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Comment by grensley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.)

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