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Comment by biofunsf | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a 911 operator gets a phone call that goes like this:

   - 911, what is your emergency?
   - Help me oh god! ... My husband he's going crazy he got a shotgun and is threatening to shoot my kids he...
   - [garble garble]
   - [Distant voice of a man] "get the fuck off that phone"
   - [Loud bang]
   - [Line clicks and goes silent]

The 911 operator can try to call back to get confirmation, but a lack of response just underscores the seriousness of the situation. If the police didn't rush over in full SWAT gear, ready to save the lives of children, they'd be the ones l̶i̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ berated in the media for not taking a clear imminent threat to life seriously.

Though I doubt fake swatting calls are so well produced.

edit: In this situation, whether real or not, obviously the police shouldn't murder people. If this was real, they should first exhaust their non-lethal options for keeping the crazy husband from murdering children. If it's a fake swatting call or the wrong address, they should discover that and especially not murder people. But in response to the parent's point about the police being eager to rush over from a single phone call, this seems like a 20 second phone call where they have no ethical choice but to rush over. How they behave when they arrive is a different topic from what I'm responding to.

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They don't have to murder people with no physical corroboration of the phone call at all. That's on them. What if it were a legitimate anonymous phone call with a transposition of the numbers of an address, or if the cops just accidentally went down the wrong street? Should people die then, or should we think that's a problem?

The have only called 911 twice, once when a neighbor was waving a pistol around yelling at his wife (cops came, de-escalated things a little, then left - better than shooting someone clearly, if not exactly perfect). The other time I saw smoke pouring out from under the eaves of the house across the street - in that case, the firefighters roared up, jumped out, and busted in my front door (in spite of the fact there wasn't any smoke or flames) so I clearly see why people are worried about first responders charging in without understanding the situation.

I'm sorry but the mental image looking out your front door as a firefighter kicks it down, an ignored building happily in flames over their shoulder, is way too funny.

Reminds me of Captain Hindsight from South Park, where he flies over to the burning building and clarifies all the (in hindsight super obvious) structural flaws in the building leading to the fire and everyone being trapped in a burning building. Then flies away amidst they cheers of onlookers and trapped victims alike.

I called 911 when I found my ex after a suicide attempt.

One of the cops that responded tried to blame me.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Your experience isn't unique, sadly.

The closest I've ever been to being arrested was when I had to call the cops because I got robbed while at work.

They had footage of another person entering the store and then sprinting out, but the 17 year old nerdy kid was a much easier target.

Never again.

Police don't just go in guns blazing with their eyes closed. It's a very high-pressure situation because police are running in fully expecting to get shot at. They don't know if they're going to end up in a situation like [1] or if this is just a prank.

In the end it's a really crappy situation for everyone. Police have to be super alert and are likely jumpy because they expect to be shot dead if they aren't the first to pull the trigger.

Personally I don't really blame the police. Rather I blame the phone industry for giving these callers way too much anonymity. It should be trivial to trace a 911 call to a real paying phone customer. That would make swatting a lot less attractive (assuming it carried a very heavy punishment too).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ODn6wuuVsU

> Police don't just go in guns blazing with their eyes closed

In the Breonna Taylor incident [0], their eyes weren't closed, but they may as well have been:

> Police then fired 32 rounds into the apartment... Cosgrove fired 16 shots from the doorway area... Hankison fired 10 times from outside through a sliding glass door and bedroom window, both of which were covered by blinds or curtains... The officers' shots hit objects in the living room, dining room, kitchen, hallway, bathroom, and both bedrooms.

Now, granted that situation was out of the norm because an occupant of the apartment fired a shot first, since he thought they were being burgled and the police neglected to announce their presence. But that's exactly the kind of situation that could happen in a SWAT raid. Most victims of SWATTing don't expect police to show up to their door, so if they're someone who owns a firearm and they hear a loud bang at the door, they may quite rightfully fire a shot at it in self defense, just like happened in the Taylor residence.

The main lesson there is that it's up to police to properly announce themselves (no-knock raids should never be used in response to an emergency distress call such as the kind that triggers a SWATTing). But even if they announce themselves and receive fire in return, I'd argue they should at least make sure they've sighted a target before they pull the trigger, rather than indiscriminately shooting a volley of bullets through a window like they're some kind of gangster doing a drive by.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor#Shoo...

