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Comment by PuppyTailWags | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder why ordinary people are not swatted, police called on them, deliveries made in their name, etc. in Sweden when a country that doesn't have such public records like USA has this so regularly several people have died.

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Swatting works in USA because of how the police handle it. In Sweden, and in most of the world, you would get a knock on the door and some questions from two policemen. US police going in blind no-knock raids with weapons hot on the basis of a single anonymous phone call is the issue, not public addresses.

Does Sweden have something like CPS? In America, if someone discovers you have a child they can make repeated allegation to CPS. CPS is required to investigate and they're also required by law to not disclose who reported it. So having your name in a book with any evidence you have children allows anyone to harrass you endlessly, each time you'll be under investigation for weeks to months and you can never find out who's causing it.

Sweden has an its version of CPS. The first time they will do an investigation but without any proof, nothing will happen. After a few of these without any indication of harm being done to the child they will just ignore them as it has been investigated.

You can’t really cause problems for people this way.

And blaming swatting on swatters is an obvious trick. To prevent swatting, we have a choice of changing our expectations about how police should react to anonymous snitching, or we can detect and isolate or eliminate every single extremely maladjusted young man that has existed or will exist.

Choosing the first means that you end swatting as a danger. You're only ever pretending to choose the second (the impossible one); but instead you're actually saying that the status quo is fine and in addition you're going to use maladjusted young males as a pretense to take even more liberties with the amount of force and restriction that you're going to apply to the general public.

Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America, the police won't immediately murder someone based on a phone call.

Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does. It's largely an effective harrassment, terrorization (fear) tactic. Congressperson Marjorie Greene (yes she's terrible, not the point) being an on-going example of that.

> Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does.

I don't think this is as much of a counter-argument as you seem to think.

> Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America

A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK [1].

[1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/131816/twitch-streamer-kef...

That's London in Canada.

> A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK

It says "Canadian" in the headline and throughout the article. Still a country other than America, but not the UK.

But also the most similar country there is to the USA.

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