Comment by kempbellt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kempbellt | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any suggestions for how we should actually handle situations like these?

Kids playing video games and getting very angry at other players online, is going to happen. Is there something that can be done at this level?

I remember hearing things back in my high-school COD days. Kids are brutal, and terrible at coping with their emotions. Saying things like "I'll stab you! You ....", at the drop of a hat. I always wrote off these types of threats as a form of venting. But then again, I never shared any personal information with people online. So I wasn't worried.

Swatting... This has been going on for quite some time now. Maybe we can start here? Train responders to be aware of these potential scenarios - that the whole thing _could be_ BS, and you should approach the situation open-mindedly, rather than expecting a battle. De-escalation training, etc. Why are police not showing up and assessing the situation first hand these days? Before taking a 911 caller's word as gospel. Assess the situation, on-site.

Giving some kid more prison time will not dissuade others. There's a lot of research done to show that negative reinforcement like this doesn't work.

> Does anyone have any suggestions for how we should actually handle situations like these?

Mandatory country wide minimal training standards for all LEOs, automatic investigation when a shot is fired, demilitarization, getting rid of trigger happy or clearly racist officers, lowering qualified immunity to a remotely sensible level, it's not like there wouldn't be approaches that work in other countries. Oh and of course doing something about America's gun culture on the other side would be another good start but that's never going to happen either.

The best response in the US so far seems to be registering on potential victims lists like in Seattle (https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-stop-swatting-before-it-h... - HN discussions exist if you're interested).

The victim list is a good idea, but it wouldn't have prevented this shooting - the victim in this case was simply the hapless individual living at the former address of the intended target (who gave that address to the swatter).

The victim list did recently prevent the attempted swatting of Seattle author Ijeoma Oluo: https://www.newsweek.com/author-so-you-want-talk-about-race-...

Sure, I didn't want to imply that the list itself is a bad idea, it's surely a necessity that works. The "best response" part was merely to point out that more substantial preventative actions, like better training, would be preferrable in my view to shift the paradigm to a world where "swatting" isn't a realistic thing in the first place.

> Does anyone have any suggestions for how we should actually handle situations like these?

You shouldn't be able to call in a hit on someone by calling the cops on them.

It's very simple. Swatting is not a thing in most other countries. Where I live, I'm pretty sure the police would survey the situation and first seek verbal contact (via phone, through the door, through a window, etc.) before storming in. Maybe they'd even nicely knock and ask what's going on. The problem really is the US police. The US police needs to be demilitarised and trained in deescalation. That's all there is to it. The man who died in the case referred in this article was shot for no reason at all except that someone was a bit too trigger happy. No policeman was in any danger at all.

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