This reads an assasination attempt by a drug cartel. Which part of this is 'trained proffeshionals'? Which part is reasonable use of force, or restrain to make sure you don't kill rand9m innocent people nearby?

In this event, it wasn't the actual SWAT, the team in the police department assigned and trained to carry out this type of thing. Instead it was drug detectives who evidently wanted the chance to go out and play army. The whole thing was run with an appalling lack of common sense or adherence to their own written policies and it points to a breakdown of discipline within the department.

> Police have to be super alert and are likely jumpy because they expect to be shot dead if they aren't the first to pull the trigger.

they are not even in the top 20 most dangerous jobs in america.

I'm pretty sure police are more likely to be shot than any other occupation. Logging is the most dangerous occupation of all, but I don't think any of them die from bullets. In contrast, police lives are at risk in brief high-stakes incidents that might require them to use a gun, or not use it, to save their own lives. All the other highly dangerous jobs involve pretty different risk models.

But that's why training of police is so important, and we as a society need to hold them to an incredibly high standard. But I think it's silly to tell police they shouldn't be jumpy because their occupation is safer than logging/fishing/piloting/roofing/etc.

>I'm pretty sure police are more likely to be shot than any other occupation.

I'm pretty sure gangsters and drug dealers are the most likely to be shot than any other occupation in the US as they make up the bulk of firearm deaths after accounting for suicides.

And you would be wrong. Food service and retail workers are the most likely to be murdered on the job in the US. [1]

[1] https://neuhoffmediaspringfield.com/2021/03/24/study-jobs-yo...

There's no mention of the data being adjusted per capita?

Well then police officers don't even break no. 2 per capita[1] (they're no. 22)

[1] https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...

To your original point, from that link seems like fast food workers don’t even make the top 25 when it’s per capita. The fast food worker stat seems irrelevant but agree there’s many more dangerous occupations than police.

> But that's why training of police is so important, and we as a society need to hold them to an incredibly high standard.

I agree they should be trained better and held to a high standard but they simply are not.

"likely jumpy because they expect to be shot dead if they aren't the first to pull the trigger."

Their job has risks, they can't just starting shooting first and asking questions because of fear.

How many police die on the job vs how many people they kill on the job?

Here's one answer: Police are 20.8 times more likely to kill than be killed (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/aug/27/chris-lars...)

It seems like there's a point there somewhere but I don't get it. The recent Texas mall shooter was shot and killed by the police after he had shot 15 people. Based on the stats, the police would be infinitely more likely to kill than be killed. Was it then wrong to shot him? Did the police not risk his life by running towards the perpetrator? It's obvious that people try to make a point, but I don't get it.

I just found the answer. I haven't really formed any solid opinion on it. I have no idea what a good K/D ratio for police would be, or how useful that information even is. I'd rather have stats for things like the number of innocent people that were killed, or how many people were killed unnecessarily innocent or not, or the number killed while in custody or while being restrained, etc.

If the idea is to demonstrate that police work isn't as dangerous as many people think, the fact that police aren't killed on the job as often as grubhub drivers or crossing guards or garbage collectors should make that clear enough. For at least the first two years of the pandemic the number one killer of police was covid. Typically most police die on the job in car accidents. Police are called on to encounter dangerous or uncertain situations, but they are also (supposed to be) trained for exactly that. That's the job. Ideally, none of them would die on the job and they wouldn't kill anyone either.

It's a bit hard to get data about how many innocent people were killed.

The USA is the country that defines any adult male died in a drone strike as a terrorist. If the same criteria is applied to the police, the official number would have nothing to do with the real number.

From a simple technical perspective, it seems like something like a more targeted amber alert would be feasible.

Is this one of those fabled edge compute use cases?

If the police didn't rush over in full SWAT gear, ready to save the lives of children, they'd be the ones l̶i̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ berated in the media for not taking a clear imminent threat to life seriously.

Here in the UK the police would rush there without guns. There would be an armed response team to back them up, but only once the threat was confirmed. Maybe the UK just has braver police.

>Maybe the UK just has braver police

Bit of a smug take coming from a place with fewer guns than people.

I don't see what that's relevant. If the UK police respond to reports of a person with a gun without being armed themselves that's clearly braver that American police who respond to literally any report with enough military hardware as if they fear for their lives.

