Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over his rare Twitter handle | Hacker News Reader

Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over his rare Twitter handle

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536 pointsmiles592 comments

If you ever used Fidonet or BBS mail, this was Mark “Sparky” Herring, who developed the .QWK file format, that tragically died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)

I'm surprised this isn't higher up.

Please see this heartbreaking Twitter thread from Jason Scott on Sparky Herring and QWK

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1417941046781259782?s=2...

Thats tragic! :( I never met with that guy but I spent some time making an QWK program for RISC-OS (Archimedes). RIP Mark!

OMG - I loved .QWK and the universe around it. Indeed I often lament the wish that web forums would support something like QWK so I could use a reader/editor of my choice - web forums suck. What a senseless tragedy :(

Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call? It would be nice to know the stats on false alarms vs actual threats in SWAT deployments. Having a prior would help a Bayesian analysis.

To be maximally fair they didn't kill the old guy a heart attack did which might have been unavoidable.

Are we victim blaming now? Is that what we’re doing?

Are we being deliberately obtuse in order to inject left-wing buzzwords into situations where they're completely inapplicable? It's that what we're doing?

I meant the cops dont apear to be at fault for a change.

That's stupid.

If you shoot someone, we don't say that technically the bullet killed them not the person who fired the shot.

That's a false equivalence. If you shoot someone with a gun, it's reasonable to expect them to die. It is not a reasonable expectation that someone will die when you ask them their name and tell them to put down their weapon.

You can reasonably know that shooting a person with a bullet will cause injury or death. Telling them to drop their weapon and surrender does not usually cause injury or death.

I meant the cops might not be at fault

I went googling and found this: A study at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has demonstrated that sudden emotional stress can result in reversible heart failure[1]. It goes on "a traumatic event such as a breakup, the death of a loved one, or even the shock of a surprise party can provoke a heart attack in people who don't have heart disease and are otherwise healthy, researchers say". and

"Dr. Wittstein and his research team found that some people may respond to sudden, overwhelming emotional stress by releasing large amounts of adrenalin and other chemicals into the blood stream. These chemicals can be temporarily toxic to the heart, effectively stunning the muscle and producing symptoms similar to those of a typical heart attack: chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure. However, there are no further similarities between "broken heart" syndrome and cardiac arrest. Closer inspection using blood tests and magnetic resonance imaging scans failed to show the typical heart attack signs, such as irreversible muscle damage and elevated levels of certain enzymes."

If that happened, it would have been avoidable; it doesn't necessarily mean he was sickly and this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

(Aside: I wonder if anyone here would think comparable things of the organizers of a surprise party, 16 years after it's published in a medical journal that they can be fatal? What if the birthay person was known to hate surprise parties? Anyone calling for a death penalty or years in prison?)

[1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2005/03/sudden-shock-c...

I meant the cops aren't necessarily at fault as the unavoidable stress of such a confrontation might have inevitably ended in a difficult to predict or mitigate health complications.

Swatting has a predictable risk of mortality thus the criminals don't get off morally because their victim died a different way than expected.

> "because their victim died a different way than expected."

I haven't seen a claim that the perpetrators expected the man to die - didn't they want to harass and scare him until he gave up his Twitter handle? If he was dead they'd have no chance of getting access to it, therefore they likely were not planning for him to die, right?

They were ok risking him being killed in order to obtain the expected benefit. If you beat someone killing them is a predictable risk. It constitutes merely a lesser crime in the same category.

I am not agreeable to the claim that minors who called a SWAT raid internationally because of a Twitter account were really forseeing all the possible consequences and rationally deciding they were OK with them. I'm also not okay with you claiming a militarised police force SWAT raid was "unavoidable".

I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT or any kind of "raid". It was simply a bunch of cops according to the family members in the video. They did not enter his house, they merely approached it. He appears to live in a rural area.

Swatting is used to mean calling the authorities with a fake crisis so subject people at the address targeted to risk and inconvenience it has nothing to do with the resulting police response.

If Barney Fife showed up to kindly ask you if you were ok you would have been swatted just not very effectively.

> "I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT or any kind of "raid"."

The article uses this picture: https://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2019/03/20...

Google reverse image search for that suggests a search term of "fbi swat team" and first result is a wikipedia link to "FBI Special Weapons and Tactics Teams". The picture is from the Wikipedia page on swatting which says it is "an FBI SWAT team during training". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting

Yes it's clearly not a photo of the actual event. Are you complaining that you were misled? or are you suggesting "techbase" uses of stock photos is more authoritative than their own primary sources which I just summarized for you?

You said "I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT" and I'm pointing you to where the article implies actual SWAT was involved, with their use of a photo of an actual SWAT team.

The police aren't the initiators of the death here. They get a call that someone is shot, and that soon others will be killed, they are going to call SWAT.

> They get a call that someone is shot, and that soon others will be killed, they are going to call SWAT.

There is no law of nature requiring that police departments react that way. It is up to us as a society to decide what behavior we desire.

If, for instance, I were to learn that 90% of all calls for SWAT teams are from "swatting" (baseless prank calls performed to create the reaction) while 10% were actual life-or-death situations it would affect my opinion of the right way for police to handle it.

So I think knowing the actual statistics is important.

You really think 90% could be pranks? Anything could potentially be a prank, that doesn't change the fact someone could be in imminent danger. Police need to always both exercise caution and respond quickly to potential crimes.

There’s no winning for the cops.

It’s a really hard job where you have to walk the correct route through a protocol in an emergency, often while being in danger yourself

Crazy that this is being downvoted. The cops were responding to a call about a armed gunman actively killing. If they respond slowly or tepidly and people die, then they get yelled at. If they respond quickly and decisevly and they have been lied to, they get yelled at. They are not omnipotent.

They could win a lot more by being smarter. Their tactics are terrible. A lot of crime could be (and is) de-escalated without the police there. They can be better trained and informed to deal with different scenarios without pulling their weapon, shouting commands, etc. They can have a better relationship in their communities. There's a lot of evidence that alternative methods result in less harm.

The "protocol" for police is also dictated by their unions and the way laws around police use of force are interpreted. In general they know they are safe if they simply kill a person as soon as they perceive a threat. They will be legally covered and physically out of harm's way. This therefore incentivizes them to use lethal force, because they have no incentive not to use lethal force.

Yes, police have a hard job. But it could be a lot less hard (for them) if laws and policies are reformed.

I'd recommend reading mcherm's comment again. He doesn't state that 90% could be pranks. He states "If, for instance, I were to learn that 90% ..." This is called "reductio ad absurdum", and is a pretty standard method of arguments. The statement from x86_64Ubuntu was that a report of violence in all cases is responded to by a SWAT team, with the implication that this is correct and reasonable behavior in all circumstances.

From my reading, mcherm is giving a hypothetical scenario in which the automatic response of sending a SWAT team would be unreasonable. The conclusion isn't that we exist in that hypothetical scenario, but that more information is needed in order to determine whether and how close we may be to it.

Yes but the reasonableness of that hypothetical can still be challenged. This isn't a math proof, but a discussion of the reasonableness of a policy.

Correct, and the hypothetical establishes that the proportion of maliciously false calls is essential for determining the reasonableness of the policy. At 0% maliciously false calls, reasonable. At 90% maliciously false calls, unreasonable. Clearly, that number is important to the discussion, which is the sole point of introducing the hypothetical.

Thank you for explaining this so clearly.

This is a repeat of the same argument. An unrealistic hypothetical does not establish that we need to consider something in the real world. Hypothetically perhaps UFO's were beaming ideas into the cops' heads, hence we cannot trust their statements and need an alternative data source. Nope, this is preposterous so we can go ahead and not worry about concerns based solely on this argument.

What percentage of alerts triggered by home security systems are false alarms? I don't have authoritative numbers, but I kind of thought "everybody knows" it's most of them.

I'm not arguing for 90%, just against assumptions.

The police/SWAT team are the ones who ultimately pull the trigger. They need to do their due diligence before doing so.

"Someone else told me XYZ" doesn't absolve you of responsibility for your actions. The people who called in with a false report certainly share in that responsibility, but it's not solely theirs.

They didn't pull the trigger at all. They just showed up.

True, but did they show up aggressively and unannounced stormed into the guy's house or land while armed to the teeth and totally shock him into death?

They didn’t storm anything. They responded to the call and the man came at the police with a gun. They de-escalated.

What are you proposing they should have done? Just waited it out from a distance?

The kids initiated the whole thing and used the cops as proxy. The actions of the police can’t be ignored. To place all blame on the kids is to pretend that hyper mobilization of a quasi military is okay.

To take this further if someone malicious caused me to do something catastrophic at work should I be absolved of all accountability? Sure, I am not the person who did the malicious thing because I had no intent, but I did still do it. Maybe I shouldn’t be fired but the security policies and procedures should be changed for the entire company to prevent this from happening again.

So what exactly do you think the police shouldn't have done here?

Noone has an answer because people just want to be mad at the police.

why is swatting a very american thing? how come other countries police departments don't seem to have an issue with it?

What happens in other countries when the police receive an anonymous report of an ongoing violent crime at a residence?

What do the police in those countries do differently?

not send swat? actually at that not have a swat team that needs to justify its existence?

You are asking other people to explain your associations and assumptions.

If you want to discuss a topic in a productive manner, the first thing to do is to honestly say something about what you believe and why.

What actual observations of the world led you to your generalizations?

No i'm responding to someone who things "there is no other way to respond" when clearly given many other countries don't have this problem, there must be?

> is to pretend that hyper mobilization of a quasi military is okay.

To stop a shooter? Yes it is.

Need actual evidence there is a shooter beyond just a phone call.

By the time you have that evidence, the evidence will be being carried out in body bags if there is a shooter.

"Perhaps the most notable aspect of the deadly force findings is that SWAT officers rarely discharge their firearms at human targets. We estimated that across the hundreds of team years for which we had data that SWAT officers took suspects under fire in just 342 of the tens of thousands of operations they undertook"

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/223855.pdf

I don't think that most SWAT responses are actually saving lives with bullets. Also included in that paper is a table showing that most frequently, SWAT is used to serve warrants.

I’m glad that most SWAT incidents end without the team firing any rounds. To me, that’s a success case and a better outcome than if the metric showed “50% of the time, officers discharged their weapons”. It’s not a waste when their body armor goes untested on a call either.

If a warrant serving situation seems dangerous enough to use SWAT, I hope they use them and no rounds are fired. That’s a good warrant service, not a failure, in my book.

Can you describe the process you are suggesting?

"After receiving a phone call concerning an active shooter situation, the force sent round a single officer, just to double-check. The officer was among the 7 killed by the gunman."

Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? The sheep were slaughtered because the town stopped trusting him. I'd rather the police scare a few unlucky people and waste some resources than learn to distrust our cries for help. Of course it's a tragedy that someone lost their life, but how many lives would be lost through not mobilising enough police?

Do you think we need corroborating evidence of a fire before rolling a fire truck, or is a phone call enough there?

The difference is that the fire brigade don't tend to run into a house and shoot the occupants.

Well in the case that we are discussing here, the police didn't shoot the guy.

No it is not. For that you send the police, not the military and not quasi military.

Totally agree.

This is basically the same as blaming the first-day developer that wipes the production database. It's more on the police to change their behavior than to expect kids to stop being imbeciles.

In my opinion, in these swatting incidents, the most responsible party is the police department answering the call without doing even a modicum of due diligence. The kids are stupid -- as kids will be, but there's not way a prank call should be able to summon a death squad to someone's door without there being _some_ checks.

Not doing due diligence is a legacy of Columbine, where waiting cost lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...

They waited for very long time after many reports of shooting. The ongoing shooting was heard outside. You talk about the change of tactic in case of multiple times reported mass shooting in public building.

It is not nearly the same situation.

"There's a shooting going on at my neighbor's. Someone's already dead! Help! Help!"

"Hang on... While we do due diligence!"

What due diligence would or could the police do? Maybe they could tell if the caller location was far away or overseas, but beyond that...

My intuition, without seeing the relevant data, is that rapid police response is worth the cost of occasional swatting.

Is it? I am asking a real question. How many people are saved by rapid police response vs. killed inadvertently? Where is there data that could be used to answer that question?

I don't know. It's simply my intuition. I know that I would want the police to respond rapidly if I called them about a shooter. I also know that swatting deaths are rare enough to get broad news attention, whereas I rarely hear about people saved by rapid police response, though I know they exist.

I sometimes look at the Citizen app (though I don't have notifications on) and there seem to be multiple instances that would benefit from a rapid response daily - theft, threats, domestic violence, shots fired, etc. I myself recently witnessed a fight and another passerby called the police. The police arrived within minutes and settled what might've escalated into a worse situation. I'm not aware of any swattings in my location, let alone fatal ones.

I'd be curious to see data on this problem.

> I also know that swatting deaths are rare enough to get broad news attention, whereas I rarely hear about people saved by rapid police response, though I know they exist.

Swatting destroys peoples house, traumatize people, injures people pretty much on the regular. And no one will pay you back for what was destroyed.

Just because no one died does not mean no damage was done.

Due diligence would have to still require a team showing up, but how aggressively the team behaves needs to be based on any actual data/evidence they can gather on-site, rather than operating on assumptions.

There is no way you can ask or expect police to show up to what may be an active shooter situation and be more passive. They may be entering a situation where split second reactions mean the difference between life and death.

If the difference is between life and death for the police, then absolutely they should be required to evaluate the situation. If that results in the police being killed, that is fine. They signed contracts saying they accept this potential consequence. On the other hand, the purported criminals have not been tried and found guilty. Until that has occurred they are innocent.

So if that means that when SWAT shows up, they walk in unarmed and get shot..so be it. That is acceptable. Having a potentially innocent person be killed is not.

That may be your opinion. I doubt the police officers who respond to active shooters would share your disregard for their lives though. Even if you think their deaths are acceptable, they likely won't, and will still go in ready to kill - or won't go in at all if they aren't permitted to defend themselves.

