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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

I think there's an analogy here with banking, around the idea of securing transactions rather than securing identity. The police need to be a lot more sure that the information they're working with is solid before they take drastic actions, just like a bank should take a lot more care that what they're doing is correct when a transaction appears suspicious.

"Standard overreaction" by the police is to my mind a bigger problem than the homicidal intent of the fraudulent calls. That kind of overreaction is a force multiplier for anyone with ill intent towards the US, never mind immature, violent and mentally ill people within the US.

I don't disagree with the idea that there is culpable homicidal intent for the prank caller, of course.

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All sorts of things are force multipliers for violently disturbed people: guns, cars, explosives, and yes fraud and deception. We should treat people who employ fraud to harm others the same way we treat people who use pipe bombs.

Police violence does seem like the "bigger" problem --- not that the difference tells us anything about how we should handle the ostensibly "smaller" problem. But I'll suggest that there's a "big" problem behind SWAT-ing, too: the way technology intermediates between agents and consequences, abstracts away externalities, reinforces the rationalizing techniques our brains use to salve themselves when violating fundamental inhibitions. In some circumstances, we even celebrate these effects, which seem to me far more menacing than a lot of mind-altering drugs.

> But I'll suggest that there's a "big" problem behind SWAT-ing, too: the way technology intermediates between agents and consequences, abstracts away externalities, reinforces the rationalizing techniques our brains use to salve themselves when violating fundamental inhibitions

At this point, I am not sure the people who go all the way to make the phone call to SWAT someone are somewhat detached from the consequences. I would put it on the same scale as loosening the bolts of someone’s ladder.

The intentions and consequences are clear, even if the “accident” might or might not happen and there is some indirection. The very fact they have to choose specific channels to make the call, or spoof caller id makes them explicitely cross the boundary of the “joke”.

Also I believe a sizeable fraction of Us is not beyond wishing someone’s actual death during a long enough period to act at least partially on it. I see it as human nature. But up until now we didn’t have a button in our hand to press it to kill any random person within some probability.

> guns, cars, explosives

all of which are regulated, unlike calls to SWAT..

That's obviously not true (calling in false police reports was illegal long before SWAT-ing was a thing), but, what's your point?

I believe his point to be that there is zero oversight on when SWAT is deployed, remember the police made the choice to go in guns blazing ready to shoot people. The fact that a choice like that can be made without strong justification is pretty horrifying.

Not only are murdering people with guns illegal, so are guns themselves regulated wrt possesion; ie the mechanism is regulated.

In what sense is a call to SWAT regulated?

I can't understand why this is down-voted. Maybe this is just an emotive issue; somebadguy's aggressive comment makes me think so.

Guns, cars explosives etc are things, and it is possible to regulate their possession wrt individuals that may misuse them.

A call to the police is a service, and is not the same kind of thing since anyone might witness a crime and need to call the police, even unreliable individuals; whereas few people need explosives (esp without a demonstrable need or credentials), and depriving an unreliable individual of e.g guns or a car, is unlikely to be as harmful to third-parties as limiting access to the services of the police.

In the very real sense that laws are regulations. Calls to SWAT are regulated through the law and backed by the force of the state. The mechanism is regulated by punitive measures after the fact, rather than some sort of regulatory filter, due to the nature of emergency telephone services.

Punative after the fact isn't regulation of the same kind. If this is due to the nature of the thing, then the thing is unlike guns explosives etc.

Well, there are many kinds of regulation, as not all things are alike.

> In some circumstances, we even celebrate these effects

The gang mentality that gets trained into police is problematic. They are told they are "warriors", they're told to use lethal force quickly, they're told that the sex they'll have after killing a human being will be the "best sex of their lives". It's sick:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/09/30/...

> All sorts of things are force multipliers for violently disturbed people: guns, cars, explosives, and yes fraud and deception. We should treat people who employ fraud to harm others the same way we treat people who use pipe bombs.