Because the likelihood of a police officer getting shot by a criminal is far higher. Not just in domestic violence situations, but also in everyday policing. An example: here in Germany even if you push hundreds of kg of cocaine you'll get six to eight years behind bars. Not worth shooting a police officer at a traffic stop over it.

In the US? Decades behind bars at least, life if you're in a "three strikes" jurisdiction - that's a massive incentive to shoot the cop and attempt to escape when you got nothing to lose anyway.

Actually, being a cop is not even in the top 15 most dangerous jobs in the US[0].

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/deadliest-jobs-in-america-bl...

Not just fewer, a couple of orders of magnitude fewer guns (maybe more). Also a populous with more mental care for those who are in dangerous mental states.

With this logic: The US police is way braver, they have to be adrenaline fueled jackasses to dare do their job of killing citizens.

With normal logic: If not everyone is at the mercy of eachother not popping heads for lolz we don't need to arm the police as heavily, and we can hire people that are good at deescalation rather than shooting back.

> they'd be the ones liable for not taking a clear imminent threat to life seriously

Cops aren't liable for shit.

We have real evidence of cops doing fuck all to "save the lives of children" or take "a clear imminent threat to life seriously" just last year in response to a much more credible threat in Uvalde.

And the supreme court has ruled they CAN'T be held liable just because they don't protect you.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...

> If the police didn't rush over in full SWAT gear, ready to save the lives of children, they'd be the ones liable for not taking a clear imminent threat to life seriously.

Q: Are the police required to protect you as a specific individual in the United States?

A: No, the police are not required to protect you as an individual in the United States.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columb...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County

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

And just yesterday the coward that hid outside Parkland High while a mass murder occurred was acquitted: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/6/29/us-officer-foun...

re: Your edit changing ‘liability’ to ‘being berated in the media’

George Floyd was murdered by cops in my city 3 years ago and the entire world heard his name.

This is a lame post. It was clear what the OP meant: in hot trouble for not doing the job. And technically liable vs. otherwise wasn't even the main point of the post. Assume best intentions and avoid nitpicking. Also the Q&A format comes off as a little condescending.

It was not clear what the OP meant, ‘liable’ has a distinct meaning with regards to legal liability.

A little condescending is OK when someone is posting authoritatively and they’re totally incorrect.

When you consider the police response to actually dangerous situations like a school shooting, what's the point of having the swat gear?

They're going to wait until the shooter has shot all of the children at least once and run out of bullets before going in.

It's pretty well known that the police have no responsibility to help in a dangerous situation, only to arrest people once the situation has ended

Good news: police are not liable for doing nothing in response to a threat.

That thought isn't exactly comforting if you think about it.

We just saw this with the recent court case decision from the cop that did nothing at the Parkland shooting.

The cops at Parkland couldn't even establish a proper perimeter around the crime scene. After the killer was done running amok he wandered off, got himself a slurpee out of Subway and then had breakfast at McDonalds. They did not even try and identify who was responsible for the shooting.

Oh, and even after the shooter had been taken into custody the sheriff still denied access to the scene to emergency medical personnel.

There can't be an excuse for that degree of malicious incompetence but the courts gave them one anyway.

Uvalde shooting comes to mind.

What, exactly, are police for?

Maintaining the social and economic status quo by any means necessary, legal or otherwise.

There's a disruption? They show up and un-disrupt it.

Feeding the municipal/county/state coffers with the proceeds of civil forfeiture?

And putting teenagers in cuffs for small baggies of weed.

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

To protect capital.

hah I didn't realize that! Though I can see why that makes sense. I edited the above to strikeout liable and changed it to "berated in the media"

They should definitely still rush over in SWAT gear, but before going in guns blazing, they should verify what the situation is. They should assume the call may be fake until it’s proven real. More recon would probably reveal that something doesn’t add up in most of these situations.

Is SWAT really needed for that though? Is not "the police" enough?

SWAT are the police. They're just normal officers with squad-based training that get mobilized when particularly-nasty situations are called in. A task force of sorts, kinda like the Power Rangers-- just normal kids until the supervillains show up, then they do a costume change and show up to assume their specific role in the response.