Again, the question is really which option is worse. On the one hand we have a zealous police response that will sometimes kill innocent people as a result of things like swatting, being unintentionally misinformed, or even just tragic accidents. On the other hand we have a cautious police response which might minimize the people injured or killed by the causes just discussed but increase the injuries or deaths that result from delays in police response. Which of the two causes the most harm?

As I've said before, my intuition is that a rapid response is the least harmful. I think the policing experts in charge of current policing strategy share that opinion based on current protocols. I understand that you prefer the cautious strategy, but I haven't seen you explain why you think there will be less harm from that strategy.

The police killing an innocent person causes significantly more harm. It is a perversion of justice and societal order. In the long run, it causes far more damage than some people doing during the commission of a crime.

This has been upsetting me about some of what I believe are people raised on the current regime of FAANGesque flattening of society, lot of things have this built in assumption that public services are so unlimited that their cost is not appreciated. Like the gov can be as omnipresent and self sacrificing as a diety.

> There is no way you can ask or expect police to show up to what may be an active shooter situation and be more passive.

Many non-US countries manage this just fine. It seems to be mainly the US where "warrior cop" is a thing.

I don't think that's true. Which countries reply to active shooter calls passively?

> Which countries reply to active shooter calls passively?

The question was "more passive [than the US]" and not "passively" - that would cover, e.g., the UK, who generally don't roll up to active shooter situations with a squadron of heavily armed trigger happy warrior cops like the US does.

"Where are you? Not sure if we can help you neighbor but we can protect you. We'll be at your place in 5 minutes and you'll tell us exactly what you heard and seen and where so we don't go in blind."

How about doing that instead of going to whatever address anyone gives them like a pizza delivery but with blazing guns instead of pizza?

I expect you would wind up with more people dead from slow police response than saved from reduced swatting. Granted, I don't have data to back this belief up, but it seems to me if you're suggesting a change from how the experts currently run things, you should provide data that supports the change.

You assume that police quickly showing up save lives (except only for swatting). This might be true in some cases, like mass shootings.

But in case of domestic disputes it's not that clear cut. Police arrives in minutes, in the heat of the moment, escalate further and they shoot someone, usually the best armed one among people arguing or just the one that has most trouble with calming immediately in the middle of a quarrel. In many cases if they caught a flat tire along the way and arrived 10 minutes later, situation might deescalate till then.

There must be some optimal reaction time for the police otherwise if faster is always better then the best thing would be to each of us having a policemen with loaded gun pointed at the back of our head all the time, half-asleep, ready to be woken up to shoot immediately in reaction to whatever crime we seem to be trying to commit.

In the US many police departments and personnel are under-trained, but no, "the most responsible party" are the human beings doing the swatting, regardless of their age. So if I'm young and "stupid" I can go around murdering people?

This is an utterly irrelevant comparison. A more accurate one would be someone (not necessarily a first-day developer) who wiped the database while trying to cause trouble - though the consequences are not so dire in this case.

This is not just stupidity, it is malicious stupidity.

The boy who called wolf is an old children’s story for a reason.

What alternative behavior do you suggest?

checking the location of thee caller. If its not coming from somewhere nowhere near the location of the supposed shooting maybe be a little suspicious. 9-1-1 calls are supposed automatic location identification as part of the E-9-1-1 system.

Swatters are obviously hacking the system by finding ways around that like spoofing numbers. This is a problem that will always exist, though the phone system certainly needs to be be made more reliable. But there's not much the cops themselves can do as a policy change. These laws you cite also force police to accept calls from burner phones with no identity. In one case the swatter called the local police's non-emergency number which doesn't go through the reverse lookup. It's basically social engineering in these cases.

which just brings up the question of why the telecom's cant identify where there own customers are. They obviously know otherwise they could delver service so why cant they pass that information on accurately. why is it even possible to fake the location.

Not sending out militarized police teams based on anonymous tips.

(FWIW, I've been swatted before, and live in constant anxiety every since. I don't feel safe.)

I suspect that far, far, far, fewer die of heart attacks from being surprised by police than are shot by violent people.

I don’t see anything in the article that claims an actual SWAT team was deployed here, or that the police did anything wrong or irresponsible.

There was a report of an armed gunman who had already killed someone on this guy’s property, so cops went to search for him. What exactly would you have them do differently?

> "He went out the house with a gun, because he heard someone was on his property," Fitch explained. "He sees all these cops around him, and they ask if he is Mark Herring, 'put your hands up,' so he tosses the gun away from him to show he's not a threat, and [put his] hands up."

If not a SWAT team, a large armed response.

What do you propose as an alternative? They can’t send unarmed cops to respond to reports of gun violence, and it wouldn’t be responsible to simply send one cop.

By all accounts, the police responded appropriately and de-escalating the situation when the man came outside with a gun.

I don’t understand what people want to be different about this situation, other than for the police to become clairvoyant so they can know when reports are false before they get there.

>What do you propose as an alternative?

From the police that regularly chokes people, shots unarmed men, women, and even kids, and likes to play with military gear, and are trigger happy?

Probably one can't expect much of them, anyway.

A competent police would have set up some kind of barricade to stand behind, call for the person to come out, try to watch the house from afar to see what's going on, and in any case, not have several people stand with drawn weapons aiming at a person...

Yes, when there's a report that a gunman has already shot someone, the police should respond by... hiding.

Of course not, they should respond Hollywood-style, so that they create chaos and even more people get a chance to be shot, Mexican Standoff style.

After all if "a gunman has already shot someone", the police can obviously bring that person back to life by charging into the scene guns ablazing...

And, as many SWATing cases have shown us, "when there's a report that a gunman has already shot someone" it's necessarily true!

>What do you propose as an alternative

Send the drones ahead. Flying, walking, tracked, wheeling.

Like that wouldn’t cause a heart attack?

Why send the officers at all and risk their lifes, can't we just install weapons on the drones? Oh yea we probably can. dramatic evil music starts

> it wouldn’t be responsible to simply send one cop

Does that even happen in the USA? I'm in the UK, and I can't remember the last time I saw a solitary cop - they patrol in pairs here.

For low priority stuff it's common enough I'd say it's the standard.

I've heard serving UK police officers elsewhere online say that their department's standard response to reports of hostage situations is to send one officer to drive past the premises in either an unmarked car or their personal car* to see if the report checks out.

In general, cuts to the police have made single crewing a lot more common.

*With the exception of dog handlers, British police aren't allowed to drive home in their patrol cars.

> By all accounts, the police responded appropriately and de-escalating the situation when the man came outside with a gun.

Whose accounts would those be of? Is there a video available for review?

The original Minneapolis PD's report on George Floyd was the only official account of the events prior to the medical examiner's report, and was specifically written to be as detail-free as legally possible.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36179698/minneapolis-...

We’re clear here that that was just what the kid said, all made up right? And no one was actually killed prior to the swat showing up. The article was written pretty confusingly.. anyway sounded to me like the guy was literally just sitting around and happened to have a gun, as you probably would in a rural area, and went into fight or flight once the neighbor told him he was surrounded by armed cops

But I would think - depending on whether prank reports like this are relatively common, as a % of all SWAT calls made legitimate or illegitimate - it’d be better to check out the scene, maybe even knock first if the situation allows it, as a default, to determine any chance that they were just being sent on a wild goose chase by some bored gamers. I guess cases with quote-unquote hostages would preclude that kind of luxury though, dunno

It sounds like the police did a fairly rational thing here. They went to the house in a large group, they asked for the person, told him to out down his weapon, and didn’t shoot him. That sounds like a reasonable response, even though it ended in tragedy.

The only people responsible for this were the people who called the police with a false report. That is the crime.

I think cops do a lot of bad shit and need to be held accountable, but this sounds like they did the right thing.

i dunno but "swatting" seems like a decidedly american thing so how come its not a problem in other countries?

You're asking this on an American-centric forum, secure in the knowledge most Americans aren't paying attention to issues with the police in other countries.

no i'm responding to someone acting like "there is no other way to handle this" who's clearly not considered that other countries handle it rather differently

The person saying there was no way to handle it differently was talking about the specific case in this article where we know the details and can consider each of the police's actions logically using common sense.

What happens in your country when the police receive an anonymous phone call about a violent crime in progress at a residence?

For whatever reason I very rarely hear about swat-like behavior from the Norwegian police, and it is not because media leave them alone.

I hear about unnecessary use of force while detaining someone, a few standoffs against armed opponents, a few car chases but nothing like swatting.

There was no “swat like behavior”. There was no unnecessary use of force. At least that’s my reading.

Not by sending a SWAT team....

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Belgium/Un...

Here you can see we have more crime per 1000 then America. But we have significant less gun crimes and/or violent crimes then US. Also violent crime with murder and murder crime. 1 more trivia item is that we actually have more police officers per capita then America.

Not sure what to conclude. Gun restrictions seem not to curb crime but seems to curb violent crimes and murders. Or maybe we are just less violent :) I'm not sure.

But what I can conclude is that our Police doesn't have to go many times to violent crime scenes and when they go the chance someone is armed with a gun even less likely....

Best I can tell, violent crime has an extremely high correlation with poverty and/or corruption, and little to no correlation with gun restrictions. The presence of extreme outliers is telling. For example, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria, and Norway have high gun ownership rates and relatively relaxed gun regulation, but low violent crime. Venezuela, Mexico, China, and Vietnam have strong firearms restrictions and terrible violent crime rates.

Nothing about this story about Iceland's high rate of gun ownership and low rate of violence says "relaxed gun regulation" to me: https://globalnews.ca/news/4236365/iceland-gun-control-viole...

Very few countries can compete with the US on the ease with which one can buy a firearm, so if that is your standard, sure. But compared to most of the world, that process is pretty damn relaxed, and gun ownership rates are pretty high as a result. And in some selected ways, those countries are even more relaxed: silencers can be purchased over the counter without a permit, and there is no regulatory distinction between short barrel and long barrel rifles. And in some (albeit regulated) cases even modern full-auto rifles can be owned, which isn't even possible in the US...where the newest full auto gun that a civilian can buy was made in 1986 and likely costs >$25k.

While you're probably right that poverty is part of the problem, counting raw number of firearms is misleading.

Norway is mostly hunting rifles for example. Very few handguns.

Policing is also different. Police is usually not carrying guns, but the moment a gun is reported it causes a massive response. As a criminal, bringing a gun massively increases your risk, as without one you're unlikely to run into anyone with a lethal weapon. It also causes a risk of a far longer sentence.

> the moment a gun is reported it causes a massive response. As a criminal, bringing a gun massively increases your risk, as without one you're unlikely to run into anyone with a lethal weapon. It also causes a risk of a far longer sentence.

That's exactly the same in the US, btw. Bringing a gun causes the tactical team to come in rather than the normal cops, and it aggravates the criminal's sentence.

> Bringing a gun causes the tactical team to come in rather than the normal cops

Missing the point, which is that this is a meaningful escalation in Norway where regular cops do not carry guns in most instances. It's a far less meaningful escalation when you're facing armed police either way.

The point both with that and the sentencing is that it creates a sharp escalation from a low risk base.

Escalation only works as a deterrence from negative behaviours if the lowest risk alternative is actually seen as low risk.

Not really what I asked. If the police get a report of an ongoing violent crime, do they respond? If they respond, do they send more than one or two officers? Are those officers armed?

If the answer to all of those questions is "yes", then congratulations, you have exactly the same situation as this case in Tennessee. (If the answer to any is "no", ...?)

"1 more trivia item is that we actually have more police officers per capita then America."

50% more. I'm impressed.

OTOH, that site shows The Netherlands as having ~155 police officers total. I guess they're not counting the 24,000 "peace officers".

New Zealand has 5 total (0.1 / 100,000).

Here in the UK the police attend. They're armed with tasers only (and some don't have those). They're trained to deescalate violence. If they assess the situation is bad enough they can call in armed backup but it's rarely needed.

Depends. Would it be Thursday between 09:00 and 16:00? If so they'd have someone here in 25 minutes. If not, it'd take something like an hour until someone turned up and asked if I wanted to make a report.

Here in germany it depends... if the dispatcher has serious doubts regarding the validity of the call he might simply tell the kid on the phone to "f... off", if there is something sounding valid you might -depending on the region- get either a "visit" from local police or directly from the SEK (the german version of SWAT). But... the SEK has a relative good track record on capturing the subjected fellons alive.

This is a problem technology can help with. Emergency dispatchers could at least verify that any cellular call came from a tower near the supposed address or a landline call is nearby.

I'm not saying police shouldn't respond if the call comes from an IP gateway or a different state - but dispatch should tell them confidence is low and in that case police could approach the scene much more skeptically.

Maybe ask caller to connect via FaceTime or similar for serious cases? IIRC most phones already share precise caller location when calling 911. Everything else should be treated as spam.

> Maybe ask caller to connect via FaceTime or similar for serious cases? IIRC most phones already share precise caller location when calling 911. Everything else should be treated as spam.

That obviously won't work, because you can't expect people in legitimate emergencies to do something like that. Say they don't even have one of those apps installed, is the 911 dispatcher supposed to talk them through installing Zoom before they send help? That's literally a Kafkaesque nightmare (or straight out of a political attack ad).

Honestly, I think the most realistic way to solve this is my making investigations into SWATing really high priority (e.g. dedicated FBI people investigating these crimes), and then handing out heavy, punitive sentences as a deterrent. The only reason anyone does this is they think they can get away with it (and often do). I think it'd stop once that impression is changed.

Don't know much about Android but every iPhone comes out of the box with it. And it shouldn't even be an option, but default. Like smartphone makers should enforce this. Probably require you to stream from both cameras.

> Don't know much about Android but every iPhone comes out of the box with it. And it shouldn't even be an option, but default. Like smartphone makers should enforce this. Probably require you to stream from both cameras.

