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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

"Swatting" isn't a significant problem in other parts of the world because the result is super boring: The police knock on the door, ask some questions, and then leave.

It is only a problem in the US because the response itself is terrifying and often dangerous. Multiple people have died from "swatting" in the US[0].

"Swatting" should carry a jail term for sure. But police reform is a large component in solving the problem (and many other topical problems).

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

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Do you actually think the police send a SWAT team to every single call? 99% of calls in the US would be the exact normal response you said - police knock on the door and ask questions.

The problem is the swatters know the exact type of call to make to elicit a SWAT response, usually involving someone being held hostage and in imminent danger of being killed. The police can't just assume people making that kind of call are lying, they have to respond as if it's real. It's not a problem of the police just responding to every call like that.

> Do you actually think the police send a SWAT team to every single call?

I don't think that's what they're implying at all, given the context is about swatting.

They are more or less stating that the problem is overzealous responses from police, rather than police receiving a fake call for which a SWAT team would be an appropriate response.

Do police in other countries simply not have the capacity to deal with people in imminent danger? Their response to getting a call claiming that there's a crazy person in the house about to murder the caller is to knock politely and ask questions? Seems more like the police in other countries suck then.

> They are more or less stating that the problem is overzealous responses from police, rather than police receiving a fake call for which a SWAT team would be an appropriate response.

The problem is that swatting is enabled precisely because the police's response isn't appropriate. The fact that swatting is so prominent, let alone an issue in the first place, is a testament to that.

Police forces demonstrably: tend to be hyper-militarized, do not train or require de-escalation, do not face legal repercussions for unlawful actions, do not keep up-to-date with various trends and technology, etc. Going in guns-blazing isn't going to save anyone if you don't validate basic information like "is this the right house?" or "did this call purporting to be from someone in our city come from a random Google Voice or Skype number?" or "have we received fake calls from this address already?"

I can’t think of a single kind of situation requiring a police response where surprise escalation is a key component that will help solve that situation in favor of controlled investigation and a focus on de-escalation.

Active shooter probably.

Ironically the standard US response for an active shooter in a school appears to be to wait outside for a good while and see if things work out for themselves.

Which you'd think they'd verify be confirmed reports or actually, like, hearing gunshots.

> surprise escalation

surprise escalation into an unknown, unverified situation where the only basis for the use of deadly force is whether the police feel there is danger. Of course they are in fear for their lives because they are leaping into the unknown, unprepared.

We hear about the militarization of the police. I hate that term. They are playing soldier, not acting it. Having been in the military, if we had a situation and the time we would monitor a location and find out everything we could. Apparently that wasn't passed along to the police, only the guns were.

> Do police in other countries simply not have the capacity to deal with people in imminent danger?

Speaking from europe, we just don't have that here, at least not enough to have SWAT forces ready immediately.

I can't think of any times that it was a problem the SWAT team was not ready.

The equivilant to SWAT in Germany is run by state police. They are used in specific situations, and most of those are never covered by the press. Statiscally, they are have on average around one deployment per day.

The big difference is, those units in Europe are a professiobally trained force and part of a professionally trained police force. And not somw wannabe commandos recruited from ill-trained police officers run by departments too small to even exist in Europe.

> The equivilant to SWAT in Germany is run by state police.

Federal.

No?

SWAT ~= MEK, SEK

FBI HRT ~= GSG-9

The French also have multiple: GIGN from the Gendarmerie, GIPN and RAID from the Police National. The small police departments and sheriffs offices, the latter with elected sheriffs without any real training and qualification requirements, are an US thing.

There is a HUGE range of responses from nothing <-----> Full On military Assault shooting everything that moves.

That fact that citizens of the US have simply accepted that the latter is even remotely a proper response to even "someone being held hostage and in imminent danger of being killed" calls is both sadden, and maddening at the same time

If I was being held hostage and in imminent danger of being killed, I would prefer an armed response.