"The police" don't show up to calls with reinforced vehicles, ballistic helmets, vests, and shields, and an arsenal of assault weapons to deal with extensive threats. At best, beat cops have an anti-stab vest, a 9mm, a flashlight, and their choice of a shotgun or AR-15 in the car. It takes nothing to gun down a pair of cops.

We expect too much of law enforcement in these situations IMO. The military has intelligence units and recon teams to provide actionable advice. The cops are working with an anonymous call, unknown entities and unknown locations; they have to figure everything out ad-hoc in an urban warfare scenario. It's chaos. Imagine being told you have 5 minutes to introduce a change to a production distributed environment you've never even seen, and either you or an innocent civilian are summarily executed at random for each error you make. Those are the stakes they're working with, and they're nowhere near as smart as you.

Mistakes get made, which is on them, but calling them in as a prank is monstrous for everybody involved. It's just fucking evil.

Normally it would be, but unfortunately in a country where small portion of the population literally stockpile powerful guns permitted by law, I would, as a responding LEO, want to be prepared for the worst..

It's not merely a matter of stockpiled firearms, because, well, you know how it goes: "guns don't kill people".

I think it's also a matter of urban gangsta warfare going on since time immemorial. The organized crime is rampant, and while the races change, the adversaries stay more or less the same. Since the 80s or so, you've had Crips and Bloods and everyone in between, with all their rap-video braggadoccio, ready to have a showdown with police at the drop of a hat. Ice-T, 2Pac, NWA, the flames have been stoked, and I mean, I guess it's not their fault, because it takes two to tango. The police have geared up and gotten ever-more militarized and hostile to ordinary citizens, wielding technology to match. So there's been an escalation.

And that's why we have #BlackLivesMatter today. Not because cops are inherently evil and shooting innocents on purpose, but because both sides have been warring for decades, and that makes for itchy trigger fingers.

So I think if pranksters are misusing SWAT teams for hoaxes and weaponizing them against their Fortnite adversaries, then perhaps it's a wake-up call to have a ceasefire, a disarmament, and both sides (or all sides) to stand down and rethink why we're all here.

Agreed. I was going to add at the end of my comment something along the lines of

"If just the police isn't good enough, we find ourselves further down an unpleasant spiral than we thought we were".

I also agree with the person to whom you're replying though.

Since they recorded 1000 swatting events in a year, I assume that most times swat is called their response is warranted - it gets tough to try to vet calls sent to a very fast response group

Funny because I would assume most times they are not warranted

so do we have enough information to determine? or do we need to push for that first.

Yes, I would be very interested in the denominator of "legit" SWAT raids, specifically limited to only those for which prank calls are a false positive, i.e. real, time-sensitive emergency distress calls, and not prearranged raids where the police have a warrant.

That depends entirely on how many "my husband is going crazy with a shotgun" calls they get, doesn't it?

I picked the above scenario because police calls for domestic disputes are incredibly common. This source[0] says they account for 15% to 50% of all police calls. Hundreds of women are murdered with guns by their intimate partners every year[1]. Also domestic violence calls are a big cause of police deaths though definitely not the #1 cause as Joe Biden erroneously claimed[2]. I was aiming to create a somewhat plausible 911 call, though having the wife shot while she was on the 911 call might have been a bit over the top.

[0] https://www.domesticshelters.org/resources/statistics/law-en... [1] https://everytownresearch.org/report/guns-and-violence-again... [2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/mar/15/joe-biden/...

The alternative to responding with SWAT isn't to do nothing, it's to respond with a less dangerous force (two/three/four officers in-uniform, knocking). We could easily default to non-SWAT unless there's very good evidence (i.e. not a single unconfirmed phone call) to believe SWAT is needed. The same way no-knock warrants should be almost never allowed.

From your source 6 cops died in 2022 due to disorder/disturbance (domestic disturbance, civil disorder, etc.) - so 6 at most. So I don't think it's reasonable to think of that as a "big cause" of police deaths. Also, and this is a personal thing that annoys me, innocent people being shot/killed by police is strictly worse than police being shot/killed. Police are knowingly taking these risks, they're compensated for them, and they are wearing protective equipment. I'd rather a police officer be shot in a domestic dispute than a guy getting shot in a swatting incident.

Agree with all that!

