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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

I’m a victim of a SWATting. You cannot imagine the hell you get put through until it happens to you. This kid deserves life.

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Can you elaborate on the hell you get put through when SWATting happens?

My understanding was that SWATting means someone calls the police and says that you have a bomb in your house or something to that effect. I imagine that the SWAT team breaks down your door and arrest you and everyone else in the household.

Soon enough, they must realize that you are all good, right? SWATting is common enough that they must be aware of it and take it into account. If they started arresting and prosecuting people who were victims of SWATting, there would be big court cases against the police.

To clarify, I am not trying to underplay what you went through. I just want to understand what you went through that made you describe it as "hell".

You can start by imagining how traumatic is it to have a huge team of armed men break into your home and violently restrain you or a loved one. If you've been SWATted you don't know why these people are there. Heck even if you recognize they're SWAT, you're not going to have any clue if they really are or of they're people posing as SWAT to kidnap you for ransom or worse.

Also that SWAT team isn't just going to come in, realize you're not armed, and laugh at the situation before letting you go. For all they know, you are as dangerous as the person who called in said and were just putting on an act when you saw the SWAT team roll up. So now you're at least going to deal with questioning which is going to be extremely difficult to deal with in a state of panic and confusion.

And no, it's very unlikely that the SWAT team would be held responsible for anything. Police have too much protection against that. To spin it for them, they were operating in good faith on the assumption that they needed to raid the house in the manner they did otherwise people would die.

And in this particular case, all while your elderly mom is ziptied on the ground in the front yard wearing just her underwear in freezing, raining weather at 1:30 at night, will all her (now very much awake) neighbors looking on.

I feel a need to point out that a force of armed men pointing guns at you with their fingers on the trigger is very much a deeply traumatizing and frightening thing to go through. We also have occurrences of swatting incidents leading to the deaths of innocents (links below). I also want to add that during a swatting incident, having your dog shot on sight isn't irregular, as they are considered a threat while sweeping through your home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-man-targeted-...

> having your dog shot on sight isn't irregular

That's a bad way of phrasing it. Shooting the dog is POLICY. The very first thing they do.

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