It's just a terrible idea. I'm guessing it took less than a minute to come up with it, and you spent that time thinking of reasons to support it and almost no time thinking about the problems with it. It's just that bad.

Some obvious problems:

1. You didn't consider the most popular smartphone OS at all.

2. Not everyone has a smartphone.

3. Not everyone who has a smartphone knows how to use all the apps on it, or can figure a new one out in a stressful situation.

4. How exactly do you think someone who's actually being threatened would prove it to the police over a video call (reveal their hiding place to take video of the perp with the gun)?

5. Don't you think the SWATter (or whatever you call them) could fake a video call using some accepted service, like they already fake phone calls?

6. What if there's no data at their location, or the signal is too poor for video but good enough for voice (like my parents' basement)?

7. Etc. (I could go on, but I think I proved my point)

8. They are using a landline.

If they call landline you already know precise location…

Does this apply to VOIP? A lot of POTS phones here in Norway are plugged into the network router not a physical landline.

Definitely not the case with VOIP. I had a case where a roommate in college had to call 911 on our VOIP phone (bad cell service in the house) and we were connected to a dispatcher in a different state (where I had lived previously). I doubt if most people remember to update their location with the VOIP provider when they move.

Yes all of those are issues that don’t even take a second to figure out. But it’s a step forward.

> Yes all of those are issues that don’t even take a second to figure out. But it’s a step forward.

Most of them are dealbreakers. A few even show that your solution won't even properly address the SWATting problem it's ostensibly meant to solve, even ignoring the bad tradeoffs.

I'll grant you it's a step, just not a step forward.

"I think someone is robbing my house, I'm currently hiding in the attic"

"Great, let me send you a calendar invite for a Microsoft Teams meeting. Can you do 13:30? Oh no wait, my supervisor has a clash then... how about 14:45?"

Exactly!

The article doesn't give much details about what the police did. It says there were a lot of them, and that the victim came out of their house with a gun and was told to put their hands up.

So they definitely didn't storm in. And he did have a gun.

> It says there were a lot of them

> ... they definitely didn't storm in.

Yes. There were a lot of them for absolutely no reason but for a completely baseless claim.

> And he did have a gun.

This is irrelevant. He was on his own property and did nothing wrong. The authorities didn't know he had a gun before sending so many cops.

> Yes. There were a lot of them for absolutely no reason but for a completely baseless claim.

How would they know its baseless? If someone broke into your house with a gun do you want the police to show up assuming you're lying?

> Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call?

The article doesn’t say a SWAT team was deployed, just that the police responded to a call. The image of a SWAT team is just a stock photo.

The police also did not “storm” anything. The homeowner went outside with a gun in hand and they de-escalated the situation without “storming” or firing any shots.

I don’t really understand what you want the police to do in these situations where they receive calls about gun crimes in progress. They can’t just assume it’s a prank and wait around to see if anyone dies before they choose to send some police to investigate.

>The police also did not “storm” anything. The homeowner went outside with a gun in hand and they de-escalated the situation without “storming” or firing any shots.

In this case perhaps, but the parents' comment wasn't particular to this instance but generic.

And there are tons of cases where SWATing actually happened, unecessary force was deployed, and so on, sometimes even captured on camera...

>I don’t really understand what you want the police to do in these situations where they receive calls about gun crimes in progress.

The same procedure that is followed in civilized countries would be a good start.

What exactly is that universal "same procedure" that "civilized countries" (please leave such flamebait out btw) follow?

The primary reason this wouldn't happen like this in most other countries is that it's unlikely that the home owner would turn up with a gun - if they did, police would be pointing theirs too. Really the main missed opportunity here seems to be the call of the neighbor, which could have been used to coordinate, but overall it sounds like the one swatting death which really was a dumb accident.

It wasn’t a dumb accident, and law enforcement isn’t to blame in this case. The police response was deliberately incited by a group of malicious individuals. How can minors, who typically are given lighter sentences, be discouraged from “swatting”?

Swatting only seems to exist in the us (afaik?) with a heavily militarized police force full of agro authoritarians trained to prioritize violence and force.

All countries have idiot teenagers…

Maybe we can take the model of other countries that have idiot teenagers but no swatting problem?

> Swatting only seems to exist in the us

I don’t think this is true. I personally know of a case in the UK where due to a false report of a gun, an armed squad was sent to someone’s house.

It may not be discussed as casually as it is in the US, but every country has armed police and they deploy them when they expect guns to be involved.

There’s a fundamental difference between an UK “armed squad”, and SWAT in the US.

perhaps you could describe that “fundamental difference”???

The culture of policing in both places.

So if someone calls in to the UK police that there's been a shooting and a murder and the person has a gun, the cops don't show up with weapons and ready to shoot? How does that work?

Sure, police culture is very different, but this is irrelevant.

It’s just false to claim that swatting is a US only phenomenon or a function of police culture.

It is a US-only phenomenon. So far nobody was able to show an example of this happening in other countries.

Why are you making a false statement when you could easily have checked for yourself?

https://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2015/08/swatting-uk-tr...

The article clearly says it was the first such occurrence. Also, it’s not clear this really was swatting, in that nobody was endangered: the police didn’t storm the house.

The word phenomenon implies repeated occurence, not some one-off or rare situation.

Yeah, there's definitely swatting in the UK.

The use of armed police there is a big deal though. My friend is a police officer in the UK and has a firearm and riot gear for armed responses, and they very rarely use it. When it is used, there's loads of reporting to ensure its use was justified.

I think you would be surprised at the amount of reporting that happens after similar events in the US.

I am an investigative reporter covering US law enforcement and crime. Let me know if you'd like to see some examples of the documentation I am referring to.

Unfortunately the prevalence of guns in America is a seriously mitigating factor on behalf of police blame for swatting here. With ~15,000 gun homicides every year, >20,000 gun suicides, and several tens of thousands of additional shootings, you can’t fault the police for expecting a call about gun violence to actually involve gun violence.

I really really don't think suicides explain or excuse strong aggressive action. The cops themselves are most likely to die or get injured in car accident - due to them being on streets a lot.

America does not have significantly more homicides then other western countries. Most gun homicides are people who know each other shooting each other in dispute. And they are clustered in high violence places making the rest of America safer then average.

Herring approached the police with a gun drawn. That's how things happen in America. In any case, showing a dominant amount of force is imperative for safety in this country where guns are common.

That's just the facts. If we want the police to disarm, we need to first disarm the population. We shouldn't be sending police into armed situations with inferior weapons.

Do you mean superior weapons such as gas grenades?

Guns are the worst, they need line of sight, overpenetrate, protective measures are ineffective, and they might not take the actual target either.

(Only tasers are worse.)

> Only tasers are worse.

Only tasers are worse at killing people. They're perfectly adequate for their intended use; allowing an officer to halt a person who presents a real danger to the officer, when alternatives are not available.

> In any case, showing a dominant amount of force is imperative for safety in this country where guns are common.

Seems like treating every encounter as struggle for dominance instead puts you all in more danger.

Well yeah. But that's America's culture.

So lets take a step back. There's two sides to this encounter. It is common for Americans, when they feel like they're in danger, to approach situations with a gun drawn.

Police, knowing that other Americans will approach them with guns drawn (since criminals see Police as a threat), will also approach with guns drawn.

And guess what? The gun advocate will point out that everyone acted as an adult in this situation. No gunfire was exchanged. The heart attack was unfortunate, but this is actually one of the better situations.

Compare / Contrast instead with say: Breonna Taylor. The Police begin to knock down the door, someone gets confused and shoots at them. The Police shoot back killing Breonna Taylor.

--------

You can't deny that the job that Police do and put themselves in means that Police are expected to get shot at. Changing this expectation will require more than just changing how Police operate, it also means changing America's culture to not have so many freaking guns.

Police are much less likely to be shoot at then rumor has it. Including by "criminals" which is quite wide category.

I also find it ridiculous that a country that says it is OK to defend your house with gun, also says it is OK for police to create situation in which people think they are attacked by violent strangers - where those strangers are cops.

I would argue that showing a dominant amount of force is the norm not an imperative.

Police justify many actionsl/systems/norms based on the fact that their job is dangerous. However they have also, in doing so, created a situation where anything they do to reduce risk to themselves is valid. That hits a limit at some point

You could insist that police behave in a way that actually puts them at some risk…i.e., not presume they will be attacked or to be unarmed. We could decide that that risk is worth it as a society and insist upon it just as we insist that essential workers put themselves at risk during covid to feed us.

If potential risk is always used to justify force, eventually the risk will be gone because force will be the default.

> America does not have significantly more homicides then other western countries.

The US has 2-5x the murder rate of peer nations.

US 4.96/100k

Canada 1.76

UK 1.20

Germany 0.95

Japan 0.26

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...

The usual argument is that if you exclude gang violence then the number is way lower. However, if you arbitrarily throw away the number one cause of violence in other countries, surprisingly enough, their numbers are also way lower.

The murder may count as gang violence whenever one of person is associated with gang - even if actual event happened due to jealousy or other crap. And being associated with gang can be also just due to who you know.

The point is, gang violence as aggregate is not meaningfully different from other violence.

Where the violence takes place in public, the relationship between the perpetrators and victims, the fact that both parties are usually armed, that bystanders are often caught in crossfire, the motives for the violence being beefs over territory, and the minimal events required to trigger the violence.

Except for those and more, it's just like any other violence.

> gang violence as aggregate is not meaningfully different from other violence

This is just false. The reason gang violence is separated out is that gang violence is perpetrated against other gang members.

I.e. the gun violence rate for non-gang members is dramatically lower.

It doesn’t mean gang violence is not a problem. It does mean that unless you are in a gang, the US doesn’t have a high murder rate.

I'm sure for young men growing up in certain neighborhoods, opting out of gang membership is less straight forward than you make it sound.

> is less straight forward than you make it sound.

Where do you think I comment on the ease of opting out of gangs?

Why exclude gang violence? The US has armed gangs.

I think the argument is usually in the context of "it's mostly people involved with gangs, it doesn't change much for the murder risk for a 'normal citizen'"

Think about this number 5 for a moment. Using a simplistic statistical model it means that you have a ~0.4% risk of getting murdered by a gun over a 80 year lifetime. That's not far off of COVID as an unvaccinated individual. Now compare how people react about that news...

There are many terrible consequences for health from COVID besides dying.

2018 US murders: 15,000

Covid deaths in last 15 months: 625,000 (500k/year)

So 30 times more likely to be killed by covid than by murder.

Not if you are below about 70 years old.

Most people who die in covid are old. I'd think most people who get shot, are younger

> Not if you are below about 70 years old.

As another commentor noted:

> However, if you arbitrarily throw away the number one cause of violence in other countries, surprisingly enough, their numbers are also way lower.

I replied to "So 30 times more likely" -- but it's not, it's either a lot higher, or a lot lower.

Fall accidents are also dangerous once you're old, doesn't mean it makes sense to compare that with gun violence or swatting

Vehicle deaths (2019): 37,595.

I'm aware of the difference, but it just means a different probability distribution. COVID's is likely very spikey, i.e. only there for a couple of years until you've successfully vaccinated, which we potentially already have, or until efficient treatment is found. Gun violence is there to stay with you throughout your life until society changes. Good luck.

We're doing something about COVID though. Even if some people are shouting "it's my right to have COVID", the vast majority of the population won't accept that stance. That's simply not the case with gun control.

We also have a much higher per-capita rate of incarceration regardless. Perhaps it isn't that we have a lot more murders because of guns, but because we're a culture that likes to solve problems with violence following our government's example.

The US also has considerably higher wealth inequality than the other countries you've listed, and hence higher motivation for violent crime:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...

That said, I wouldn't consider those countries directly comparable as far as their position in the world, and how their culture is affected by that position. Russia is probably it's most direct peer, and is comparably closer when looking at wealth inequality and homicide rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

You are right that the homicides are highly clustered, but that doesn't mean there aren't more of them than in other countries.

However, what is happening is that most of those homicides are criminals killing other criminals and aren't very relevant to non-criminals. This greatly changes the balance of value vs risk to the average American.

The typical self-defense use of a gun is simply showing it and making some scumbag run away.

I don’t see that as a counter to what I’m saying, that seems like part of the model of those other countries.

Thus just isn’t true. There may be more gun violence in the US, but all countries police bring guns when responding to respond to reports of guns.

I believe the point is that in America, police SOP is to assume every call will involve guns because of the demographics of the country.

Sure but my point is that this is irrelevant to swatting, which by definition involves a claim that guns are involved.

> Swatting only seems to exist in the us (afaik?)

[citation needed]

as someone who typically is very proactive about citing my comments (see my post history) I'm going to claim 'afaik' - as far as I know - as a citation in this case because I'm clearly indicating a nonauthorative claim here.

This would be a case where you're asking me to prove the negative...can you find instances of Swatting occurring with similar resulting violence in, lets say, Japan or Western Europe?

>How can minors, who typically are given lighter sentences, be discouraged from “swatting”?

People will call the cops with BS accusations and fake threats (e.g. bomb threats, etc) all over the world, including calling them on people.

SWATing however only (or 99%) happens in the US, where the police charges like bulls, is trigger happy, puts their own "safety" over anything else in comical degree, gets military surplus equipment in bulk, and has the impression they are in an action movie...

The news popularized SWATting as a something that in the US leads to the target's death, because those cases are more "newsworthy". There are probably many more cases that end up with no deaths or injuries but still a lot of psychological trauma. But this still means that SWATting in the US can be used to good effect with the intention of getting the target killed or at the very least seriously harmed. You can view it as a combination between contract killing (the caller) and manslaughter (the shooter).

But the Police needs to pay for overreacting, not for showing up like in this case. The Police showed up and "admirably" defused the situation, probably only because the target was white. But if you incriminate showing up in force the initial response will be to stop showing up, and much later to do it in a more peaceful fashion, like with 1-2 people at the door and the rest of the platoon in military gear being hidden.

Why is newsworthy in scare quotes?