You've conflated employing fraud with direct use of force.

Fortunately, the law draws a fine line between the two. You must prove that swatting somebody presents the same probability of death as detonating a pipe bomb. The truth is there is far more successful SWAT operations that doesn't result in death of innocent lives. Out of the SWAT pranks, only a few results in death. Therefore, it does not pose the same direct harm and high probability of death that a pipe bomb would.

> You've conflated employing fraud with direct use of force.

He's conflating employing fraud to harm others with direct use of force. Put another way, should it matter whether you caused harm (and I'm assuming that means physical harm for this argument) using fraud or whether you paid someone to inflict it?

I think perhaps you interpreted the harm from fraud he was referring to as financial harm, but this specific issue is all about fraud that caused bodily harm.

> should it matter whether you caused harm (and I'm assuming that means physical harm for this argument) using fraud or whether you paid someone to inflict it?

I think it does matter, for the simple reason that people who are willing to commit violence, up close, with their own hands, have a very different psychology than people who are willing to do harm but still (presumably) have the normal human instincts that make them not want to do it personally.

It's one thing to kill; it's quite another thing to be willing to (or take pleasure in) literally get your hands bloody. The latter is the mark of an dangerous psychopath.

It does not in fact matter at law: arranging to have somebody killed will net you the same murder 1 charge as the person who pulls the trigger.

That doesn't seem obviously true to me?

The manner in which a crime is committed affects all stages of the legal process, including sentencing, jury deliberation, and those considerations will certainly also affect how a prosecutor decides to charge someone.

If you're saying that someone hiring a hitman has the exact same probability distribution of getting charged (let's say, given airtight evidence in both cases) compared to someone who pulls the trigger, that seems like a very strong and surprising claim.

If you're saying that 'in theory' both crimes would rate a certain type of murder charge, that sounds reasonable. Even then though, the prosecutor would certainly be able to tack on other charges (e.g. assault with a deadly weapon) that tangibly affect the outcome, from plea bargaining onwards.

And that seems correct? One of the goals of the criminal justice system is to prevent future crime, so to the extent that the manner a crime is committed reveals information about the future threat level of a criminal, society (and by extension, the legal system) should take that into account.

No, calling SWAT for the 100th time doesn't mean somebody is trying to get you killed. The victim was shot because he failed to obey orders:

> The cops didn't shoot soon as he opened the door. They commanded Andrew Finch to put his hands in the air, he did then put his hands down. They tell him to put his hands up again. Then he drops his hands by his side again. The cop that shot him thought he was going for a gun. Andrew Finch wasn't following directions of the police and the officer made a mistake and Andrew died, but he would be alive today if wasn't for those two morons on the internet that started the whole thing. The Cops legit thought a dangerous situation was happening and I believe they had good intentions. The amount of time to react to someone pulling a gun and killing you is milliseconds. It's bad that they shot him but the weight of all this falls on the people the winded up the machine and sent it to an innocent family.

If it was indeed homocide, the prosecutor needs to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the guy who called SWAT would be able to predict the course of events. The fact that he swatted others before and walked away will point to the fact that this was indeed a prank gone horribly wrong.

I'm just looking at the facts and the more they come out, I get that you are emotional but I'm not defending the guy, but that it's a stretch to say the person swatting was trying to get him killed, rather than say using pipe bombs or hiring hitman which show intent to kill.

It's clear there was no malice aforethought here which you repeatedly claimed without any examples or arguments to back it up.

I'm sorry but this is just how the law works in America or any developed country anyways. We can't have populism and mob mentality run the courts because they are not based on logic, evidence and impossible to separate bias from the truth. Am I happy that these guys will probably walk away? Absolutely not, but I am speaking from a place of clarity and reasoning, not turning to angry blood lust.

I'm not sold on that analogy. After all, fireworks are recreational explosives and we could count up a lot of destructive but non-malicious explosions as well as malicious but ineffective explosions (pipe bombs defused by robots or blown up in controlled fashion by bomb squads).

