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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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So we agree that neither the police nor the swatters should be let off the hook?

Care where the idea that we have to let anybody off the hook comes from?

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 very first comment in this thread had this false statement:

> He’s not being harassed by the swatters.

My comment was not intended to let swatters of the hook. My point was that the harassment should be called “attempted harassment”, because it should never have been effective, although still punishable.

That’s still harassment - the clear intention was to at best harass and at worst get them killed. You can support more responsible use of force by police while still recognizing that these guys were looking for a weapon to hurt someone and SWATing was the option they chose.

And even if they were not acting in that intention, knowingly calling emergency when there isn't one is a drain on resources that might be needed elsewhere.

What should the people calling in the swat be on the hook for, if they aren't harassing him?

Fake police report, wire fraud and if they forgot a cent in their last tax declaration add tax evasion.

It’s not wire fraud but it is certainly use of an electronic device to harass and annoy as well as disturbing the peace.

Nobody mentioned letting anyone off the hook. That's a very internet thing to claim your opponent has said.

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?

The first sentence of the first post that started this thread said the victim was not being harassed by the swatters.

> are you going to surveil and psychologically analyze everyone in the world in order to detect and pre-crime imprison everyone

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]".

What do you think the chances are that the police are affiliated with the swatters?

Many police departments have upper IQ limits for officers that’s only slightly above average. Since leadership is promoted from internal ranks, that also causes ineffective leadership.

This sounds crazy but this has been documented at least once, as far as I can tell. This link describes a court case where a candidate for a police force was rejected on the basis of having too high an IQ:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

If you look at the culture of police in the US, the department policies that they enforce, and the laws that they enforce, it begins to make more sense. An intelligent person would not fit into existing police culture very well (because of the IQ restriction policies that have been in place). There are many police departments with awful internal policies (racist, illegal, anti-civilian), that a smart person wouldn't want to enforce, and of course so many laws in the US are just bonkers. Civil asset forfeiture, no knock raids, broken windows policing, drug evidence planting, CYA charges, these are all awful practices that are routinely done at PDs across the US, in some case documented as PD policy. An intelligent person would want to fix these problems, make a difference. This would of course hurt the PD's bottom line, their arrest stats, would cast former and current police in a bad light.

To further one of your points, there is very much pressure to keep closure rates up by pinning it on the most-plausible suspect even if you have doubts, and letting the DA sort it out. The DA does not always sort it out, and if it looks like an easy case then that someone gets railroaded.

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.

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