He's absolutely being harassed by swatters. They call the police to get him swatted. Not to mention that on top of swatting, there is impersonation going on AND they are targeting others as well - like his parents.
He's ALSO being terrorized by the police, who are more inclined to cosplay with guns and make people fear than to actually do anything about their broken system or be held accountable at all. They absolutely cannot play ignorance - the are basically in an alliance with the swatters. Swatter calls it in, they wink and nod and follow through.
The swatters are taking advantage of the police because it is somehow acceptable for police to show up a a residence in full battle gear, when the resident has no criminal record and there is no known probable cause to use such deadly force.
Swat should be rarely, if ever used. Instead they're used in more than 90% of these cases.
There is literally no downside to the judges who approve these actions, or to the police who conduct them.
It’s obviously trivial to produce whatever kind of report is necessary to justify a SWAT response.
They sent police in SWAT gear, but they still politely knocked. They were let in, saw what was actually going on, talked to them about how neat the guns were, and that was that.
There’s a middle ground that’s probably acceptable to most.
it is somehow acceptable for police to show up a a residence in full battle gear, when the resident has no criminal record and there is no known probable cause to use such deadly force. Swat should be rarely, if ever used. Instead they're used in more than 90% of these cases.
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All of that is obviously bullshit if you spend 45 seconds thinking about reality.
Obviously there is an infinite number of different calls to police that can justify an aggressive, armed, SWAT response to someone previously unknown to law enforcement.
We have a legal system for a reason. Giving a cop any lethal weapon is passive acceptance that he may circumvent the legal system and put himself in the position of judge jury and executioner. This is wrong and erodes trust in police and the judicial system vastly more than any other issue. No cops should have guns, not "SWAT" team, not beat cops, none.
Cops responding to e.g. reports of a group of jihadists ambushing restaurants in a crowded European nightlife district: MAYBE tasers and pepper spray!
Here in reality, awful stuff happens on a daily basis. Get a grip.
It seems like you already said you dont believe in just circumventing due process and the judicial system so I am just at a total loss in trying to understand why the police would need guns. Maybe killing dogs?
I feel like perhaps I am not communicating my point well here. By giving police guns we are implying that we as a society are OK with them using those weapons. By using those weapons they are likely to kill people. By killing people they are acting as judge jury and executioner. This would seem to imply that we as a society are totally fine with police circumventing the judiciary system.
The argument of course is that cops need guns to protect themselves. Unfortunately guns do not stop bullets. A gun is going to do nothing to stop a cop being shot. Unless they use that gun on the shooter. Thereby again acting as judge jury and executioner. Do you see the problem here?
> Obviously there is an infinite number of different calls to police that can justify an aggressive, armed, SWAT response to someone previously unknown to law enforcement.
People are really watching too many action movies. There are essentially no scenarios that justify responding to a residential area using essentially military gear. The obvious thing to do is first confirm and assess the situation, no assault rifles needed.
The biggest irony is that in the situations where police could have actually used heavy gear to save lifes (Uvalde, note it didn't need to be the initial response either), they rather waited outside not risk any injuries to themselves. Just goes to show they just want to play tough guy in situations with little risk.
The real intention of the police could be to respond to each call and swat just to assure that as many charges as possible are accumulated and billed to the culprit later.
Everything is reported and recorded so the police actions, that are torturing the victim, also dig the hole deeper and deeper for the criminal. The harm done is obvious and allow asking for damage compensations. At that level of reckless no judge could dismiss it as just child's play.
Keep swatting also reward the criminals that are watching. This is not necessarily a bad thing. To keep them engaged and interested on the game is a must for the police, that therefore increase their chances to complete patterns and chase them slowly one by one.
I agree that he’s being terrorised by the police. The police should face consequences for allowing themselves to be used like this.
I don’t understand why you want to let the swatters off the hook. They should absolutely be going to jail.
the police aren't mindless drones -- when they act like they are it's a problem that is greater than the thing that initiated it.
Yes, the swatters are bad -- but the consistency of this response and the absolute trust in the pseudo-anonymous report every single time is absolutely baffling ; like Clancy Wiggums or Frank Drebin baffling; it's just rolling the dice until an innocent is killed while pointing fingers at some boy who cried wolf while knowing that the boy is full of shit.
As I see it just because we shift the focus to the lower level (the layer executing the swats) we don't have to automatically let anybody off the hook on the higher levels. We can have both.
> He’s not being harassed by the swatters.
The question is pragmatic: are you going to surveil and psychologically analyze everyone in the world in order to detect and pre-crime imprison everyone who might potentially call in a false tip anonymously, or are you going to control your police forces so they don't attack people with sometimes deadly force based solely on anonymous tips?
No one suggested this; strawman.
There are a whole lot of ways to harass someone using proxies beyond swatting and the traditional ordering of 40 pizzas to their house. Even if any given proxy only falls for it once it can be really bad.
Coming up with ways to counter these kinds of harassment campaigns is important, but it probably doesn't involve "pre-crime imprison[ment]".
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
Obviously this is not ideal at the police level (who should find the truth, not someone to blame) but some more accountability is warranted within the judicial system too. All incentives here are perverse, yet lack of them results in fuckall getting done.
I hope I never have to rely on a root cause analysis done by these people.
Because they're irrelevant to the situation. The swatters could be a compulsive person with mental illness.
Or dozens of different people, because it become some internet fad or something to target this person, that's impossible to stop.
Or untrackable "hackers".
The police has no excuse to come in SWATing in the first place without verification of the actual situation, much less keep swatting additional times, and in no civilized environment would it do it even 10 times, much less 47.
Can’t catch them all? Catch the ones you can, make an example out of them.
