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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

It boggles the mind that you can just send an email to the police and they'd act as if whoever is targeted by that email is in fact a dangerous criminal and they'd arrest them and subject them to all kinds of humiliation and harassment and mistreatment - just based on a single unsubstantiated email.

I thought this idiocy is endemic only to the US police but it looks like German police is the same too? And people just accept it as normal? I mean kudos to German police not rushing in with guns drawn and not treating the scene like they are in the Battle of Falluja, but it is still fscking insane - why did they have to cuff him and subject him to a hour-long questioning at the station - what did it take them an hour to find out? Why is all this considered normal?

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> It boggles the mind that you can just send an email to the police and they'd act as if whoever is targeted by that email is in fact a dangerous criminal and they'd arrest them and subject them to all kinds of humiliation and harassment and mistreatment - just based on a single unsubstantiated email.

Well it kind of makes sense if you believe people are generally going to follow social norms and not make false accusations for no reasons.

Like, all you have to do in a crowded theatre is shout "FIRE", and everyone acts as if there's a dangerous situation and everyone is subjected to being forced out of the theatre based on a single unsubstantiated shout.

Or if you put your mind to it, there are any number of false, anonymous allegations one can make with large asymmetries between the effort to make the allegation and the effort required to clean up the situation.

It does not matter you believe, accusations should not be enough to swat someone. Accusations != proof and proof is what matters.

The problem is that those are not typically accusations, those are reported emergencies.

If you see your neighbor, for example, actively trying to kill his wife during a domestic incident, the last thing the police should do is sit on that report and carefully investigate whether that is true. They should act, because it might be a life or death scenario.

What logically follows, is that false reports like this should come with very heavy punishment. I would say at least as grave as attempted murder.

Make it simple, equal ground rules for police as citizens. If it's illegal for me to point a gun at someone because someone told me a scary, it ought be the same as police. The dichotomy exhibits the standing army effect the founders warned against .

Its more compli ated than that. What percentage of scaries told to you are credible vs what percentage for the police? i dont think this should happen but i also recognize its a complex issue

If it's not typical, it should be seen more skeptical, not less. If I say my neighbors are witches who worship the devil, and are going to summon legions of Hell to earth this evening, then the police shouldn't start with burning their house down, with them inside, just in case. They should first try some other means of verifying this highly unusual claim, before acting on it as if it were true. I am reasonably sure the prior of that email being true, based on all previous emails they've received in that police department, is less than 1%. And yet, after that, and after already finding out there's no murder happening on the scene and no emergency at all, they still behaved as if the victim is the criminal. And I am sure they didn't even get politely reprimanded by that - probably they were praised by their peers and their managament for quick and decisive action.

Proof has never been used to justify arrests, just prosecutions. Or rather it's never been a necessary bar that must be demonstrated. Warrants at least have mildly higher bars

Reasonable articulable suspicion of committing a crime is a bar. Quite low, but "suspicion of committing a crime" is not met based just on an anonymous tip, as SCOTUS said quite clearly. It is enough to investigate, not to arrest and not even to detail someone.

Agreed. I don't think the police response is inherently unwarranted (well except literally, ha ha) but the protocol surrounding how to handle the situations appears completely busted.

> Well it kind of makes sense if you believe people are generally going to follow social norms and not make false accusations for no reasons.

It kinda doesn't. If one in 10,000 people watching livestreams would do this kind of shitty thing, then at one million people watching livestreams, you can expect 100 instances of this crap.

It's small relative to global population but not small enough to ignore completely.

Why would you expect this. These people doing the swatting often aren't even citizens. These are often foreign attacks and the inept police make these attacks very effective.

Seems like kind of an insane assumption giving the history of lynchings in this country and with how trigger happy cops are taught to be

What does it have to do with lynching?

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

https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-l...

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

Please don't make me explain further; the history of false accusations in america is very deep and bloody.

This happened in Germany. Come on dude I’m American and I know not everywhere is America.

Do you think false accusations are a uniquely american attribute? Have you never heard of Europe's (and very much Germany's) long history of lynching alleged witches?

Im not sure what you’re trying to imply with these questions. You started your comments talking about “this country” and providing links to American lynchings. That has nothing to do with Germany. I’m not stupid. Every country has evil shit in their history and everyone is well acquainted with germanys historical shit list but let’s not try to turn around your dumb mistake as some moral grandstanding okay? Link German lynchings and false accusations when talking about Germany.

??? We're discussing the assumption that people don't make false accusations? Nobody is making any moral claims about germany, it's just historically an equally terrible assumption as in this country. I do agree this is likely a terrible assumption in every country!

