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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

"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...

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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

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