> The alternative to responding with SWAT isn't to do nothing, it's to respond with a less dangerous force (two/three/four officers in-uniform, knocking).

SWAT does not get called in to every domestic violence call.

The one in discussion isn't a welfare check or noise complaint, it's an angry man with a shotgun in a near-hostage situation. He's already angry, and now threatened by being outnumbered, and knows the night will end with him in jail. Desperation++. You've escalated the situation and increased risk to everyone. This is America, not Japan. When the SWAT team gets involved, it's a disruption tactic to deny him time to think or act.

> I'd rather a police officer be shot in a domestic dispute than a guy getting shot in a swatting incident.

"We won't have your back if you fuck up, and we'll leave you for dead either way" is not a selling point for any career. This one isn't exactly popular to begin with. Without the hero worship, there is little incentive to go into public service. The money is better in the private sector. Ask me how I know.

Firefighters and EMTs don't have to deal with this shit, so nobody has anything bad to say about them. We forgive their mistakes, even when people die.

Those cops should be pretty familiar with domestic violence situations then since they commit so much of it.

https://sites.temple.edu/klugman/2020/07/20/do-40-of-police-...

And yet, cops fight in the courts to so it is a-okay to do absolutely nothing when a man who has a restraining order against him kidnaps his kids and then eventually murders them.

How long had the technology to see the calling number been available?

And can't law enforcement map that to a physical address within a light speed equivalent amount of time?

Unless a swatter is "the phone call came from inside the house"-ing, it should have been easy to filter out for maybe, conservatively, the last two decades.

The physical address is some VoIP gateway. What if you legitimately use VoIP and call 911 for a good reason? They can't just ignore your call. (Legally they can ignore your call, but then why have 911.)

Exactly! I almost added that to my reply above.

To make the above situation even trickier, let's say the homeowners had a landline for years, but just recently switched to a VoIP gateway. Their VoIP gateway operator advertised a feature that their outgoing caller ID will make it look like they're calling from their old number. This is a real and desirable feature for lots of people. I'd rather not have police disregard all calls from VoIP gateways.

But to GP's point, of course what we really need is a genuine verifiable caller ID. Or at least some sort of verification that's instantly available to 911 operators. In this case, the VoIP provider should be able to assert that the call really is coming from that address in a way no one else can spoof.

... So no more getting prepaid sim cards (for, say, 2fa for a shitposting or politics account) without registering your government id with the provider?

The location spoofing is the real problem here, not ID. An anonymous SIM card can still give accurate location.

In Australia you can't activate a SIM card without registering your government ID with the provider.

Similar with prepaid credit cards if memory serves.

Flipside would be: don't use a burner phone/SIM to call 911 - or at least have an alternative method of verifying location / address.

You can call emergency numbers without a SIM card.

Even if the number is from a bachelor pad how would you know a family isn't visiting and a violent husband didn't just decide to go full batshit crazy? Or someone is calling from a google voice number where you can pick your area code?

Why do they need swat? Two police officers are not acceptable?

Also the police aren't required to enforce the law

I think the issue isn't necessarily the existence of SWAT, but the over use of SWAT. SWAT makes sense if its LAPD going in to do a raid on a big cartel event. In a real scenario when you are also going to be confronting a large group armed to the teeth. Outside of that, eh, why is SWAT being used so much for things that really just need 1 or 2 officers with stock equipment?

> rush over in full SWAT gear, ready to save the lives of children,

Ready to endanger the life of children.

There's really no nice way to put this. This phenomenon does not exist in any other country in the world which is not a completely failed state.

Should the 911 operate not be able to verify the number and it’s location?

If not there is your problem. Fix the telecom network and prevent all spoofing of numbers.

Would solve lots of other things too

Well 911 calls have locations in a few seconds. If I am a zoomer prankster calling from San Jose swatting a guy in NJ.... hum thats a long knife

Most low-cost VoIP providers will let you set your e911 address to whatever you want without any verification.

If only spoofing your caller ID were possible...

This is kind of a nitpick but caller ID, ANI, E911, and now STIR/SHAKEN are different protocols AFAIK and spoofing them takes different amounts of effort. Unfortunately capitalism turned SS7 into swiss cheese so the effort probably varies from trivial to easy.

>ready to save the lives of children

Lol, a wild meme appears.

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