But like, the police know about swatting. They know that this is a thing.

How do they determine a real situation from a swatting before going on? Domestics are the most dangerous situation you can possibly be in. Imagine if they cops just knocked casually and the incited someone to start stabbing a hostage.

Acknowledging that it could be a fake call should be part of the protocol for responding to the call and it should be obvious when that is the case when they get on-site.

Remember that police can and do kill innocent people when they storm the wrong house for the wrong reason. Expecting them to be more careful with other peoples lives isn't such an unreasonable ask.

I don't think it is that common in Europe.

People lie to the police all the time though. People invent false accusations all the time. The police has to know it. It's just that they have exactly zero incentive not to do it - because nobody is going to give them any pushback for arresting an innocent citizen, taking him into handcuffs and harassing him for an hour because they got some email. There's no cost to it and that's why they do it. Maybe this should change.

I don’t know about police but most reports to 112/911/999 call centers are real. Probably 95-99% of callers believe they are reporting a real incident and that their report is accurate. Deliberately misleading calls constitute maybe 1-5% depending on the region. So when information is reported, it is assumed that it is reported with best intentions.

There is a cost to false arrests in most situations. At the minimum, police resources are wasted. People also write complaints to the police, which are taken seriously in some countries, and sue the police in others. There are many costs. You are basing your conclusion on an untrue premise.

Probably 9/10 police departments in the developed world know what swatting is. There just isn’t justification to forgo normal procedure when there is a possibility of swatting. The raids are very “choreographed” and much research has gone into how to carry them out safely. So no one deviates until they are 99.99…% certain it’s a swatting.

It’s not so black and white. There are many reasons why police respond to swattings the way they do.

It doesn't make sense even then since the police are the last people to believe people are generally going to not make false accusations, and even if they did believe that, it wouldn't make sense to target the average when the cost of mistake is so high

The fire hypothetical is also incorrect (you can start with the people near a clear/easy exit and some visibly crazy/drunk shouting: people might look around, but unlikely to run around, then progress to more challenging situations), though I don't know a practical % of how many of "everyone" would act like it. People might indeed be forced out, but that's the result of a policy implemented by a few people, not the behavior of everyone, just like in the case of this idiotic SWAT policy

I'm sorry but everyone getting up and leaving a public place because of one person shouting fire is not and should not be the same threshold we expect the police to have for a full on military assault on a residential area.

> I mean kudos to German police not rushing in with guns drawn and not treating the scene like they are in the Battle of Falluja,

Sounds like the second half yes, but according to his story in the YouTube comments they did have weapons drawn (one being maybe a taser, but presumably the rest were firearms?):

> Unsuspecting - I assumed someone else was missing or there had been a break-in - when I opened the door I was confronted by a good 10 police officers with drawn weapons and at least one with what looked to me like a Taser.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIEwcTKUFCA

German police really likes raiding homes for trivialities. This is a completely underdeveloped issue in Germany and legislative, judicative and executive branches are misbehaving here.

Old and fearful population will ensure this doesn't change in the near future. If they had a button to just gas home inhabitants...

> It boggles the mind that you can just send an email ... and they'd act as if

May I remind you of the phenomenon of "We severed work relationship with worker W after he was accused of horrible acts, to protect ourselves".

(When proper mindset is, "Having severed work relationship with worker W after allegations, they are vilified" - logically speaking.)

It is unfortunate we embraced base-10, because few levels of magnitude are available to describe the downfall: now we should talk about "1-digit IQs".

I am having a hard time understanding what you mean.

In general you have not been the only one, but I don't see many difficulties in that post.

The OP wrote that «unsubstantiated» accusations are sufficient for some police forces to take an abusive stance forgetful of the principle of general cautiousness, of "innocent until proven".

I replied that the neglect of Presumption of Innocence can not only be seen in the attitude of some police forces, but in chunks of society, such as enterprises - notably, in some systems firms will openly fire people hit by accusations of the class "Tom says that Dick" (which entails, "of thin grounds").

Now, given that anybody could be randomly accused, and given other logical collaterals such as involving the principle of reciprocity ("the employer discharging the accused could be next"), that "practice" is especially barbaric - those who employ it paint themselves in a most vile coat. And given the absurdity of the practice from points of view of reason, I suggested that speaking of "two-digits IQ" for lurking social phenomena like this one may not be enough.

Some loon just tried to shoot Donald Trump AGAIN...

I can imagine that the police in the US are going to be very twitchy

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