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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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