SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
You shouldn't be able to make an anonymous phone call and have the police bust down someone else's door guns drawn.
An unverified phone call alone should not amount to probable cause. That's not civilization.
To your point though - the fact that the swatting has resulted in innocent deaths is evidence that law enforcement is too aggressive.
There's like so many steps along the way where you can make an assessment of the situation before going FULL SWAT-raid. Mother in a night gown opening the door, yawning? Probably not a threat.
I'm not saying I want the job handling these situations or that it's easy, but "well, someone called, let's send in the Wet Ops team!" can't be the only answer, either! There's even videos of cops handling this super calm and professionally, basically how I described it above. So it's not impossible.
This is because in your country it is exceedingly unlikely the cops will receive a barrage of high powered assault rifle fire after knocking. The militarization of police in the US is a complicated problem that ultimately stems from our proliferation of guns which turn every interaction cops have into a potentially deadly one.
The US cops have talked about escalating risks for years but US cops haven't faced actual escalating dangers. One can track the actual danger faced by police and it has been declining.
The problem is the average citizen gets their information from TV dramas where cops indeed constantly face dangers.
headline: "Once again: police work is NOT getting more dangerous"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/10/02/...
I haven't seen many cop series lately but my impression is most police actors in hollywood don't dress up like John Rambo in fighting in the jungle.
https://www.journal-news.com/news/local/local-police-boost-a...
https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/crime--law/police-ex...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/15/local-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/09/police...
In part, this is driven by programs (as mentioned in the USA today article) where the local police forces can get the equipment itself at no cost (they only pay the maintenance, cost of shipping the equipment, and cost of storing the equipment, or any other local accommodations; all of which are a bargain compared to its actual cost)
The question is whether this level of danger is a sufficient to justify police tactics that severely endanger civilians such as no-knock raids - factors that make "SWATing" so dangerous for the average person.
The further factor here is that the false belief that there's an armed camp ready to attack cops instantly with automatic rifles can give one the distorted impression that no-knock and related tactics will save lives.
However, the reality is there are few people ready to knowingly engage the cops (since even if you win, you lose against the authorities) but there citizens who have guns ready for persons known who might be breaking into their home and so SWAT tactics can be as likely to draw fire and casualties as to avoid them in the real world. And kill innocent of course.
I would never be an advocate for the kind of no-knock raids the article is describing. I'm not addressing that by contesting the use of those statistics. My point is more that _any_ risk of getting shot in the line of duty changes the entire playing field. Just because it's declining doesn't mean that it's insignificant. That being said, as said before I'm not advocating for the kind of overwhelmingly violent responses that SWATting describes.
I don't have an opinion on that, having not looked at the data, but it is entirely plausible.
stoking the fears of the average citizen to be fearful of cops likely increases their risk of death on the job which is all this does.
SWATting and police militarization seems to have started after the September 11, 2001 attack in New York.
Regardless of your opinion on the issue, it's pretty clear that "gun ownership" and "police kicking down doors" don't correlate.
I own guns, as my father did before me and his father before him. All my brothers own guns. We're sportsmen, hunting is a popular recreation where we live.
Of all the guns in my family, not one has ever hurt a human being. Not a single incident, over many decades and who knows how many shots fired.
I have many friends with the same situation-- I don't know of anyone who has ever shot another human being. Not a single one.
The problem is the dramatic drop in respect for other people and their lives. Some people have lost respect, they are dangerous. It's not the gun's fault.
In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 deadly, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000.
There are a roughly similar amount of fatalities related to guns, though more than 50% of those are suicides.
I'd suggest... you know... following the rule of law.
Basically, the whole presumption of innocence thing.
A call is a great reason to respond... with inquiry.
Guns ready sure IN the event and inquiry leads to life and death situation... but that should be after the fact of an inquiry: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
It's not up to me to find solutions that don't violate peoples rights. It's up to the people wanting solutions. Just because you have a problem doesn't put you above the law.
Same goes for everyone under the concept of rule of law. As someone who is dealing with a US Naturalization, the rule of law as a concept is drilled in hard. Shame people born with the right don't understand it.
Exactly! Especially since law enforcement has (successfully!) argued that they have no legal duty to serve and protect you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksim_Gelman_stabbing_spree#L...