Quotation marks [0]. Because I wasn't trying to express my own opinion about the newsworthiness of reporting on SWATting incidents that result in deaths compared to those which don't. So I quoted the term used most often with regard to this kind of news.

Why assume the scare? And how did the rest of my comment imply it? Absent any reason to infer that particular meaning how do you support your decision to take the least charitable interpretation?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark

Well, in part because the your comment is questioning news practices. The point of scare quotes is to signal irony, uncertainty, or skepticism. Your very next sentence implicitly questions the "news popularization" of swatting as something that leads to the target's death on the basis of its greater "newsworthiness" vs. incidents leading to psychological trauma.

That, and because you were not actually quoting anyone or anything specific.

When quotation marks are used in a questioning context and the text being quoted is not an actual quote, the assumption is scare quotes. The writer is trying to draw attention to the language rather than actually quote someone's words.

> SWATing however only (or 99%) happens in the US

[citation needed]

> law enforcement isn’t to blame in this case. The police response was deliberately incited by a group of malicious individuals.

If a system can be easily manipulated from the outside to produce negative results, the outsider is easily to blame the first time it happens.

Swatting has been a problem for over a decade[0]. If the system remains vulnerable to the same attack for that long, the system administrator is at fault for failing to resolve the issue.

[0] I was lazy so just looked up what UD thinks, the second definition is dated 2007, so that seems like a reasonable date to consider "over a decade" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=swatting

Impossible to reach all minors with so many absent parents.

Sometimes these events are like getting struck by lightning, and all we can do is install lightning rods to lessen the statistics.

In this case that might look like further anonymity or public service announcements explaining to people that if you share your address some crazy person may end up killing you (somehow).

> What exactly is that universal "same procedure" that "civilized countries" (please leave such flamebait out btw) follow?

Flamebait language beyond, US cops deploy SWAT teams on regular warrants and non-violent crimes. US cops seem to love their swat teams.

> The primary reason this wouldn't happen like this in most other countries is that it's unlikely that the home owner would turn up with a gun - if they did, police would be pointing theirs too.

Like, it is legal to own the gun, but if you have one cops are free to shoot you?

As I understand it, SWAT teams are seen as very prestigious by both police officers and departments. IMO it stems from the fetishization of all things ‘tactical’ which is common in American culture. Many cops say their goal is to join SWAT rather than the normal progression of detective, captain, etc.

Anyway, I suspect this leads to SWAT teams wanting to justify their existence by responding to as many situations as possible.

It is a complicated issue, though. In a country where many people own assault rifles that massively outgun a cop’s pistol, SWAT teams are kind of a necessity.

Most regular cops carry patrol rifles in their vehicles. They are almost never outgunned.

> Like, it is legal to own the gun, but if you have one cops are free to shoot you?

That's in no way what I said, and not what happened here for once?

(1) Regular police (as opposed to SWAT or SWAT-like equipped units) are dispatched for things that are not riots

(2) Police checks and verifies first, as opposed to kicking doors in shooting because a 13 year old made a call.

(3) Police is taught not to be trigger happy, even if there are reports - or actual sighting - of the suspect carrying a gun, knife, etc.

(4) Police doesn't get military surplus equipment fit for war, nor does it use it in civillian cases.

(5) Police doesn't equate a report of someone selling/doing drugs, with a chance to storm the place guns a blazing.

(6) Traffic police doesn't get to shoot you if they stopped your car and you had the audacity to walk out towards them. That's not even a thing.

(7) The police is taught to discern low-risk and high-risk situations, and not e.g. treat a guy with a knife 30 feet away, or a small black boy playing in a park as a threat.

(8) The police is taught to be an aid to the citizen, not to see everybody as a threat.

Some pointers:

https://www.amazon.com/SWAT-Madness-Militarization-American-...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/police-militarization-f...

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/06/poisoning-our-police-h...

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/885942130/militarization-of-p...

> It's not just that there are fewer guns elsewhere

I'm sorry but it seems to be the main factor though. When the probability of the suspect carrying a gun is very low, you are not that motivated to use yours.

> (many countries have heavy hunting population, and people will use shotguns, close themselves in their house if they're accused, etc).

That's completely different. You can't really hide your hunting weapon in your jacket. People don't walk around with their weapons in the town. The culture is completely different. Even in a country where many people do own weapons (Switzerland) it's very rare that someone would use them for crime.

The entire point here is that almost none of those generic (but very real!) issues really apply in this specific case for once (especially given the call number2 applies a bit, as I already said). "Police responding to a call about a shooter are armed, actually encounter someone with a gun, point guns and tell them to drop it, gun gets dropped, nobody gets shot" sounds like something that could happen in many places and is not a useful example for cops being way to fast to shoot people.

>The entire point here is that almost none of those generic (but very real!) issues really apply in this specific case

Yes, but we already covered that - that it's not specifically about this case.

Even specific to this case, the reality of surrounding circumstances and events is significant.

We very recently had country-wide protests on the topic of police brutality with very minimal consequnce.

Those surrounding circumstances almost certainly informed this man's decision to own a firearm and his decision to brandish that firearm while figuring out what was happening on his property.

The assumption here is that the stress of the situation was the cause of his heart attack, and ultimately his death.

What ever happened to giving someone a phone call to assess the situation?

SWAT teams in the United States are primarily used for serving high-risk warrants. Their purpose is not riot control.

Many high-risk warrants are issue over BS, like "this guy is selling marijuana".

Mind supporting that with evidence?

> The same procedure that is followed in civilized countries would be a good start.

Bad accidents happen in Europe, too. Mostly it's because of bad int and armed forces breaking in to innocent people's homes, with children having trauma for life. Sometimes they don't even apologize.

EDIT: Sometimes it's not even by mistake but on purpose. In 2014 after islamist extremists killed journalists over publications of images offending them, some young people expressed their approval for the killing, including a 10-year old girl. Armed police stormed her apartment in the morning while she was sleeping and detained her for 11 hours:

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/france-4-children-terrorized...

Why would anyone go outside to meet the police with a gun in their hand?

Sentence is about 6 words too long.

"He went out the house with a gun, because he heard someone was on his property,"

You don't think the police tazered the guy here? Since he died of a heart attack my guess is they did. Police in other countries typically doesn't use tazers.

They literally can wait around and see if anyone dies, according to the supreme court ruling declaring that they have no obligation to protect anyone (in the U.S.).

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...

Sure they legally can do that. But a police department's goal shouldn't be do do the minimum necessary without breaking the law. Their goal should be to be as beneficial as reasonably possible.

I would argue their response shouldn't be to storm in with military flashbangs either, which is a typical response causing serious physical harm - burns, deafness, blindness. I refuse to believe there isn't a middle ground.

there is ban guns..

I mean I'm totally fine with that, though I'm led to believe this is a fairly contentious issue in American politics haha.

If we end up in a situation like in today's Cuba, there would be nothing the people can do to stop the government from doing whatever they like.

This is already the case and has been for decades. The army is far, far better equipped than a ragtag band of militia. Individuals with guns would only add to the chaos.

The individual military members are going to have quite the moral quandry about firing on its own people in a free country which was at least attempted to be built on integrity.

I agree, but also the situation you're describing is no longer a 'free country' so much as anarchy or an attempt at strong-handed rule. I'd liken it much more to the cultural revolution and the tank man.

There is already a tool for that: a General Strike. It's easier to pull off too and brings governments to their knees in weeks if not days.

How is that working out in Hong Kong?

I'm not sure why you would conflate a city-wide strike with a general strike. Maybe you could explain that part before I answer.

Like what happened in this case? Where they appear to have responded appropriately?

> I don’t really understand what you want the police to do in these situations where they receive calls about gun crimes in progress. They can’t just assume it’s a prank and wait around to see if anyone dies before they choose to send some police to investigate.

If they assumed it was a prank, there's a chance nobody would die, unlike in this case where they did make sure somebody would.

Is that the point you're making?

The headline says there was a swatting, though.

> The homeowner went outside with a gun in hand and they de-escalated the situation without “storming” or firing any shots.

"De-escalated it" to the point where the homeowner had a heart attack and died. Without the video, this just looks like poor police work, and of course a heinous crime by the original caller.

Agreed, but all too often there has been a forced entry. I think they should be resorting to cameras first.

From Krebs on Security (linked to from Jason Scott's Twitter thread):

> Unable to disengage a lock on his back fence, Herring was instructed to somehow climb over the fence with his hands up.

> “He was starting to get more upset,” Billings recalled. “He said, ‘I’m a 60-year-old fat man and I can’t do that.'”

> Billings said Mr. Herring then offered to crawl under a gap in the fence, but when he did so and stood up, he collapsed of a heart attack. Herring died at a nearby hospital soon after.

I would be pretty shocked if SWATting was any appreciable % of police responses. You can't delay response times by 50% to handle the .01% of cases which are falsely initiated.

We're not asking police to delay response, we're asking them to delay shooting people.

But when all you have is a hammer, every citizen looks like a nail.

Actually, in this case, the police didn't shoot. The guy died anyway.

I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago. There were over 4000 shootings and 769 homicides here last year. AFAIK, there were 0 swattings here.

So, I don't think it would be a good idea to set "assume it's a swatting" as the default response to 911 calls for service in response to violent crime. At least for Chicago.

How many times did the SWAT team do something useful last year in Chicago?

Hundreds. You may be surprised to learn this, but shooters and killers often violently resist being arrested unless they face clearly overwhelming force. A lot of murderers and shooters have been peacefully arrested by CPD tactical officers.

You can see the use of force incidents that resulted in complaints here, on the Civilian Office of Police Accountability case portal [0] (although not all of these involve tac officers). You can also see the statistics on rates of use of force in this dashboard [1], and see what counts as use of force (as well as when use of deadly force is authorized) here [2].

It's important that people actually check up on their police departments. Police serve a vital and life-saving role in society, but they have to be actually monitored. Just assuming they're all bad gives cover to the bad ones and discourages good ones from signing up, and as someone who checks, I can tell you that the people most abused by America disproportionately call the police for help, and many of their emergencies are truly harrowing.

[0] https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/

[1] https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboar...

[2] https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G0...

“ abused by America ”

what does this mean?

It's a cool little rhetorical trick that let's us redirect and spread blame around to everyone.

Too much time on the internet can give people a distorted view of things.

Say more about homicide research in Chicago? That sounds super interesting. (I'm a software developer in Chicago.)

I do the same for another major city, but I actually work for the dept and crunch more than just homicide numbers. Assuming poster isn’t with a dept or maybe city gov, Honestly it’s not that exciting to be on the outside crunching murder numbers. Me and op work in similar jurisdictions, and he seems to have a good grasp on his stuff, so I hope he’s working with the dept.

It’s MUCH more interesting to get a job with the dept as they let you run wild on all their data from fleets to police locations, investigations, digital stuff like facial rec etc. most depts need good analysts too in beleaguered cities so go against the grain and join up, you’ll love it. Not to mention the security and benefits. Lot of my work revolves around holding cops more accountable that to me is the most interesting stuff, not crime analysis.

Just had a meeting yesterday where the majors were asking me how our team can figure out what aspects of a detectives investigation leads to the maximum likelihood of case closures and identifying the largest factors for example. As much as Twitter/nonprofit/outsider crime analysts have access to open data, some stuff you gotta be on the inside to access let alone move the needle vs. just reporting analysis to followers. Highly encourage anyone reading to consider…

100%.

I've largely been focused on implementing recommendations from a PERF report on Chicago homicide investigations [0] after years of attrition in the Bureau of Detectives collided with a massive spike in violent crime (in 2016, following the Laquan McDonald murder). My main projects have centered on developing CPD's capacity for recovering video evidence (mainly CCTV) in homicide and shooting cases, as well as teaching a special detail of detectives how to convert footage from proprietary codecs to standard codecs in a forensically sounds way (so that the footage can actually be viewed by less technologically savvy detectives and assistant state's attorney's). You can view seeking-to-identify focused samples of collected footage on CPD's YouTube channel [1] (although these are not representative of the breadth of footage now collected on each homicide). It's not as polished as LAPD's productions [2], but that's to be expected considering the well developed entertainment and digital media workforce in LA.

Although I do want to praise Chicago for it's willingness to make data available publicly. I had been pushing for years to get shooting data posted publicly and we just got that added to the data portal in May [3]. Additionally, the Cook County State's Attorneys Office puts a lot of their case data on the CCSAO data portal [4]. These are only a tiny fraction of the tables in CPD's or CCSAO's respective data warehouses, but as far as public data ecosystems go, Chicago's is the least bad I've worked with of major US cities. Working with LAPD's or NYPD's open data is a real pain.

[0] https://home.chicagopolice.org/homicideclearancereport2019/

[1] https://youtube.com/c/ChicagoPoliceNews

[2] https://youtube.com/c/LAPDONLINE1

[3] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Violence-Reduct...

[4] https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/browse?tags=state%27s+a...

Wow! You and I actually have very similar roles.

I assume you mean deaths from swattings. There are swattings every year in Chicago.

So some of the big online streamers get swatted very frequently. They are generally reluctant to talk about it because they don't want to encourage the behavior. But a couple of the ones that live in Austin have revealed that they have an arranged visual signal they can use to tell the officers "we're ok this is just a swatting call."

Evidence?

We're in the habit of blaming the police for everything. No. When there is a call for danger assume the worst. Not doing so could mean a life is lost. It is very rare for someone to die of a heart attack because of a swat.

How about we punish the hell out of anyone who does these stupid prank calls instead.

How about we do both? Think of strategies that minimize harm in case of a false alert and severe punishment for malicious false alerts? Death by heart attack is not the only possible bad outcome of a SWAT team storming a house.

You can react without assuming the worst. For example after a bomb threat it is reasonable to calmly evacuate a school and do a search, that doesn’t mean people should be fleeing for their lives. Swatting however generally provokes an over reaction.

> Swatting however generally provokes an over reaction.