Is that an educated preference - you have looked up your chances of survival in an armed response vs a negotiated one, or an instinct?

In this hypothetical we’re beyond negotiation anyway. I think I made this clear with the clause “in imminent danger of being killed”. If hostage negotiation were possible, that would not be imminent danger of being killed.

I’m a member of a minority group that is currently experiencing an uptick in violence from the American public. I’m generally a good-natured person and tend not to make enemies. If someone is in my home with a firearm, they’re there to kill me for my perceived connections to big banking, a rational person does not commit random acts of violence like that.

You do, unintentionally, make a stellar point though. If someone in my part of America called the police because someone was trying to kill me, there will likely not be a police response once they see the last name of the target.

Hostage negotiations have a high success rate. It’s one of the very few things to be proud of about our law enforcement strategy. That being said, hostage crises generally happen in public places, and can only be successful if terrorism is not the goal. I would be deeply surprised if anyone decided to attack specifically me if their goal was not to strike fear into my community.

“I’m a member of a minority group that is currently experiencing an uptick in violence from the American public.”

That’s horrible, it’s insane the lengths people will go to satiate their misperceived anger.

What are the violent acts being committed?

https://www.adl.org/resources/tools-to-track-hate/antisemiti...

In other parts of the world the police get a call saying there is an armed individual threatening to hurt hostages and they send a single unarmed officer to knock on the door?

The comment didn’t say it was only a single officer or that they were unarmed.

That makes a huge difference, thank you.

You see the police normally do this thing called investigation. I know here in the US the police have forgotten what that word even means, as they just react, often emotionally, jumping wildly to conclusions based on zero evidence.

You see not every police dept in the world has removed all investigation from the responsibility of their police forces..

There will be a well proportioned response, but it won’t be an actual SWAT team. There’s typically one such team per five to ten million people and they won’t move for a joke call.

But more importantly, with an order of magnitude rarer killings, there is much less of a “we’re at war with the bad guys” culture. In some countries discharging a weapon brings automatic suspension for the investigation, even if nobody gets hurt. Cops simply don’t tend get trigger happy in this environment.

> with an order of magnitude rarer killings, there is much less of a “we’re at war with the bad guys” culture.

...(assuming EU) apart from hosting some of the deadliest wars in modern history.

In other parts, citizens generally don't have guns, so the idea of an "armed individual" by itself is already hard to believe.

Guns are in many countries all over the world.

Yes they are, and they are mostly in the USA with 1.2 civilian firearms per civilian.

Yes, but almost 50% of all the civilian guns are in the US.

There are estimated to be thousands of swatting incidents in a given year, so the "super boring" result evidently happens the vast majority of the time in the US too.

It's also not always that boring in other countries. Here is an example that involved more than some questions and leaving:

https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/18-year-old-arrested-in-cana...

Canada isn't that different from the US.

Outside of North America, you don't have to worry about police violence too much in developed nations.

From your linked article:

> An 18-year-old has been arrested in Canada after investigators traced “swatting” calls at Volunteer High School in Hawkins County and Watauga High School in Boone, N.C. to him.

Note that the caller was in Canada, but the swatting and presumably violent police response was in North Carolina. Swatting is as American as apple pie and baseball, IMO.

"presumably violent police response"

The article appears to describe a non-violent response, so you may be wrong in this case as well as about the normal outcome.

Good to know I got only a 1 in 1000 chance of dying because Americans are so hyped up on fake maga tough guy takes that we can't agree to hold police accountable for their behavior.

That's not what I was trying to communicate.

I know I can't win the argument you'd like to start about the absolute risk and whether it's tolerable.

I don't want to!

My point was about the variance, and false confidence that two small rates are truly different. Even when one is zero, so the other is infinity percent larger.

It's not that 1/1000 is "low" or "high" in terms of human cost - that is in the eye of the beholder.

The point is that the frequency of rare events is highly sensitive to random chance, and so even with hypothetical perfect records you can't pretend different numbers are necessarily different rates.