In the case of SWATting, the fraud is obviously meant to jeopardize the liberty of the targeted subject, and the jeopardy of their life at the same time is highly predictable, even that doesn't let the police officers off the hook.

I'm pretty comfortable with the company of expertise my argument keeps on this subject.

I appreciate what you're trying to say but banking is not a great analogy for an emergency response situation. Banks do not face the same element of time pressure or lives being at stake.

How would "being a lot more sure" help here? If you mean the police should verify information more thoroughly before responding, then that comes at a direct tradeoff in response times. If instead you mean police should respond swiftly but not bring out the SWAT teams without more verification, then that could pose a (different kind of) safety issue for responders and potential hostages.

The issue here is more one of militarized police tactics. When you're trained to respond to any threat, any sudden move, with overwhelming deadly force, then deadly outcomes will happen.

When SWAT is deployed, the chances of someone getting injured are increased. Some gamers are calling in more SWAT false positives, leading to an increased likelihood of injury to the public.

To begin, talk of swatting someone ought not be sanctioned on these communication channels. Mod down the comments or suspend their privileges/account.

We agree, use of force is far to casual in the US, especially with the reduced rate of violent crimes.

In the time being, we could also start dealing with the false positives directly. For example, while SWAT is gearing up, the operator could ask who is calling and how they learned of the issue. Without that information, the odds of a false report go up and the trigger bias should be going down.

> For example, while SWAT is gearing up, the operator could ask who is calling and how they learned of the issue.

How exactly would that help? Swatting is by definition fraudulent callers claiming to have firsthand knowledge of an issue -- in this case, he pretended to be a hostage taker.[1]

Better hoax detection training is a fine idea but swatters are determined adversaries. It's going to take more than just asking a couple basic questions. And since real emergencies are often signaled by imperfect and limited inbound information, there is only so much that can be done to filter out false positives. I agree with Krebs that this is primarily a matter of police use-of-force training and stronger action against swatters.[2]

[1] 911 recording starts at 10 minutes: https://www.pscp.tv/LJSNicholeManna/1lPKqponlzQxb?t=9m10s

[2] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/12/kansas-man-killed-in-swa...

Shouldn't it be possible for the police to trace calls to 911? Sure, a serial swatter would use burner phones to hide their identity, but you can at least find out their position. If the phone is not in the same cell as the caller claims to be, that should be a huge red flag against deploying a SWAT team.

>>If instead you mean police should respond swiftly but not bring out the SWAT teams without more verification, then that could pose a (different kind of) safety issue for responders and potential hostages.

I think you're getting close to someone people don't like to talk about; we (as a society) seem to value the lives of police officers far higher than we value the lives of innocent "civilians". This seems entirely backwards to me - I'd strongly prefer that police officers effectively never fire first. Let the SWAT teams be very highly armoured and lightly (or non-lethally) armed.

You have it backwards. SWAT police move aggressively, at great personal risk, in order to save civilian lives. The idea is that there is a hostage situation and hostages are being actively killed.

How often is that idea close to reality, and how often is it a fake call, a no-knock warrant, or some other bs?

And are they actually taking great personal risk? Police killed a bit under 1000 people in the US in 2016 and had around 150 officers die (with lots of this vehicle related). Seems like it's riskier for people interacting with cops than the cops themselves.

Wikipedia sugggests that the bulk of SWAT deployments are to serve search warrants. This suggests to me that they're not acting at "great personal risk, in order to save civilian lives," and instead that they're acting as a deadly threat for compliance.

What the prank caller did the equivalent of unleashing a dangerous dog on an innocent citizen. That the police in the US is a dangerous dog is a problem in itself, but unleashing a dangerous dog to harm someone is a crime.

Bank will freeze funds indefinitely until they can make a decision.

It's not applicable to what the swat has to deal with: hostage situations, armed fights, bombings, etc... they can't hold on the phone forever and do nothing.

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