How can you know this. My guess would be it's like hacking any other system. You hear about the few times they succeed. Especially if turns into a horrible incident the news media can use to fit one of their favorite narratives.

Several states recently passed anti swatting legislation, California (2013), Illinois (2015), etc because it’s common enough to be considered a significant issue. It’s not just about the risk to the public, these overreactions interferes with the police and waste significant resources.

Really people have been doing this for a long time, the “boy who cried wolf” is part of Aesop's Fables dating to ~600 BCE. Swatting is significant because it’s harder for cops to filter based on internet famous than actually famous.

The boy who cried wolf is not a story of over-reactions. And none of this evidence proves or even suggests such a thing, unless perhaps you were claiming the laws themselves were an over-reaction. Or unless you are defining over-reaction as any reaction at all other than omnisciently knowing when a warning is false and not reacting to it.

Part of the problem is that the SWAT type response to a reported threat is a dangerous and extremist from of policing.

If US police focused more on containment and de-escalation this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

Standard practice elsewhere is to send the nearest foot or car patrol to investigate, and prepare intervention team as backup.

No idea why you would send an intervention team in blind, much less on an unconfirmed tip. It's a recipe for all kinds of disasters and expensive one too.

No, the swatting issue is at least 50% on police as organization. There are and will always be assholes and false calls.

Institution that reacts without care and with sever overreaction so often, will have more of them simply because they are super easy to make attack.

Assuming the worst includes assuming being used for swatting. Excessively violent response from US police is a big part of the problem. Also see Brionna Taylor. The police should always verify before going in guns blazing.

>We're in the habit of blaming the police for everything.

This is true, and I think people today have a very warped view of policing. However, there are plenty of legitimate areas of improvement:

- No knock raids

- Violent arrests of non-violent offenders

- Eminent domain

- etc.

No knock raids are particularly troubling because (among many other reasons) they can result in a legal shootout between police and civilians: A civilian who has been violently woken up in the middle of the night is disoriented and scared, and legitimately believes he is subject to a life-threatening home invasion. He opens fire on the police, who he believes to be the home invaders. The police, being fired on, have a legitimate right to defend themselves. It's not airtight, but this scenario can lead to a legal shootout where both parties have valid legal arguments.

I realize this is mostly oblique to the topic at hand, but our policing can and should be improved, even if it gives ammunition to the folks who want to demonize the police unjustly.

It sounds pretty airtight to me. (But the formerly-sleeping person's legal argument doesn't really matter, since they are dead.)

What do you think isn't airtight in that scenario?

If the call doesn’t meet a particular threshold it can be treated as genuine while also ending the call with a pre-recorded message about the dangers of phoney SWAT calls.

If this is a prank, we WILL find you. Please enter the last four digits of your social security number followed by the pound key to receive an automatic 90% discount on your sentence.

> Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call?

You read about a few false positives and decide the police need to start assuming by default that every call is a false positive. You have no data on the number of calls where sending a SWAT team is the correct response (true positives), the number of calls where the responder correctly decides not to send SWAT (true negatives) or where the responder incorrectly decides not to send SWAT (false negatives).

No, you have no data, just a handful of anecdotes and on that basis you want to completely change how first responders work. You talk about “Bayesian” but you couldn’t possibly calculate how many lives could be saved or lost by this change.

Please, let’s stop acting like we’re experts at everything because we know a bit about software. Maybe other people are competent too. Maybe they know shit we don’t.

Oh and by the way, like someone else pointed out, the article doesn’t even say SWAT was deployed or that any law enforcement entered his home.

I don't assume competence of 911 responders because they regularly get the wrong house. Your aggressive screed really added nothing to the conversation. "It's probably correct so we should ignore the problem" isn't a sane perspective on police violence based on a prank call.

My point is that they have more data and experience on deciding whether a call is legitimate or not. More than the GP here, who read two articles about SWAT-ing before deciding to upend the entire system.

> regularly get the wrong house

Citation needed, with data? Or do you, like GP, also want us to assume that your anecdotes are data? And getting the exact address isn’t the same thing as deciding the legitimacy of a call.

> “it’s probably correct so we should ignore the problem” isn’t a sane perspective

You’ve mischaracterised my comment and called me insane. That was uncalled for. I did not say this wasn’t a problem. I merely questioned whether a person with 0 data and 0 experience was qualified to call for upending the current system. More data is needed before we can hold such strong opinions.

I would request that in future you don’t call people’s opinions insane without even understanding what they’re saying. You’re currently in violation of HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> Citation needed, with data?

Depends if you count a minimum of 10% "regularly"?

From 2003: "After the New York City raid that killed Alberta Spruill, Police Chief Raymond Kelly estimated that at least 10 percent of the city’s 450+ monthly no-knock drug raids were served on the wrong address, under bad information, or otherwise didn’t produce enough evidence for an arrest. Kelly conceded, however, that NYPD didn’t keep careful track of botched raids, leading one city council member to speculate the problem could be even worse."

There's a whole bunch documented here (where I got the quote) - https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/balko_whi...

We’re not talking about the same thing are we? This conversation is specifically about where dispatchers are sent after a person makes a call requesting law enforcement, giving their address.

Fair point.

Although I think it speaks to the general competence of the US police that they can't get the right address even when they've spent days/weeks organising a raid - I wouldn't necessarily trust them to get it right on a fast rollout on a SWAT call.

>Your aggressive screed really added nothing to the conversation.

Nor did your flamebaiting, uncharitable response to said comment (see 'In Comments' guidelines).

Your comment confused me, the article says the kid in the U.K. called the local police department so until I read this I assumed they googled the local number and dialled the police directly internationally, not going through 911. But it sounds like that would have got them 911? Here it would just get you the guy at the front desk in that station.

I am surprised if it’s possible for someone in the U.K. to call 911 and get “911 stateside” and not redirected to 999 in the U.K.?

One time I was talking to a police officer who was giving me a ticket and I asked him what his favorite part of the job was. He said “breaking down doors and kicking peoples asses”.

That seems like a terrible idea and an unrealistic one at that. If someone is calling to report a violent crime in progress, you’re not coming to a theoretical judgement where you have the luxury of collecting facts to make a determination. This is a matter of prudential and practical judgement concerning human lives. It is not a joke. You must respond quickly in case it is true. This is not a horse race. We’re not taking bets on the most likely case. You will lose time if it turns out to be a prank, but the potential risk far outweighs that loss.

This man also didn’t die because he was shot btw. The way you reduce these incidents is through severe punishments for reporting false crimes.

I was a victim of a swatting in July 2019. Someone called 911 and said a man was threatening a woman with a gun at my address. Police showed up, told me to put my hands up at gunpoint, cuffed me, searched my house and then left like nothing happened.

There needs to be a better process for handling these calls. Just call the person at the address, or approach and use a loudspeaker or something. Walking out my front door to a bunch of guns pointed at me was the worst experience of my life.

I had the same thing happen to me in September 2020 and once again March 2021. This was a full SWAT response the first time and significant police response both times. We had little kids walking out of the house with hands up and many guns trained on them. It was a harrowing experience. This is far more common to have the police just shrug and say that nothing can be done.

I wonder if they get paid extra for raids and false alarms are a nice way to earn extra cash while not risking your life.

On the other hand, if someone actually is threatening another with a gun and extradites them inside, giving them a heads up in such a manner could initiate a hostage situation. Surprise forced entry minimizes the chance of human death in such a situation since it's likely that the person doesn't have a gun constantly pointed at the victim while they're in the house.

> Surprise forced entry minimizes the chance of human death

Literally every bit of research on the topic says the exact opposite.

Why is it that we rely on a phone system that so easily allows the true source of a call to be masked? In this case it sounds like they located the caller, but the article does not say how.

Because the phone system is based on very old protocols with duct tape and patch work applied over the years. Not sure how you want VOIP calls to be de-anonymized. Are you arguing for state surveillance?

I used to work for a phone company. While this was not in the US I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be possible to implement this there as well.

Each call had two source number: One user provided and one network provided. The user provided number could be set by the caller (within limits). The network provided number was always set by the provider.

A normal callee would see the callers user provided number. The emergency services, however, would see the network provided number.

This worked for PSTN calls as well as for VoIP (via the P-Asserted-Identity header)

Due to historical reasons phone tapping in the US requires warrants, a protection not extended to the internet unfortunately.

This can tell you the network that sent the call (with a lot of effort and subpoenas to every network along the way), but there are so many ways to get VOIP access these days, VOIP companies don't necessarily have KYC.

Damn man, that's terrible. Sorry you had to go through that. I can't imagine how that must have affected you, especially for quite some time going forward. Super rough :\

Wow, where I live, if someone phones the cops, they don't show up for like 2 days, and even then, they are so chilled I don't think they can spot a criminal next to a normal person, never mind pulling guns on people. My country is not perfect but at least we don't deal with these kinds of interactions, sadly due to incompetence.

> Just call the person at the address

"Yep it's the police here, we'll be at your house in 5 minutes, just giving you a heads up in case you want to ambush us, xoxo"

These “kids” are straight up psychopaths. All this over some dumb internet name. It’s just 100% calculated maliciousness.

These criminals were already set on making someone’s life hell if they didn’t get what they wanted. The police were just the pawns that were part of the plan.

This isn’t even close to “kids doing dumbass things”. Sure, maybe if they knocked over a mailbox or whatever. What even close-to-normal level of teenager ever does this? If they didn’t get caught, they would probably be laughing their asses off that they made a man die. Just needlessly cruel and evil.

Agree. You could listen to the 911 call that triggered the previous death and see how he tried to make the police more nervous.

https://youtu.be/mFfwpOLXBqk

If they are considered a minor and not accountable, then parents need to be 100% held accountable.

This sounds like pure thirst for vengeance, like "somebody must pay, no matter who".

Accountability is not punishment. It's a thirst for justice. With nobody accountable there is no justice.

I've now read every comment in this thread and have not seen a single answer to the question: what happens in Europe if someone calls the police to report an active shooter incident? Can someone please answer this question in good faith? Everyone in this thread seems to be treating this question as an accusation.

I can’t answer for Europe as a whole, because European police is not federalised or centralised in any way. There is a multilateral Europol.

My guess is that in countries with a recent history of war but now a more stable state (some Eastern European countries) you would probably get a quicker response.

In Western European countries, there would probably be a long response time. In Norway we have had two terrorist attacks for the last ten years (both by right wingers, one aimed at the Social Democratic Party youth convention and the second at a mosque), and in both cases police were too slow to respond.

This is based on nothing other than my gut feeling.

This was shared 5 hours ago aka ~1:30–3:30am in Europe

this is the first example that I can think of

> At 12.03 p.m., a 112-distress call reached Halle fire-emergency HQ; one minute later, police were informed.[24] At 2.40 p.m., federal police quick responders BFE+ arrived in the city of Halle.[25][26]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle_synagogue_shooting

So it took about 2 and a half hours for the BFE to arrive in the city.

They are not the only tactical response force though. But in general I feel like, at least for Germany the response scenario for big events (like Halle) is more: 1) secure the situation, ie make it stationary and have a secured cordon 2) call in the pros (typically GSG9 out of Bonn) 3) take the time to establish communication and deescalate in the mean time

And similar things for situation that don’t warrant escalation to GSG9. Ie the typical street cop will not be the one going in swat style. And even the typical cop in Germany has 3 years of on the job training before becoming a rookie… so training levels are not even close to comparable in the first place.

That being said: these kinds of situations are exceedingly rare and as such can trigger a truely staggering amount of police response. The amok situation in Munich in 2016 for example literally pulled most of the on duty force of Bavaria to Munich (and was resolved before most of those arrived). The total response was iirc something like 3k police officers. So I wouldn’t call the response more limited https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Munich_shooting

While GSG9 is called for cases of suspected terrorism there are also state-level, SWAt-style teams called SEK [0]. Besides providing a faster response time than the GSG9, they do deal with smaller hostage situations, high-risk warrants, etc.

Customs also has a similar unit called ZUZ [1] focused more on warrants and arrests than counter-terrorism.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEK_(Germany) 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zentrale_Unterstützungsgrupp...

We don't know. There is just not enough data to say.

I'd say these things simply don't happen, but that would be naivety, but we don't know the base rate, all we know are the few publicized instances.

That said the militarization of police is less drastic here, though since the ramming and knifing attacks police presence has increased.

For example in Hungary dear leader Viktor deployed the military to (folks with rifles) to help the police maintain COVID rules like curfew. But mostly all we got out of it are a few photos:

https://www.budapesttimes.hu/hungary/soldiers-helping-police...

https://dailynewshungary.com/news_to_go/this-is-how-the-nigh...

The usual use of a SWAT-like group happens when the tax authority raids folks and they want to make it quick so they can collect evidence: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_rOnMkaWDS0

Swatting is not really a thing in Europe AFAIK. I believe it's exclusively a US problem. Few countries have militarized their police to the extent that the US has. And of course the gun ownership is so common there that they'd pretty much have to assume the worst when a call comes in. Cities like Chicago have casualty rates measured in the thousands per year. Many active war zones are more peaceful than that. So, it's understandable that there are incidents and that police are biased to protect themselves when they need to respond to calls like this.

Of course police do show up in Europe if you call them and most larger cities have swat teams as well to respond to e.g. terrorist threats. I live in Berlin, and of course we have situations where that kind of response is needed fairly regularly. Same with other cities across Europe.

But they wouldn't show up in full force for what appears to be domestic violence based on a single anonymous call. Usually when something is actually going on, they'd be getting many calls and it would be clear pretty quickly what is needed.

Also in Germany police will never show up with a gun already in hand. I don't know the exact code of conduct they have but there are probably a few steps of deescalation before a gun is even drawn.

Here's a case where the law is far behind a new crime. I had a guy who went after my Facebook handle. I won't go into details, but it went on for two years. Cops were of no help and I had to turn to a net savvy lawyer.

It will continue to increase before Congress takes it seriously. When there's a clear law with penalties that interest prosecutors then it will end.