Much less if you guess at numbers based on prejudices.

"How to Lie With Statistics" desperately needs a sequel.

Keffals was swatted in Canada, and Canada has a far less extreme police and gun culture compared to the USA.

Far-less extreme? Why? Just because they loudly profess it?

Any way you want to measure it, it is less extreme.

This is actually not true and it's just like myth propaganda propagated by Canada. The Royal mounted police are deeply murderous to native people till today. that's just a single example. in the same way that the American media blames every black man murdered by the police so does the Canadian.

That's because both countries are based on the continued enforcement of white supremacy.

'Starlight Tours' are a sordid stain in Canadian history, however, I don't see how that makes it untrue or a myth. Even if the RCMP is demonstrably bad, Ontario and Quebec have their own provincial police forces, and so do a few large municipalities.

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

>> "Swatting" isn't a significant problem in other parts of the world because the result is super boring: The police knock on the door, ask some questions, and then leave.

> Keffals was swatted in Canada, and Canada has a far less extreme police and gun culture compared to the USA.

I think it's egregious that she was actually arrested for something that the police should have realized was fake, or simply been able to sort out in-person. However, her claim that she woke up with an assault rifle in her face was simply not true. In the context of American swatting, it's more like swatting-light since Canadian police actually require training and attempt to de-escalate instead of solving every problem with guns.

> Officers did not conduct what is sometimes referred to as a “dynamic entry” into Ms. Sorrenti’s residence. Rather, they knocked on the door, announced themselves as police officers, and occupants answered. Any attempt by uninvolved third parties to suggest otherwise is inaccurate and irresponsible.

https://www.londonpolice.ca/en/news/statement-from-police-ch...

Is the rest of the world loaded up to the gills with weapons? There's 1.2 guns per citizen...

Well, that's because we have to protect ourselves from SWAT teams!

Indiana just enshrined that right into law.

https://theweek.com/articles/474702/indiana-law-that-lets-ci...

Good? As a Californian who doesn't own a gun and hasn't fired one in 20 years, I'm unlikely to take advantage of that law, but I appreciate that it exists. A SWAT assault that isn't preceded by presenting a valid warrant is just a heavily-armed home invasion, and home owners absolutely should be able to respond to those. That was presumably already legal, but if "enshrining" it into law as you put it makes it pointedly obvious to the police that they can be legally shot dead if they don't follow a safe, legal procedure, great. Maybe swatting will be less of a thing then...

Edit: wow, just saw this part:

> Why did Indiana push this law? The state Supreme Court had previously ruled that citizens had no legal right to resist police officers, even in a case of unlawful entry

What a crazy ruling. I guess this law is checks and balances in action in two ways...

If you think about it in practical terms, I don’t think this is a good law. What’s going to happen if a house owner is opening fire at a heavily armed police team that is conducting an illegal raid. Is the police going to stand down and reassess the legality of their entry? Or are they going to shoot back? And what’s the likely outcome? Dead owner and dead police. Great.

Now, if you’d really want to dissuade the police from making illegal raids, make them liable for all damages, slap on penalties and put the burden of proof on them. Police entered and cannot prove it was legal? Pay fine, repair damage. At the same time lower the bar for personal liability for the officers: Can’t demonstrate that they did at least the basic due diligence? Pay out of their own pocket.

> Now, if you’d really want to dissuade the police from making illegal raids...

Why not both?

I don't think it's necessarily wise for a homeowner to open fire when outnumbered like that, but it's their right to make that choice when armed intruders break into their home. (And really without the whole knock, announcement, warrant thing the home owner doesn't know the intruders are police.) Making this clear shouldn't exclude these other excellent ideas.

The police dont pay fines or repair anything - tax payers do. But cops do enter the houses where they might find someone that answers fire. Only the latter is a dissuasive.