You can't have your cake and eat it too!
If you don't have an obligation to protect, you don't have immunity when you shoot at anyone who is not shooting at you.
IANAL. My understanding is police have a duty to the public at large, not to an individual person outside of a special relationship (i.e. witness protection). If the police did have a duty to individuals, the state would be unable to allocate police resources to best serve the public. Essentially, individual priorities would DDOS police resources. In the case you reference:
> a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen. [...] A publicly maintained police force constitutes a basic governmental service provided to benefit the community at large by promoting public peace, safety and good order. [...] Publicly furnished police protection may accrue to the personal benefit of individual citizens, but at all times the needs and interests of the community at large predominate.
A fatal SWATing recently should have raised so many red flags - caller was from an overseas number, described the house as two story when it was one, gave the wrong house color, and said that they could see things through the window from the street (when there were no windows visible from the street).
Furthermore, why do police feel obligated to respond to a phonecall that could be fake but not to a tweet, email, IM, etc?
The system is broken, phones that can call cops should have strict provenance standards.
If you're sending cops with guns to someone's house at 3am you should be required to prove your identity.
"Is something on fire?" "Is someone injured?" "I'm sorry, 911 is for emergencies only, not personal therapy"
For the moment, replace "swatting" with bona fide criminals behind the door. If the swat teams ended up killing some of those criminals that wouldn't be evidence of over-aggression on the part of law enforcement.
Since you posit that "gun drawn" is the reasonable response to swatting, then the same logic applies. You're obligated to continue wearing your devil mask for that sentence, so you have to explicitly argue why that isn't the case. :)
Yes, it would. Our police are not, as the saying goes, "judge, jury, and executioner." Those "bona fide criminals behind the door" are only accused of a crime and are entitled to a vigorous defense and day in court. They are definitely not to simply be gunned down in response to the arrival of the police.
Yes, if those people happen to do something threatening that requires lethal response--like shooting at the responding officers--then the officers are entitled to defend themselves. But police officers simply happening to show up where criminal activity is occurring does not give those officers license to "kill some of those criminals." That is over-aggression on the part of law enforcement and, sadly enough, is one of the major problems we're dealing with in Seattle in relation to our police, petty crime, the ways our police force have reacted in the past, and how to balance the competing needs.
The solution is to take these reports seriously, but with a grain of salt. i.e. don't just shoot a guy that walks out of his house while confused.
I understand police in the US has to adapt to the assumption that everyone has a gun, but even when you suspect a hostage situation what's the problem with politely knocking and waiting if you get a friendly response?
That might be a big part of the 'root cause' of this issue.
The United States has had a high level of gun ownership for several hundred years. The police response of "respond to anonymous tip by kicking down the door and opening fire" seems to be a mostly post-9/11 thing.
I suspect that the root causes are multifold:
(1) No-knock warrants became legal in 1995 to prevent the "destruction of evidence" during drug busts.
(2) Americans got really paranoid after 9/11, and more tolerant of this sort of police activity.
(3) Increasingly harsh prison conditions and unfair sentencing encourages suspects to fight back, rather than comply with law enforcement.
(4) We have a number of well-funded and well-trained paramilitary criminal organizations in the United States, thanks largely to the War on Drugs and decades of poorly-thought-out immigration policy.
Modern semi-automatic (double-action) revolvers were commonplace as of 1900.
Both of the above fired highly lethal ammunition, with rates of fire and reload not that far from modern semi-automatics, which were themselves common by the 1920s.
At which time you could mail-order a machine gun to your front door, which is So Not Even Remotely Close To Legal today.
Body armor suitable for police wouldn't become commonplace until the 2000s.
Ergo, for 130+ years, the police faced a populace armed with high-capacity assault weapons. And for most of that time, they did so with six-shot .38 revolvers and no bulletproof vests.
And only in the past twenty-odd years has kicking in doors with guns blazing become, somehow, necessary.
So, no, gun ownership, even of high-powered, high-capacity assault weapons, doesn't correlate at all to police violence.
In contrast to this, in the US, there appears to be practically no accountability for the police: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2019/07/18/cop-who-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SThUJTApA5I
In this case, they smelled smoke coming from the unit, which is why the fire department broke down the door, and the officers didn't go in expecting to get shot at.