That should in no way be used as an excuse not to get the police to behave themselves as well.
Let's put it this way, they're not irrelevant to the particular situation, but they're irrelevant to the real problem, which is the "open for abuse" system of SWATing, and the problematic management it gets from the police.
Fixing that helps society at large (plus helps this guy).
Whereas getting those guys just solves this particular guy's problem.
Police response to these types of calls is faulty. The Milwaukee police are definitely particularly deficient in continuing to fall for this and not taking corrective action.
But there's myriad ways to harass people through proxies-- SWATing is only one. We need to be put in the effort to catch and punish people engaging in these stalking and harassing behaviors, because we'll never harden our society against all of these.
We have laws in place for this type of thing, but that's not to say that law enforcement generally cares.
Edit:
It would take _years_ to get the police to put their house in order. So why not go after swatters as well in the meantime? Most swatters are repeat offenders.
And once the police have cleaned up their act… do you believe former swatters will quietly become law abiding citizens? I don’t. They’ll find some other way to ruin people’s lives, hopefully a less dangerous way.
We could also ask, why do swatters swat in the first place anyway? How could we prevent them from wanting to do such a thing?
Who said we're not? We already have laws and procedures for that.
It's the abuse of SWAT that we don't really cover well.
Shutting down communities (as in shutting down a subreddit in this case) is not a popular idea but I wonder if it's not the only viable response.
I think communities can police themselves if there is an incentive to do so (or rather disincentive not to). I know of plenty of communities with strict rules of conduct because frankly they worry about being shut down. Any community around MAME for example will likely have rules against "asking for ROMs".
But the police response is a systemic issue, however. It's open to be exploited similary by any other actor.
Care to explain why criticizing the police should amount to "letting the swatters off the hook"? This is nothing that automatically follows unless we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
If you jail one swatter there will be another one, and one after. If the police/dispatch gets their house in order you fix the problem on a systemic level and swatting becomes harder for all swatters.
So yeah if this should be fixed: punish swatters and avoid situations where one guy gets 47 swats without the police realizing they are played for fools each single time.
Not the commentor, just sticking my nose into a duel, but I think they were responding to: "He’s not being harassed by the swatters."
That also read to me as pretty dismissive of the swatters.
Sure, if it happens 47 times I would expect them to add a big red flag aka "first check if danger is present" to the dispatch adress after the second false alarm — and one can blame dispatch for that. But if you are a different officer each time and you are told there is a sociopathic murder taking place in that house that you have never seen, how is it your fault to assume dispatch did their job here.
This is a systemic issue:
- anonymous contacts of emergency services is possible, so swatters abuse this without having to fear immidiate punishment
- dispatch aparantly has no mechanism of linking knowledge between different calls. E.g. if this is the 3rd time we are dispatching swat to that address they should tell the officers that it might be a fake, or don't even dispatch officers at all. However attackers could use this to then go there for real and punch/kill our victim without having to fear police being called there
- police officers don't do a good job at the assessment of the situation before they kick doors in. This isn't always an easy call to make
Ok yeah people have tried several times to unsuccessfully SWAT sitting members of Congress. Like clearly there is a list of addresses like "this address belongs to a Congress person, proceed with caution." Dispatch should add OP to this list.
However, it is the job of the officer to investigate. I doubt it is the officer's first day in life in the United States. They know how things work here.
Yeah, cities hate paying out for police officers who get hurt and disabled on the job and have decided it is cheaper to pay for "bad apples" than to have a police force that shows humanity. This we have this situation where police officers shoot to preserve their own life just in case the suspect is armed (a valid assumption when getting hold of a gun is easy).
> police officers don't do a good job at the assessment of the situation before they kick doors in. This isn't always an easy call to make
I'm tired of all the QI and associated bullshit. Violating someone's constitutional rights should come with consequences.
On slightly unrelated note, i found court documents related to the swatter "Torswats" (though pages are plastered with "unofficial") and shit is crazy to say the least, especially on materials found by detectives and cops. Such material are messages from Torswats and cops handpicked his diatribes against jews, government officials, homosexuals, black people and ukrainians.
I agree with the gist of your post but this quote sounds crazy to me. Are there humans that are not "ethnic"?
What, exactly, are you trying to say here?
"ethnic minority problems" -> "ethnic problema"
- Inflated incidence response, probably help for asking more budget
- "real-life situation" field training
In any case, I wouldn't say the terrorism comes directly from the police, but from the stalkers. The police might benefit from the situation, however.
Or as Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
*Serious as in, supposed shootings / murders / kidnappings etc - not serious as in "a legitimate call out"
There are plenty of YouTubers swatted whose response is significantly downgraded after 2 or 3 false calls. I think DarkSydePhil just gets a welfare check (no pun intended) at this point.
The nice thing is that they get more and more familiar with the place and so can be more and more efficient in case that man really gets in trouble one day
>He says they have stalked and impersonated him, defaced his home, and continue to send a daily avalanche of abusive phone calls, voicemail messages and emails.
The teenager needs to made an example of, and his customers should be tracked down and charged as well. This is highly anti-social behavior.
I can just imagine.. guy gets swatted, then the cops stop coming, then he gets attacked for real ..
And at the same time, the officers responding have a right to protect themselves, which means treating it as credible.
Of course the middle ground is they respond as if real, except they just talk to the guy.
The problem 100% is the swatters. They should get decades in jail for repeated calls like this. And yes the swatters are harassing the guy, regardless of the police issue, any other stance is absurd.
And yes, the police should be working with the victim.
If "investigate" is limited to "send in team", then criminals can exploit this by calling in a dozen or so fake cases on the far side of the police jurisdiction to where they're actually going.