How a thing like "swatting" exist at all? AFAIK it can happen multiple times to the same location and directed against same people too [0].

It happens for baseless unconfirmed allegations against someone.. "Oh I have heard that he/she is a drug dealer and they are walking with a gun in their backyard" - and whole swat unit is sent - no questions asked. What the hell?

This happens to the super rich and famous too [1]. SWAT team comes to the neighbourhood full of 20MM+ houses and is not second guessing what's going on?

[0] a bit too lazy to search, though there were infamous swattings of famous youtubers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Other_notable_cases

The whole Special Weapons and Tactics things seems a bit over the top, especially coming from the UK where maybe some cop will maybe knock on the door and ask if everything is ok.

I imagine that police responding to a home in a country which is armed to the teeth is quite different.

to play devils advocaat.

Is it not better for the police to wrongfully turn up to a potentially dangerous situation then to not and people get hurt or killed?

Problem is how violent US policing is [0].

Police/SWAT do not turn up to assess the situation. It looks like they turn up to release their anger, aggression and "play" with their assault weapons. Swatters do this, because it will cause big material and mental losses to the victim, with a high chance of death [1]. In this case police/swat is a "poor man's assassin".

It's very funny for me to read "Measures against swatting" from that wiki article ([1]), when it happens only in US (and maybe Brazil). This does not happen in other 1st world country, because police is accountable for their ammunition and especially citizens shot. In US you can instigate fake raids and kill innocent people in their sleep, and nothing will happen to you as long as you say that you feared for your life. [2]

[0] I know I am stereotyping, though from western 1st world countries US is undoubtedly the leader in police violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor

>Is it not better for the police to wrongfully turn up to a potentially dangerous situation then to not and people get hurt or killed?

Not so long as they tend to leave a trail of citations for petty BS infractions nobody cares about and everyone resents wherever they go.

Is the police not at least in-part responsible for the death? From my POV, it’s the inappropriate charging of the police force that caused the death of the man. And clearly the police can handle the case differently. Of course, the kids must face consequences as well but I believe the police can not be acquitted. I don’t think such incidents can happen anywhere else in the world.

If they have credible information that an armed and dangerous person has killed someone and may be about to harm other people, what should they do? Just ignore it? Or send some unarmed officers over first to check, who may then get shot?

Except that the information was not credible. Assessing the credibility of information should be part of the operating procedure.

Honestly I don't judge the police MO. How are you supposed to approach this report when firearms and rifles are extremely common?

It's easy to say you have to give the benefit of doubt when you're sitting behind a desk, but when you're in the front line I don't think it's that simple.

At this moment it looks like it's a roll of a dice.

I can’t find any articles that say an actual SWAT team was dispatched. This article and the one it sources both say that police responded to a call. They have stock photos of SWAT teams and they talk about “swatting” but this sounds more like local police rushing to the scene.

The homeowner actually went outside with a gun in hand to confront the police, but they de-escalated the situation without shots fired. The man died of a heart attack from the stress of confronting the police with a gun, not from being attacked by an actual SWAT team.

Yeah, people are essentially mad at the police for showing up.

The article does define swatting as a large armed response as opposed to a SWAT team responding, but it's splitting hairs.

The guy walked outside to a squad of officers aimed at him. Whether they were SWAT or not seems mostly irrelevant.

> The man died of a heart attack from the stress of confronting the police with a gun

And even that is probably an exaggeration. Stressful situations don't cause fatal heart attacks by themselves...he probably had severe heart disease before this happened.

Does a swat team have to show up for it to be swatting?

I suspect the police used the taser or choked this man.

A man who is active enough to carry a gun and protecting his property, conscious enough to follow the order of police to drop a gun... then suddenly got a heart attack from stress alone? That's too suspicious.

We know nothing about his medical history. So maybe we should not jump to conclusions too fast.

Worse than that, much more humiliating:

Unable to disengage a lock on his back fence, Herring was instructed to somehow climb over the fence with his hands up.

“He was starting to get more upset,” Billings recalled. “He said, ‘I’m a 60-year-old fat man and I can’t do that.'”

Billings said Mr. Herring then offered to crawl under a gap in the fence, but when he did so and stood up, he collapsed of a heart attack. Herring died at a nearby hospital soon after.

Source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-who-cause...

Maybe I'm stupid here, but what did they plan? That the old guy would keel over, and then his twitter handle would magically become available to them?

Extortion I would guess? Give us the handle or we keep harassing you.

Listen to the latest Darknet Diaries

"The family eventually learned, earlier that day, an anonymous caller demanded Mark hand over his Twitter handle worth thousands of dollars. Mark refused. Hours later, the unthinkable happened."

https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...

These kids know exactly what they're doing, and they shouldn't be absolved because they're young or "boys will be boys". Frankly punishment should be directed at the minors involved and their parents. If I'm a young person I can go around murdering and committing crimes because I'm "young" and "didn't know any better"?

> and their parents

How exactly do you suggest parents accomplish the surveillance necessary to avoid liability?

Maybe by not framing the issue as one of 'liability' and 'surveillance', and just teaching the kid right from wrong. As for how that's accomplished, that's the parents' responsibility.

They failed here, so the state will be stepping in for the next few years.

What should the parents' punishment be? How do you evaluate that the parents have reasonably met their duty? Are both parents equally culpable? What about divorcees with alternative live views? Why should this parental failure liability end at 18, what about 19 year olds, or those in their 30's? What about kids previously diagnosed with mental illness?

Those questions will make up the bulk of the defense's case, I imagine.

Well if you read the article you'd see one is being charged. The other is ambiguous but it appears authorities know who it is.

I read the article, I was talking about all swatting situations in general.

I understand you're angry. But an (somewhat arbitrary) age limit has to be set between what we consider children and adults, and once it's set there is no logical reason to make exceptions.

Would you make the same argument if the kid involved was 16? 14? 12?

While the kids knew what they were doing and certainly have some responsibility here... all of them are (well, were) kids: can we really blame them for doing fucked up shit without considering the consequences? The core problem with swatting really seems to be the process of reaction by adult police officers starting with a fully-militarized force as their first interaction, as SWATting someone has clearly gotten so easy that we could probably just automate it by connecting GPT-3 to Twilio via Wavenet using data from public background check websites.

In general I completely agree that it's not reasonable to say the cops have no responsibility for what they do because of what they were told on the phone. But in this case it's not as though they opened fire on the guy, so it's not clear what they should have done differently.

And we should be thankful for that: I know someone who lost a nephew to cops in December (who were called in by his sister to do a mental health check; when they arrived there was no active danger and yet they put him in a knee-to-neck restraint); but do we actually need a squadron of people to show up with guns in these situations? I know people who have gotten so afraid of cops that they don't even call the cops anymore when actual bad stuff is happening... like people shooting out their windows with pellet guns as part of what seemed like repeat targeted attacks against their house (a co-op).

> but do we actually need a squadron of people to show up with guns in these situations?

They received a call about a violent crime in progress. When they arrived, the man exited the house with a gun in hand, thinking he would need to defend himself from intruders.

Are you really suggesting that the police should have sent one or two unarmed individuals to a report of an active gun crime in progress?

By all accounts, the police appear to have acted appropriately and managed to both control and de-escalate the situation after the man exited the house holding a gun. Why are we trying to make the local police out to be the bad guys for following up on a report of armed violence and de-escalating the situation without shots fired? It doesn’t make sense.

If the call had accurately represented the situation it seems like it reasonably called for force. I'd say if we wanted to deescalate the police response we'd have to get a lot more serious about restricting gun ownership. As it is it's hard to see what the nonviolent solution is to a heavily armed person doing violence.

> can we really blame them for doing fucked up shit without considering the consequences?

Yes, we can. Maybe the actual punishment should be less severe because they were kids, but we can't say, if you're a kid and you do this, nothing bad will happen to you.

Parent's point isn't "Kids should be able to do this without consequence", it's "Kids shouldn't be able to do this at all."

There will always be bad things in the world. If not this there would be other things kids can do.

Edit: i guess i should rephrase this. I disagree that the ease of swatting in any way absolves the perputrator of any guilt or that if it wasn't possible to swat people we wouldn't have to have rules against violent crime.

I still think the ease of swatting is stupid, just that removing that ease doesn't solve the fundamental problem that bad people exist in the world. That said, im not saying that we shouldn't make swatting impossible

Whilst true, this is a situation where kids can do something relatively trivial and easy (make a phone call) and a massively disproportionate outcome in the form of extreme violence is carried out by the state. There are very very few such opportunities for kids to leverage that kind of power, and it's important to prevent them.

Well i'd go with both to be honest.

Swatting being so easy is ridiculous but that doesnt absolve the kid of any guilt.

What extreme violence are you talking about? A bunch of cops showed up to search for a reported gunman, and by all accounts acted completely appropriately.

Nobody was shot or assaulted, nobody broke down any doors, or did anything ‘massively disproportionate’ here.

I'll leave it as an aside whether we consider it to be violent for a team of military-styled gunmen - clearly ready to kill - to descend on someone's home.

In this case nobody was shot or assaulted. In other cases people have been.

That the man in question did nothing deserving of a legitimate SWAT response means that for one to have happened was massively disproportionate. Because a SWAT team is a disproportionate response to doing absolutely nothing to provoke one.

This argument doesn't make sense. Let's go over the series of events.

1. Someone calls 911 reporting an armed conflict reporting an active shooter situation.

2. Police respond, sending a SWAT team.

3a. Tense situation was resolved, unfortunately resulting in a heart attack.

3b. Suppose there was an actual gunman. The fast response would have saved lives.

You're sitting at home knowing post event debating the situation knowing the actual events that are taking place. The police only know 1 version of the events, which they hope are in good faith. In order to argue that the police's response was disproportionate, you would have have to known beforehand the report was bogus. But this is impossible, so the police must bring enough force to deal with a legitimate call.

The trade off here is due diligence versus response time. In the fast majority of cases, people don't abuse 911, so the polices' fast reactions are beneficial. You have to leave it up to society to minimize these types of edge cases.

How can you realistically prevent them without incidentally dropping genuine calls now and then (your rate of swat calls will be extremely low in comparison).

Also, making a fake phonecall to the police and describing a graphic situation to the police is not so trivial and easy. Pouring some gasoline on your neighbors house and burning it down or emailing bomb threats are also trivial tasks that children understand are wrong.

What if a kid is taken hostage and manages to call the police? Should we ignore the call because it could be a swatting prank?

Sure, but reducing bad things is helpful even if it isn't 100%. There's an interesting video essay on this exact style of argument, if you're interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yts2F44RqFw

Then I guess we are all screwed, as you aren't going to stop kids from doing "fucked up shit" like this as the entire problem is the idea of understanding that you might get caught for this and get sent to jail is kind of out of reach for most people--not all, but most--until you are older... and even so: there are simply always more kids, and I maintain you might not even need the kids.

And yet, in my high school class, not a single kid killed anybody...

Murders aren't really common enough for this to say much unless your high school class was exceptional in some way.

Any kid can take a stick and push it into another kid's eye. You can't child-proof the world, you have to raise the kids.

Yes, we can.

I don't know where this idea comes that kids can never be held responsible for serious misdeeds. This is hardly a harmless prank.

Meanwhile if the call was legit, people would complain why the lazy police took no steps to remedy the matter and the usual "police have no obligation to protect you" quotes would be copy and pasted.

People should look toward improving the problems in society and in people instead of just blaming police for everything. Police did nothing wrong in this case. The parents and kids should be investigated and questions should be asked of what they did or did not do and how they could have prevented this.

So we’re talking about ’The boy who cried wolf’ here. There’s a reason it’s a timeless fable, dating back thousands of years.

It’s a common dilemma that we might not ever solve. It seems to me ‘swatting’ is one of the most modern iterations of it.

It's not boy cry wolf because the victim made no claim. Someone committed fraud making a false claim and attributed it to him.

This is the correct response. Yeah, sure, tactics could change to “analysis before action” but then you lose responsiveness when you need it most. Maybe there’s a balance, but I don’t think it’s worth it. The real answer is to litigate the fuck out of any dipshit who commits the act of “swatting.” It really is like starting a fire, the potential damage is immense.

And analysis before action killed a ton of kids at Columbine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...

No, the shooter killed a ton of kids at Columbine.

> can we really blame them for doing fucked up shit without considering the consequences?

Absolutely. The incident was in 2020 and one of the suspects isn’t a minor as of 2021, so these aren’t exactly clueless children who are incapable of understanding that actions have consequences.

Swatting also isn’t a new concept with unknown consequences. These people are using swatting precisely because it has a track record of being extremely dangerous. They’re not breaking new ground, they’re looking at past events and choosing to repeat them.

These people shouldn’t get a free pass because they were almost-adults rather than legal adults at the time of the crime.

Ok, so let's write an entire article about punishing the kids, making it sound like a really harsh punishment should hit them and implying it is a shame that the other ones are untouchable, and not even once talk about how maybe the police are at fault for being at the whim of children on the Internet? That is ridiculous.

We can do both, fortunately.

What's the alternative response you expect police to have after being told a violent killer is on the loose at an address? There is very little they can do to vet the information, and time is critical. There is a reason they send SWAT and not a regular officer. The claim these kids make to illicit such an extreme response is usually a hostage situation or armed killer hiding out.

I've seen a decent amount of body cam footage of officers responding to calls. Not enough force or control over the situation can be a fatal mistake. Too much force and they're vilified by the media. They obviously can't ignore the call either.

Cops are getting crucified in the US on both sides. Why anyone would want to take in that duty in these times is beyond me.

Swatting doesnt seem to be as big a thing in any other countries besides the US. There seems to be something peculiar to the US style of policing that makes swatting more dangerous.

I'm going to make an assumption that it is our citizens are more likely to be armed.