The funny thing is, while "to protect yourself from government tyranny" is the favorite phrase of gun enthusiasts and gun lobbies in this country, whenever a citizen uses a gun in justifiable defense against police (the most recent notable one being Breonna Taylor's case) these same people side with the police every time.

Some politicians have staked themselves on this issue publicly. Can't recall the name, but a GOP candidate explicitly said that he would shoot the police if the entered with a no-knock warrant into his home.

One challenge is that citizens side with the police in court.

It doesn't even get to court very often, thanks to police investigating themselves, and DAs who are beholden to them one way or another.

> these same people side with the police every time.

Not all of us.

This is inaccurate. I know many people on both sides of the gun debate and I don't know a single person who doesn't want police reform regarding no-knock raids. I don't know a single gun owner who supports the police in the Breonna Taylor incident.

The overwhelmingly vast majority of "protect yourself from government tyranny" types want to massively curtail police powers.

> The overwhelmingly vast majority of "protect yourself from government tyranny" types want to massively curtail police powers

I find this hard to believe. Back the blue, blue lives matter, thin blue line people are propagated by gun enthusiasts who use nice slogans like “government tyranny” to justify their positions in a shallow and emotional way. There’s no actual belief in government tyranny, otherwise they wouldn’t stand with the law enforcement arm of the government’s elevated agents.

You seem to be saying that if the majority of "back the blue" folks are gun enthusiasts, that means the majority of gun enthusiasts are "back the blue" folks. I'm not sure if either is true, but if it were, you still couldn't infer one from the other.

Weird that we can't vote for that then. Seems like you may be counting wrong.

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, "The only way to stop a bad guy from swatting you is a good guy with his own personal SWAT team."

Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.

Dear Diary,

Today the pasta was good.

And yet those same people you mock, using only the tools you described, threw off the yoke of the largest world power at the time.

Amongst the reasons they did, were situations eerily similar to what we call "swatting" (and no-knock warrants), which were some motivations behind the fourth amendment.

An amendment that we have, through twisted legal interpretations and arguments for expediency, managed to largely de-fang (civil forfeiture, I'm looking at you).

He graduated top of his class in the Navy Seals and was involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, with over 300 confirmed kills. I think he knows what’s up.

> using only the tools you described

Well, that and the French navy.

There's evidence the framers of the Constitution intended for citizens to be able to own weapons that gave the federal government pause if the federal government decided to overstep its bounds.

Specifically, even in 1787 it was seeming likely that there was a good chance that at some point the federal government was going to abolish slavery by force, and the framers of the Constitution needed the southern states on board with the Constitution's stronger central government vs. the Articles of Confederation.

So, they probably intended weapons of some proportionate power compared to contemporary military weapons, but the ultimate underlying motivations are suspect.

On the other hand, I could imagine a world where in 1787 alcohol and/or marijuana were legal in some states and illegal in others and the framers were worried about federal troops imposing national drug policy on drugs that never crossed state lines. In that case, it seems more reasonable, which I guess lends respectability to their reasoning at a medium level of abstraction.

Switzerland is, yeah. No such issue there, however.

Switzerland is about 1/5 the guns per capita. If you look at US state gun prevalence, it reliably correlates to the where higher numbers of police are killed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

Chicken/egg problem. Who escalated first?

Probably solvable by de-escalating both at the same time.

You can solve this by not giving police guns in the first place.

While true, the culture of guns in Switzerland is very different to the US.

People spread this detail without knowing that the Swiss instead strickly control access to ammunition.

I’m unsure why people think this is true. If you have the ability to buy a gun in Switzerland you can buy any amount of ammo just as easily.

The difference is strong regulations disallowing carrying/transporting loaded weapons and enforcing storage requirements as well as a very different gun culture without the emphasis on handguns for self-protection.

Ammunition is tightly controlled in Switzerland as far as I understand. Having guns is not that helpful without some ammunition. Most people are not going to be prepared to produce ammunition

You need a permit to buy ammunition in Switzerland, just as you need a permit to buy guns. But the permit is available if you do not have a criminal record. Ammunition is not more tightly controlled than guns, both are controlled, but not as tightly as in places like New York or California in the U.S.