It's easy to fault the police when they respond with guns drawn, but at the same time it's often impossible for them to know what they're about to walk into.
I'm not saying being a police officer is an easy job, but isn't that what they signed up for? "To protect and serve" (despite being legally challenged and rejected when actually taken to court where an officer refused to engage with shooters) seems to be their mantra, and they talk about putting their lives on the line for the public safety.
I fear the problem is the police are more interested in protecting themselves than protecting the public, at least in the United States.
Being a cop in an area like Japan, where you mostly drink tea and stand watch outside of the police box trying to fight boredom’s is one thing. Responding to a call in Baltimore is another.
Cops are cops they are not Seal team, they collect paycheck and want to come back home alive and undamaged, expecting anything else from them is unrealistic.
I once pulled over a few blocks from a friend's house, so I could call her and get a few final directions. A man from the house I had parked in front of instantly started talking ominously and yelling at me. I think that guy was a meth head crazed out of his mind. In the back of my mind was the possibility that he'd bring out a shotgun and start blazing away at me. (Yes, my friend didn't live in a great neighborhood.) The police here have to be prepared to deal with people like that.
I think friendly looking police androids are going to be quite helpful.
Surveillance is orthogonal to the use of authentication, although is a natural consequence of needing to keep tracking of billing records.
In a pre-adtech surveillance capitalism world, it was possible to physically enter a location and be known to some but not all.
An IFF system that's readable only to friends addresses much this need.
It's not super scalable (that's why numbers are spoofed instead) but for a couple calls it'd be no problem.
The problem isn’t that the police respond to a false alarm. The problem is that they sometimes shoot people when they do.
Maybe it works in military conflicts, but in civilian policing, it gets too many ~innocents killed.
911 call taker: “Thanks for your report. We’ll work on verifying this and might be able to get out there in 2-3 weeks.”
I don't think there can be any one-size-fits-all solution to this - each case must be assessed on its own merits.
Police: “Well, thanks for that. Have a nice day”...
Police don’t bust in and start opening fire, so your description of how this works is simply false, and removing their ability to respond to emergencies is absurd.
What's (relatively) new is that they've discovered they can summon their own personal army in the form of an increasingly militarized police force.
Now, I imagine swat teams don't like doxxing either. Sounds like a business opportunity.
* One officer sees a suspect drawing a weapon, and reacts more quickly than the others or the suspect is not visible to the other officers, and thus fires a justified shot and saves a fellow officer's life.
* One officer misinterprets an innocent gesture, fires an unjustified shot and takes the life of a suspect/innocent person.
Furthermore, I'd worry that the diffusion of responsibility means that the officers fire more often, under the belief that their fellow officers agreed with their course of action, or are indicating that they are in danger (by trying to fire), or that they don't believe they alone have taken the decision to kill, so can justify shooting at a lower perceived level of threat.
See for instance firing squads:
> This is believed to reinforce the sense of diffusion of responsibility among the firing squad members. This diffusion of responsibility makes the execution process more reliable because the members are more likely to aim to kill if they are not entirely blamed for it, or if there is a chance they did not fire the lethal shot. It also allows each member of the firing squad to believe afterwards that he did not personally fire a fatal shot—for this reason, it is sometimes referred to as the "conscience round".
With respect to the diffusion of responsibility effect, I think you are probably right that there are lots of possible unintended consequences. In as much as an officer decision to pull the trigger explicitly or implicitly takes in to account the reduced feelings of guilt and increased feelings of peer support in case the weapon is in fact fired, and if it takes into account the smaller likelihood that pulling a trigger will actually discharge the weapon, it may well increase the frequency which the trigger is pulled. More darkly, one could imagine a squad of officers making it into a distributed game of Russian Roulette.
On the other hand, I think this highlights the limits of our imagination. For example, one could imagine the following alternative. Each officer has a body cam, and a pair at base, who is actively monitoring the camera. A decision to fire the weapon must involve both the person on the ground, and the buddy. Or one could have a supervisor of some sort, who can override individual decisions, and so forth.
I don't have the answer, but I think it warrants thinking about.