Police that serve in a disarmed populace don't have to worry about a suspect reaching into a wasteband or pocket and pulling a firearm. Cops in the US do. That single movement alone is enough to warrant a violent response by police engagement standards.

Swatting is definitely a thing in Canada.

And the UK. From 2015: https://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2015/08/swatting-uk-tr...

“In the only known UK arrest for swatting offences [..] all commited in the US.”

So… nah.

"Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts and her family were woken in the early hours of the morning last week by armed police at the door. Days later, more armed police arrived at the address of a Mumsnet user. In both cases, police had received calls claiming there was a gunman at the property. In both, said gunman did not exist."

Turns out you’re right, and “ Roberts and the Mumsnet user were the first known UK victims of "swatting"”. The first.

Although it still sounds like something very different from the real swatting, in that the police didn’t pose danger to inhabitants.

> There seems to be something peculiar to the US style of policing that makes swatting more dangerous.

Something peculiar about certain groups of US teens, too. Some of 'em seem totally convinced that they're immune to consequences as long as they're below a certain age…

In this case the person who called in the report was a minor from the UK. Back in April, someone from France swatted Ubisoft (https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/justice-et-faits-divers/2...).

"What is the procedure for police in those countries when they receive an anonymous report of ongoing violent crime at a residence?"

> There is a reason they send SWAT and not a regular officer

None of the articles say they sent a SWAT team. It reads as though police officers simply responded to the call. I think the term “swatting” and the stock photos of a SWAT team are misleading a lot of commenters.

> and not even once talk about how maybe the police are at fault for being at the whim of children on the the Internet?

The police arrived at the home after reports of urgent violence. The homeowner exited the home with a gun in hand and the police de-escalated the situation without shots fired on either side.

What do you suggest they do differently in this case? They can’t just assume calls are false and ignore them.

It takes no effort to yell "fire!" in a crowded venue. Some very easy things are very harmful, humans have to learn not to do them.

> These people shouldn’t get a free pass because they were almost-adults rather than legal adults at the time of the crime.

I personally disagree with this. A specific age must be decided between children and adults - let's say 18 (depends on the country). What would be a good clear definition of "almost adults"? 17? In that case, just make the adult age 17. Then you'll get the exact same argument for 16 year old kids committing crimes.

There is no logical reason to consider children adults.

> The core problem with swatting really seems to be the process of reaction by adult police officers starting with a fully-militarized force as their first interaction

Well the alternative is to assume every crisis phone call is a prank/crying wolf? You'll just swing the other direction and the police will show up unprepared for a crisis every once in a while.

Say some kids go to Mecca and "prank" big crowds of people by shouting "bomb! bomb!" and then it causes a stampede and people die. Is the core problem there the reaction of the adult Muslims not being skeptical enough of the initial claim?

I think the parent is off about that being the "core" problem, but you're presenting a false dichotomy: one can be skeptical about the truth of a crisis phone call while still investigating to see what's really going on.

You realize there are checkpoints on all the roads to Mecca where they check your documents and religious affiliation, right?

What exactly do you want police to do after being told that a guy is going around killing people? As that probably happens more than swatting attacks in the USA. Sending a SWAT team on such a report seems quite reasonable.

> that probably happens more than swatting attacks in the USA

This assumption might be worth re-evaluating.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/23/4253014/swatting-911-pran... (2013):

> The FBI estimates there are around 400 swatting attacks a year

https://www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-eng... (2018):

> 277 FBI-designated active shooter incidents that occurred in the United States from 2000 to 2018

The FBI definition of active shooter incident excludes a lot of cases:

https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-incidents...

See page three.

The exclusions on page 3 are:

  * Self-defense
  * Gang violence
  * Drug violence
  * Contained residential or domestic disputes
  * Controlled barricade/hostage situations
  * Crossfire as a byproduct of another ongoing criminal act
  * An action that appeared not to have put other people in peril

None of these would describe a situation in which "a guy is going around killing people".

All of those except the first and last describe a situation in which "a guy is going around killing people" and would call for an active response from the police. The guy is just not doing it in the way separated out as "an active shooter".

People can, and have died from this practice. But sure, give zero consequences to the assholes doing it, I'm sure that will teach them a valuable lesson.

Do stupid shit, win stupid prizes. No empathy for these kids.

With the voip spam, it'll come from Russia, China or India.. it's a major denial of service threat we are ill equipped to handle. We need crypto style authentication for phone calls.

I thought Shaken and Stir, would help with some of that. The problem still comes from the bad actors doing this 'swatting', and the law enforcement agencies not having better policies to deal with this.

Kids of those ages are routinely tried as adults.

You're going to have to let all those minorities out of prison who were tried as adults at 14 before I can even begin to subscribe to your logic about 17 year olds.

The UK and the US need a joint prosecution agreement where the kid gets prosecuted in the UK for the crime and the punishment is deemed reasonable between both countries. I'm guessing something like this may already exist. This will only work for crimes at similar levels but there are enough of those that matter.

Yeah it’s completely absurd that emergency services can be abused like this. It’s a similar situation to ordering a bunch of delivery pizzas to a victim’s house. There must be a middle ground between convenience (being able to pay cash at the stoop, get a rapid emergency response when you need it, etc.) and preventing abuse.

It's called caller ID. Don't trust an anonymous source. From the article it sounds like swat in tennessee responded to a call from the UK? That part seemed fishy.

Caller ID records are neither reliable, universally available, nor hard to spoof.

It sounds like a flaw in the phone system that a call to 911 can be done anonymously.

It seems lax and irresponsible that every single swatting attack hasn’t been traced and prosecuted.

International telecom agreements basically make caller id impossible to secure. It can be spoofed so easily that it can’t be relied upon.

It’s the same thing that makes it hard to block international criminal gangs that target the vulnerable.

If spoofed properly it’s impossible to tell that the call isn’t from a local number in Tennessee.

Practically, the kids are fully responsible because no shots were fired. The swat team obviously made a decision that for them was a good one to mobilize. Can’t fault the police for making a 50-50 decision. Most likely they sold it like there isn’t any time for them to decide.

This was part of an attempt to commit extortion. That's beyond kids being kids or "some responsibility."

Also, it doesn't sound like the police did anything wrong here. They were responding to a report of an armed killer. They had to show up, ready to engage an armed killer. They didn't shoot him, he had a heart attack.

"Months later, the family learned about Shane Sonderman, who was a minor back in April 2020 when the crime was committed.

"Sonderman is currently behind bars awaiting trial. A Federal Grand Jury indictment claims he had six victims across the country. Herring was the only one who died.

"Another minor was in on the scheme. “A kid in the United Kingdom made the call to my dad’s local police,” Fitch said.

"The accomplice will not be extradited from the United Kingdom because he’s currently a minor."

https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...

The whole system relies on naive trust. Maybe we need to move to trust but verify. This would mean that you investigate first.

The earlier you teach kids that "actions have consequences" or responsibilities, the better the kids and in turn society will be. "They are just kids" is ok in some cases, but the incident at hand is quite a serious one and I don't think, the perpetrators should be absolved coz of their age.

I don't blame them I blame the parents. If my dog murders you I'm to blame but not if my kid does.

Why isn’t law enforcement being held accountable as well? As long as it’s possible to wreak havoc with a single phone call or text message, there will always be people who will do it. Law enforcement needs to be prepared for that. Why is this still happening?

Consequences for the parents of such budding psychopaths should be so severe that they actually take their parental obligations seriously.

Just last week someone got doxed and swatted by Twitter as well. People get cancelled on an hourly basis by Twitter's narcissistic collective of soulless wretches that they call a userbase.

Twitter should be globally nullrouted for the crimes its users commit on an hourly basis. Jack Dorsey is absolutely knowledgeable about this as well totally complicit in it happening.

So you are suggesting that we cancel Twitter for cancelling people?

Every time I see “cancel” used like this I feel compelled to remind that if this was a real issue preexisting terms indicative of bad behavior would be used…e.g., censorship…and they aren’t used because they don’t apply and cancel culture is made up to absolve people of consequences for their actions.

You are saying that publicly shaming someone, making them lose their current job and making them un-hirable is a fair punishment for making an off-color joke, or holding beliefs that even slightly differ from Twitter's collective, or any number of innocuous things that people have had their lives ruined over.

Cancel culture IS a problem. You are part of the problem for not acknowledging it.

"Cancel culture" is nothing. We've long warned about how privacy online, using pseudonyms and being conscious of the data you present to others. If you're saying something that platform users dislike, they're probably going to stop engaging with it or dogpile the topic. It's a reality distortion field, a cause with no effect.

These arguments always attribute causality to someone with very little agency in those situations and minimize/victimize the actions of someone who did something problematic.

Let’s walk through it…

Person A says something bad (your ‘off color joke’)

Person B dislikes that and says so on the internet, loudly

Person C sees what B said and decides not to hire A

Your argument is that B is more responsible for Cs actions than A or C is. This particular brand of American individual freedoms is bought into by one end of our political spectrum in particular and is nonsense.

My argument is that Twitter is 100% complicit and aware of what person B does, as well as the consequences of it (in this case, indirectly murdering someone). This phenomenon of ruining multiple people's lives in this fashion is also almost entirely localized to Twitter.

This is why I believe Twitter should be forcibly shut down. Their entire business model depends on them memory holing the atrocities its users commit.

This seems like an overreaction

It is. And ironic, considering the vitriol displayed is what he's criticizing.

I hear people swat using phone calls a lot, too so we should really do something about Alexander Bell.

The most prevalent countermeasure deployed against lying seems to be identity verification.

For example, to combat lies about the source of money from crime, banks are required to verify the ID (photographic, residential address) of depositors, as are other transactors e.g. property sales intermediaries.

Lies can easily be disseminated via technology, and identity verification as retrospective tracing to origin can be done at the device level, the network level, or both.

However, perhaps we are getting to a point where the default of communications tech will be a much higher level of user identity checking as a precursor to communication and operation of devices.

Although this is a dystopian scenario where a centralised controlling system regulates who can actually even use tech or to what degree, it is easy to imagine that it would be technologically possible.

The concern is that the actions of criminals will be used as an excuse to apply this kind of system and make possible the oppressive restriction of freedoms in future.

I highly recommend the latest episode of the Darknet Diaries podcast, which discusses a campaign of harassment aiming to get someone to give up a highly-valuable Instagram handle: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/

It is a crying shame that these children can have so little discipline or moral compass that they acted this way.

Children are naughty because they want to test boundaries. If a child does this to you it’s really important to very firmly show them where that boundary lies. You’ll feel bad but there is plenty of time to be kind to them later.

They're minors, not children. Sonderman was 17 at the time.

Not being tried as an adult is a legal distinction. It doesn't turn the perpetrators into kids without responsibility.

The latest episode of Darknet Diaries is on a similar topic: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/ - basically someone owned a desirable Instagram handle and got harassed into giving it up.

Seems like a case where the police on the frontline did everything fine.

But the reputation of the police caused a fear response triggering a predisposition to a heart attack.

If you knew that having multiple police turn up on your property was going to lead to a safe, reasonable, calm discussion between you and the police, why panic?

The size of the fine illustrates a sort of perversity here. If paid who's actually getting the money the state or the victims (family of the deceased). I'm quite sure many will think blood money abhorrent but why should the state get any either?

Something that didn’t seem quite clear to me from the article, what was their motivation?

Was this straight up extortion with the aim to sell the Twitter id or did they just want to possess it for bragging rights?

I'm glad to read about the 20 year sentence for the other swatter. That needs to be widely publicized so people realize it just doesn't pay to jerk people around for fun.

As a point of comparison -- let's say kids prank a random non-cop into going over to a guys house with a gun. Who gets in trouble, and why the difference?

Where's the outrage against Twitter? Couldn't they simply make it possible to recover any twitter handle, e.g. by providing proof that you were the original owner?

Then the market value of a stolen twitter handle (at least an active one) would be zero, since any handle I buy will just be restored to the owner eventually.

Right... time to solve this like Apple did with Find My + secure enclave + stopping phone thefts in their tracks.

Or like the time Sherlock Holmes put together all those clues and found the murderer.

The person who arranged the swatting goes to jail for 5 years: https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/22/qwk_swatting_death/

Interesting. It’s a classic confused deputy problem. We provide a channel to summon police that default trusts the summoner for various reasons.

Usually, we simply resolve post-hoc but it appears that all one has to do is be a foreign minor and one can do this with impunity. Very interesting.

And yet the minors will only get a slap on the wrist (if that). Causing serious harm to others should come with consequences, regardless of your age. Kids get away with all kinds of heinous crimes for which adults would be put behind bars for life, and that is wrong.

Perhaps we should consider why we allow the U.S. to have SWAT teams that respond in such a manner?

In which countries will armed police not show up if you call in an ongoing shooting?

In most countries, police are armed. The OP was asking about SWAT. The militarization of the police is a big problem.

Do you have evidence that a SWAT team was involved in this case? I don't see it anywhere. (https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...)

5 years? Ridiculous. This person needs to be sent to a much worse place than a prison for life.

How is issuing a SWAT team for every single call without validating them first not illegal yet?

The complete story from the local news:

https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...

Update: https://www.techspot.com/news/90483-grandfather-died-heart-a...

I thought calls could be traced? If an emergency call comes in from another country claiming to be reporting a local situation, I'd think police would do a little more checking before going in full throttle, guns at the ready.

Harsher punishments. Nothing is stopping kids from going around and stabbing randoms but the fear of getting caught (and for some the distaste of hurting others). Kids believe they can swat someone and get away with it. Don't only go after the cases that result in deaths, crackdown on all such cases.

That hasn't panned out with the death penalty (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/30/there...). People don't go "gee, I wonder what the typical criminal penalty for this action is..." They just do it, especially kids with immature brains and only partially developed impulse control.

Many of those who commit crimes that could result in the death penalty are either in a high risk scenario (e.g., drug dealers) who face worse fates on a day-to-day basis.

It’s understandable why the death penalty isn’t such a harsh deterrent for everyone.

