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Comment by Joe-Z | Hacker News Reader

Well, I guess if you‘re in the US it is perfectly reasonable to expect police (even „special tactics“ teams) to just immediately shoot people on the sole base of a phone call and thus all of the responsibility lies on the caller.

Remember kids: Don‘t use emergency services, they might get someone killed.

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I think it's reasonable anywhere to expect an emergency call to result in prejudice, whether that's police being apprehensive with regard to a suspected dangerous person, or firefighters being willing to break into a building they believe someone to be unconscious in. Treating all emergency calls as false until proven otherwise would put lives in danger, be it emergency responders or the public.

The danger that hoaxes inherently present, and that ignoring potential hoaxes also presents, means that hoaxers must be deterred.

Your comment is of course much more reasonable than mine. I too would expect police to show up or SWAT kick in a door if a terrorism threat was called on someone. Blaming the murder of an innocent person on the hoaxer however seems perverse.

This guy is sentenced to 20 years in prison for what he probably perceived as a 'prank call' at the time. That's insane!

As noted in another comment of mine, they didn't blame murder on him, but instead prosecuted more technical, less interpretable crimes.

I agree that murder may be an excessive charge given lack of intent, yet in the United States murder is often broadened to include committing a serious crime (felony) where there is a clear danger of killing someone, and it resulted in death. Then again, I would argue that this goes well beyond just a 'prank call' in that there is intent to specifically victimise someone by deceiving armed agents.

If his idea of a harmless prank involves subjecting someone to that kind of danger then I’m not so sure. Another fun prank: kidnap someone and hang them on a cliff over a lethal fall, with a 80% chance they’ll survive.

I rather doubt even 0.1% of swattings result in deaths, how can you compare that to a 80% chance of survival?

Citation needed. Without going any further SWAT--of what I've read, this was back in 2011--shoots all dogs on sight, as soon as it enters the building, as standard operating procedure.

Number doesn’t matter so much, I just personally don’t want to be swatted. It sounds horrible and traumatizing.

Repeatedly threatening someone with death falls under torture.

You're right, it should have been life in prison.

Death is a known possible outcome in most SWATers' minds, and they often make jokes to that effect, or jokes about killing people's dogs (and dogs have indeed been killed due to SWATings). They'll often make false claims like "someone is being held at gunpoint, it looks like an automatic weapon". They're knowingly gambling with people's lives when they claim there's an active hostage situation in someone's house. This is not just a prank or hoax.

The SWATer absolutely shares responsibility for their death, even if they don't hold sole responsibility. 20 years seems like an appropriate sentence to me.

I had "an incident" with someone who was having a psychological break. He had a phone, but didn't know how to use it, didn't really know where he was. Other folks wanted to immediately call the cops. The cops were the last thing on the list that would have helped anyone and could have in high likelihood made this guys life 100x worse if not over.

Weird, are you the same poster as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607028, or did they copy paste your comment?

Looks like he copy-pasted it. I was confused too.

So who do you call when you’re dying?

Of course you call emergency services.

In a country with 300 million privately owned firearms, if the police receive a call ostensibly from a hostage-taker threatening to murder several people, they're going to respond in a much different manner than if you call for medical assistance.

This is why SWATing is so pernicious. We let basically anyone buy seriously dangerous weapons up to and including assault/battle rifles, let all of our police match firepower, and then dramatically underfund mental health services such that murder and hostage-taking is a regular occurrence. Just a stellar combination for internet 'pranksters' to exploit.

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