I think under those circumstances, having a consensus algorithm in place would diminish the likelihood of it occurring, since, presumably multiple agents would have to have the fear reflex at the same moment. Unless agents are getting feedback from others about their trigger pools, or decide before hand that they are going to do it all together, I just don't see the scenarios you describe being realized. Of course, if cops go in with the idea that they are gonna kill someone, then they are no longer behaving lawfully.
My real issue with the idea is how practical it would be. If an officer's gun didn't go off when it should have, and they were killed, then people are going to be really upset.
According the FBI there's been 250 between 2000-2017. https://www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-eng...
I also think it's important to understand why the police respond like they do. It isn't arbitrary, it's statistically suppose to save lives, but SWATing is intentionally abusing that response.
As a first responder who has trained with, and documented photographically, multiple active shooter scenarios (training, at high schools, community colleges and even malls) and responded to more than one...
These scenarios are not active shooter events. That is someone well, actively shooting. Usually with confirmation from 911 dispatchers ("we have gunshots in the background of the call").
Usually these situations are highly Hollywood-ized. One caller described "I can see from the street through the window - they have the whole family on their knees, hands on heads and have guns to their heads, about to execute them all".
More worryingly are stories of sending quantities of drugs (often possession, not even supply levels) to a residence - that shouldn't be able to evoke a no-knock SWAT response in the first place.
Doesn't that strike you as something people might say but never do? Kind of like innocence until proven guilty? I mean of course the state and its employees don't think like that.
Edit: There seems to be some confusion below. I'm not excusing the police of their responsibility by any means. Its important to remember the vast majority of swatting incidents end without violence, thanks almost entirely to the professionalism of the men who have just kicked down a door (or chose not to kick down the door, but knock instead) and found out that the phone call they got about a guy in his living room butchering small children is actually just a dude playing video games or whatever.
Edit2: I'm a pretty libertarian fellow but if you are incapable of thinking of a scenario where you would want the police to kick in your door and storm your house with guns, then you either have no imagination, or you live in a magical fairy tale land and I'm super jealous.
Making a 911 call is an anonymous venture; there's no deposition or oath or penalty of perjury here. A civilized society is one in which calls made to such an endpoint (whether by a human or bot or whomever) are treated accordingly.
Police need to stop killing people. Stop violating people's rights. SWAT teams have not made society better and are easily deprecated. That's the real message here.
All 911 calls are and should be taken seriously though. Even when you misdial 911 they will sometimes even send a car out to make sure, unless you explain yourself well over the phone.
So these scammer guys will always be able to get a police response, especially as long as phone calls can be spoofed to look like it's coming from "inside" the house. The only variable is how the police handle it and, of course, how many sociopaths there are who can pull it off properly without getting caught.
It depends what "taken seriously" means here. If it means followed-up upon in a rapid way to see if there is any corroborating information to indicate that there's a real emergency, then sure.
If it means instead to suppose that any of the provided information is true tout court, then no, this is a recipe for ongoing disaster.
It's important to have a rapid, anonymous reporting system. It's also important to have auxiliary systems in place to verify information that comes in through this system.
I don't really follow the Marvel universe very closely outside of X-men, but isn't Captain America a figure who stands in contrast to government overreach, Nazism, police brutality, etc? I think of him as being a sort of left libertarian.
I think we might actually need more Captain Americas in these situations, not less.
What's a left libertarian? A liberal socialist? Those words are opposite.
Many times they don't even need to bother that far. A fatal incident last year involved a 911 call from an overseas number (that couldn't accurately describe the house he was supposedly looking at as he called). There has to be some astronomical odds about you internationally roaming, and seeing a supposed multiple execution style homicide "from the sidewalk", but yet, SWAT still showed up, and killed someone.
edited for grammar all happy now.
It's the only way it will change.
Untold thousands of regular joe's get hit with this every year. No one cares since it only happens to 'the bad guys'.
When you have authoritarianism, it doesn't always go your way. That's why we should be against authoritarian tactics, such as sending armed men to break down doors and terrorize people over an anonymous phone call (I personally think we should draw the line in the sand much more on the side of freedom, but this basic level should be agreed by all)
I grew up long enough ago when there was a feeling that the Western world was superior to the Iron and Bamboo curtains because these things didn't happen in America.