Who said anything about death peanalty.

There's a lot of evidence that once a punishment is big enough, it makes no difference on deterence, but that's very different from saying punishment vs no punishment is the same.

Interesting.. can you provide a study I can read?

Its not my field so i'm not sure im aware of what the best studies are, but some links:

https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/ffct-prsn/i...

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...

Ah sorry thought you were an expert.

This may be true for the death penalty. But it certainly doesn't generalize to all punishment.

Are you saying that punishing bad behavior consistently won't deter criminals? That flies in the face of common sense that I don't believe claims of "no evidence".

Most children do have a concept of consequence. They certainly understand that calling police will be traced back to them. I was a kid once, they're not as stupid as you think.

> Are you saying that punishing bad behavior consistently won't deter criminals?

I'm saying teenagers are frequently fucking idiots, and that sending them into the American prison system is a "solution" that causes even more damage.

When I was a kid, sending kids to "jail" for the night was a great way to scare the hell outta them in the name of making sure they understood the gravity of the mistake they'd made crossing a certain line. Where I grew up, the police were always in cahoots with the parents to ensure that the kid got a right good unforgettable lesson outta the experience. Sounds like the sorta thing these stupid kids need to me.

I agree with the caveat over the last ~30yr we've normalized calling law enforcement over the most petty things. When teachers threaten to call the police when kids get in a fist fight it substantially waters down the gravity of calling the police for something that actually matters.

That’s probably a consequence of not allowing teachers to deal with that themselves.

Which is a consequence of some teachers abusing that unofficial privilege.

The police have become the only authority with the ability to use force in society.

That too is being questioned now because of abuse of authority.

Which leads to all sorts of questions about who should be the allowed to take action against bad behaviour?

Who watches the watchmen?

Yeah, it's really sad the direction it's all taken. Still not sure how exactly it could be improved (or if it's even possible anymore; it may already be too far gone).

Look on a small scale I could afford speeding tickets easily but I can’t afford to have my license suspended after x number of them so I don’t speed very much.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17366333/

> Drivers who receive speeding citations are at increased risk of receiving subsequent speeding citations, suggesting that speeding citations have limited effects on deterrence in the context of the current traffic enforcement system.

You also have to communicate the penalties to people. "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!"

What would be a reasonable ("Harsher") punishment in this case?

Dumb kids are everywhere. Punishment is not harsher. And yet swatting seems to be nearly exclusively American problem.

A harsher punishment isn't going to solve the problem.

These kids aren't doing this shit because they expect to get caught.

The real problem is the militarization of the police force, and the idea that all it takes is a random phone call (without any proof or verification) to have someone's house stormed by a squad of men with guns and military gear.

Why is there always a "real problem" as opposed "also a problem"?

Because you will never be able to stop stupid kids from being stupid kids.

Instead of trying to solve that unsolvable "problem", we should be focusing on the "real problems" that actually ARE solvable, like excessive and unwarranted (literally) police force.

The US already has about 10x the number of people in jail as European countries. We need less people in jail, not more. I don't think changing the punishment from 5 years in jail to 10 years in jail would deter anyone differently. And I would like to believe that someone doing this super stupid thing is redeemable and can be a productive member of society, versus a permanent ward of the state.

I agree. This guy facing 5 yrs while Aaron Swartz was facing 35 yrs for scraping a website...

I doubt that would make any difference. The problem is that swatting is trivial and risk-free.

Phone networks make faking calls trivial, because spam callers want it to be. swatters piggyback on that to be able to swat you from all over the world.

Police departments in some countries will respond hard to claims of violence in progress, making it easy to get the response you desire.

There's no point having the death penalty for swatting if you can keep doing it from anywhere in the world with virtually no chance of being caught.

The US has much harsher punishment than other countries. The main result is that it has 10 times more prisoner, literally, than all other countries. Has it resulted in less crimes than in other countries?

How the hell did the kids get his personal details?

Don't call 911 to report a fake crime, kids.

There is a word for when a false 911 call prompts a potentially lethal police response.Tell me again how police haven't been militarized?

Mark - we will do better. RIP

One aspect of this that I haven't seen addressed yet, is the role the 911 dispatchers play. I'm not sure what (if any) training they receive today specific to detecting SWAT'ing instances, but it seems likely that there are steps dispatchers could take to try and help separate pranks from real incidents, and - in turn - relay that to the responding officers who can mediate their response based on that.

Disclaimer: I am a former 911 dispatcher myself, but I've been away from that world for 25 years or so, so my knowledge of training standards, procedures, technology, etc. used in a modern 911 center is pretty thin.

That said... there should be some red flags to a dispatcher that call might be of questionable veracity. One would, to my mind, simply be if the call is received from a much different geographic region than where the incident is reported as happening. For direct calls to 911 the callers location is generally shown, although not with super high precision in the case of cell-phones. If somebody wants to call a 911 center that isn't "their" PSAP, they can call the 10 digit number for the center (if they know it. I guess these can probably be found online). I think you will also get location information on the admin line, but don't quote me on that. Additionally, the dispatcher can tell if you called 911 or "the admin line" - and a member of the public calling in on the admin line should probably raise a least a hint of suspicion.

A call being relayed / bounced to your center through multiple other agencies is also something that might indicate that the caller is not physically present and may not have the full picture.

There are probing questions that could be used to help validate the call. "Did you hear/see these events yourself?" "Where were you when you say/hear them?" "How old are you?" "What's your name?" Some of these are, in fact, questions a 911 dispatcher would ask anyway, not specific to SWAT'ing. What I'd be curious to know, is are there more specific ways to probe to detect a likely SWAT'ing event.

If there is a report of gunfire or something, a dispatcher would also typically notice if they only get one call, and no additional confirming calls. While it is possible, especially in a rural area, to only get one call on something like that, reports of gunshots would often-times come from multiple sources. So if the incident is reported as being in a busy/urban area, but there is only one call, that could be an indicator that things aren't kosher.

Anyway... just some stream of consciousness stuff here that occurred to me. Not sure if anybody has looked deeply into this aspect yet, or is working on it. If not, maybe somebody should be.

Edit: looks like this has gotten at least some attention within the public safety communications world:

https://www.ems1.com/tactical-ems/articles/swatting-guidance...

https://www.911.gov/pdf/National_911_Program_State_of_911_We...

That's so sad.

Why can minors wield SWAT teams without further due diligence?

1. Some situations are highly sensitive, and 2. any decision-making process for a fixed budget has a precision-recall tradeoff.

I understand both of your points; my point is maybe we should reconsider our precision-recall tradeoff if we're sending SWAT units into innocent households that result in innocent people dying. All sorts of rights violations have to happen for that to occur.

> All sorts of rights violations have to happen for that to occur.

I agree in general, but in this specific case I don't think there were any rights violations. The guy sadly had a heart attack while complying with reasonable if forceful instructions.

Well, innocent people die in both paths so we’re in an optimization problem unless you’ve decided you have concrete answers to the trolley problem that are number invariant.

People like that just need to be locked up for the rest of their miserable lives. There's absolutely no reason someone like that should be permitted to be part of society.

Not sure why this is downvoted. I am _radically_ against prison punishments for non-violent crimes since they don't achieve anything, but for crimes like these, I honestly don't want to live in a society where someone with this kind of judgement is allowed to roam freely and cause more harm.

They are children. Children make mistakes.

Yes, mistakes are another word for bad choices. How many violent criminals are making good choices?

"The family eventually learned, earlier that day, an anonymous caller demanded Mark hand over his Twitter handle worth thousands of dollars. Mark refused. Hours later, the unthinkable happened.

"Months later, the family learned about Shane Sonderman, who was a minor back in April 2020 when the crime was committed.

"Sonderman is currently behind bars awaiting trial. A Federal Grand Jury indictment claims he had six victims across the country. Herring was the only one who died."

https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...

The problem is that a significant part of the population has this kind of judgment.

Kids are stupid and 50‰ are dumber than average. It is possible that their judgment isn't that that far off the norm, and it was an unlikely string of events that led to this outcome.

Clearly punishment is appropriate, but we rarely hand out life imprisonment for first degree murder. Seems like this would be more akin to manslaughter.

With the mass militarization of the police, malicious SWATing is basically attempted murder.

Sure, but if police aren't militarized, if you look at the gun stats you see that we are a heavily armed nation. This isn't the UK. What are police supposed to do, go in there with truncheons in one hand and pepper spray in the other? The gunplay is out of control at the moment. The cat's out of the bag and we've screwed up.

Especially since there've now been (at least) three incidents where SWATing has directly led to house residents dying, and many more incidents where pets have been shot and killed. It was always attempted murder, but at this point there's absolutely no way for them to deny it. Anyone who still SWATs people is fully aware of the potential consequences.

The way I see it, swatting is attempted 1st degree murder and if the victim dies the death penalty should be on the table.

First degree murder is a little much (do you really think this is equivalent to taking a gun and shooting someone with pre-planning and full intention to kill them?), but certainly involuntary manslaughter fits.

Not sure what about planning a swatting on Discord and then executing on that plan would qualify as involuntary. The actions were voluntary, intended to cause harm to the victim and a reasonable person would foresee that they could result in death.

I don't think the intent is to cause death though.

Ianal but based on wikipedia that still sounds more like involuntary to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter

> First degree murder is a little much (do you really think this is equivalent to taking a gun and shooting someone with pre-planning and full intention to kill them?), but certainly involuntary manslaughter fits.

IAMN[even_close_to_being]AL, but I think you're right about it being involuntary manslaughter. My very limited understanding is that when a drunk driver kills someone, it's involuntary manslaughter because they're undertaking a risky behavior with intent neither to kill nor cause bodily harm, but death occured as a result of that behavior anyway. I think it could only be voluntary manslaughter if the circumstances were wildly different, like if the man got swatted, had a heart attack or stroke or something life threatening after the police had left, and the perpetrators were the only ones watching the stream and decided, in the heat of the moment as they watched his death unfold, that they would let him die for some reason, like they were angry at him for having the audacity to keep streaming right after the swat... I dunno.

I believe it could only be murder if in the premeditated steps ("hey, let's swat this guy!"), the guys deliberately planned on using the swat to give this man a heart attack or serious bodily injury.

At least, that's my very limited understanding; I'm just some guy with a beard, I don't really know anything about anything.

>the guys deliberately planned on using the swat to give this man a heart attack or serious bodily injury

I would say that while in this case the death via heart attack was an accident, having men with guns attack a home counts as deliberate intent to cause bodily injury.

I might be misremembering the classifications, but wouldn't that be voluntary manslaughter? Similar to if they rammed a truck into his house, intending to damage and terrorize but not (specifically) kill, and happened to run him over in the process?

The way I see it, the death penalty should never be on the table.

Ok, but please don't post shallow fulminations to HN even when (especially when) something is enraging. It reliably lowers discussion quality, which only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I sold my Twitter handle a few months ago for $8,000. After dozens of DMs from people wanting to pay $100, finally a well funded startup with a serial success founder went all-in. I don't care about their TOS and I hate domainers.. Since I wasn't using it beyond reading and retweeting, might as well put it to use by someone else.

To be pedantic, aren’t all Twitter handles equally rare?

No, and in exactly the same way N arbitrary frequencies don't sound good together. There are infinite sound frequency combinations that sound good, but this is still a smaller infinity than all possible combinations of frequencies. That said, if you claimed "C Major" as your chord, you might get swatted.

Hah! Now this is why hacker news is hacker news. Here's an interesting and related 3Blue1Brown video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw

>A swatting incident—the act of calling 911 to report a fake crime so armed responders storm an address—was organized on Discord in an attempt to intimidate Herring into handing over his valuable @tennessee Twitter handle.

That the police in the US would stom an address - in full SWAT gear and attitude nonetheless - because somebody "called", is one of the most amusing examples of the incompetency and lunacy of the police system.

In which country will armed police not show up if an ongoing shooting is called in?

In which country the police has the worse death statistics in such situations (at least outside of some developing world backwater)?

In which country would such people move forward with weapons drawn, shouting commands, and making things worse?

> In which country the police has the worse death statistics in such situations (at least outside of some developing world backwater)?

In which countries are there as many guns available to the public?

> In which country would such people move forward with weapons drawn, shouting commands, and making things worse?

Is this not what you would expect to happen in a so-called armed conflict? The situation was successfully de-escalated.

> Is this not what you would expect to happen in a so-called armed conflict?

I think the point is to not make it into armed conflict between cops and person.

> The situation was successfully de-escalated.

Which situation was de-escalated?

I hate when news articles fail to answer obvious questions like, "What was the Twitter handle?"

EDIT: Clearly, I'm illiterate. I did read it, and then re-read it --- each time missing @tennessee.

It's right there in the fine article.

They answered it - it's @tennessee

Did you read it? It clearly noted it

Was this not in the first paragraph of the article?

> was organized on Discord in an attempt to intimidate Herring into handing over his valuable @tennessee Twitter handle.

End of 2nd paragraph: “@tennessee“

I glossed over it the first time too, thinking an individual couldn't grab a .gov-like handle.

Can you not add felony murder to the charge? From the 5 year charge, this sounds like a felony, and the person died during and because of the commission of a felony.

Second, can we get rid of allowing international phone calls to appear with domestic numbers. I don't care if companies can't hide the fact that they outsource their call centers to low-wage countries. At least, if all domestic phone numbers were assured to originate domestically, it would be a huge deterrent against this and all kinds of other scam phone calls since they would be subject to US law enforcement.

How would you even enforce point 2? Most people at my work, regardless of location receive a Sydney number, because their soft phone connects to the Sydney VOIP infrastructure.

I would imagine a lot of work places do similar things with their phone systems.

Your calls then show up as Sydney. Don’t like it change your VOIP provider. I’m tired of spam call centers using fake numbers

I don't think minors should be able to summon a SWAT team without a 3 kill streak first. We should contact the game publishers to remove these non-skill based incentives and lootboxes.

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