to endure. Not sorry, it's a dangerous field you chose, so you're not gonna be able to be completely safe all the time...
But then again, we have the time just recently with the AR-15 cop that killed that suspect who four-legged crawling at him while being ordered to do so and then the cop murdered h
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Re: Go through the internet logs to find out who (Score:2)
Moar Gulag now!!
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Stop trying to be pedantic. The goal was still cause problems for the victim by having the police show up their home, which is what swatting refers to, not your narrowly defined "it's only swatting if the police actually send a SWAT team."
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Re: Not good enough (Score:2)
That's a tyrannically disproportionate response to the crime.
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Re: Not good enough (Score:2)
Stop licking those jackboots. If a murder occurred, the SWAT thug would be the murderer.
Yes community service sounds reasonable for a dumb phone prank.
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Nah. It won't do jack to the number of prank calls. And the number of SWAT murders will continue to rise until civil society gets enough backbone to eject these occupying armies from our cities.
All draconian punishments will do is feed more lives into the Gulag meat grinder.