There are also government subsidized shooting ranges that do not require these permits.

Buying guns requires a permit (and a background check and maybe a chat with the local police department) but to buy ammunition in Switzerland you don't need a permit. Just a clean background check that you can request online.

That's a solvable problem it would seem? It's either that or more discipline.

I have a few questions about the relevance of this.

> 1.2 guns per citizen

After 1 gun, do guns truly become more dangerous? For someone opening a door, I don't think handgun vs AR vs shotgun is a very meaningful distinction - you're going to die if you get shot in the face

> loaded up to the gills

Isn't it true that one of the top arguments used against gun control that criminals will have the weapons anyways?

Therefore, as a LEO being summoned to a potential crime scene, isn't it true that they would behave in accordance with the person being a potential criminal, and therefore living outside of "guns per citizen" statistics? And therefore isn't the global approach to SWATting likely done without respect to the local environment, but instead in accordance with best practices of deescalation and safety?

I look forward to hearing you expand your thoughts.

A small group of Americans actually own guns, maybe 20%. So yes, the average gun owner has more like 5 guns.

As for entering the property, if there’s five people and one gun, that’s a lot different to five people and thirty guns.

Most of the SWATing issues are in states where households have 30-40% rates, many with as high as 55-65% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

It's best to look at households because children generally don't own their own gun, and often if there is a couple, only one of them will own a gun (usually the man).

44% of US households have at least one firearm in the house.

Not "a small group".

In terms of individuals of all ages, it's 32% of all individuals owning guns -- 45% of all men own a gun but only 19% of all women own a gun.

Therefore the population where it's unusual to own a gun is single women. Single men are also less likely to own a gun than married men.

If we look at those who are married, 52% of all married couples live in a household with guns.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...

Your stats seemed low, so I looked it up on this Gallup poll. The data is from two years ago, but it probably hasn't changed much.

32% of US adults say they own a gun. 44% of adults say they live in a house that has at least one gun.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...

However, I agree with your overall sentiment -- the distribution is far from uniform.

You mean 44% of Americans have more like 3 guns, by the official record, which vaguely addresses my weakest point I suppose. Not sure this does anything to justify the US approach to policing

You're suggesting that police officers would face a significant danger merely knocking on the door of a gun owner's home, which is silly. Just because someone has a gun doesn't mean they're going to unload on anyone knocking on their door, much less a uniformed police officer.

Also: 2/3rds of Americans don't own a gun, and only 44% even live in a house with a gun.

Ever notice that only in a very small number of cases does a "swatting" result in any danger to the officers, such as the homeowner shooting an officer? The number of times this has happened is in the single digits. Hint: that's because there's little danger to police responding to these sorts of calls.

In fact, there's very little danger to police officers in the US, period. They have a murder rate lower than the general population, because people know that cops don't give a shit about when you or I are murdered (nation-wide the clearance rate for homicides is abysmal, one of the lowest in the developed world) but if a cop is killed, the killer will be correctly identified, found, and arrested within hours.

Being a cop in the US doesn't even rank in the top ten in terms of deaths on the job. Retail workers and cab drivers have a far higher homicide-on-the-job rate;

Pre-COVID the #1 killer of police, overwhelmingly, was traffic collisions, suicide, and heart disease.

During/after COVID, the #1 killer, despite police getting first-in-line access to the vaccine, was/is COVID. Completely preventable.

The reason these "swattings" are so dangerous is because police show up expecting a dangerous situation, confrontation, even though it's incredibly rare.

As for Switzerland: "military service is required; and military firearms are kept in homes—which historians credit for Germany never invading Switzerland during World War II."

Far smaller population than the USA, and loads more variables to consider when comparing the two. But at least one country gets it pretty Damn Right with Guns!

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