Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

Despite that the teenager will likely be going to jail, the most damning indictment is of the police forces that were repeatedly co-opted by the teenager. It should really take something much more clever to trigger this kind of systemic response repeatedly.

2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition so while what you say is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader as the typical mass shooting of the FBI definition consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.

You pulling an argumentative sleight of hand here conflating your run of the mill gun violence with terrorist attacks or mass shootings isn't cool.

It doesn't matter how the police is equipped, they can't stop a guy from walking up to his neighbor and shooting him in the face unless they're already there pointing guns at him. Although, maybe some sort of remote mind control chip is the answer there?

Also, I'm certain every shooting ends up on local news.

Claiming that police are being militarized is a very broad statement. Depending on your perspective it can be positive or negative.

You could argue that consistency and having a common operating model with accountability is a good thing. Unfortunately many would argue the adopted model is very flawed and that the level accountability is tied to public outrage or scrutiny.

I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate. Some argue that sensitivity and deescalation training are where the focus should be, while others are arguing for the warrior training.

The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because doing it badly will be more harmful than not having done it at all.

I am pretty happy with the police hardly ever killing anyone, and that almost always someone who is a real danger to others. I am happy fewer people being killed by police so far this decade (and that includes road accidents involving police!), than have been killed by police in the US so far this month.

"Violent Disorder" is a specific offence listed in the Public Order Act.

> Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson

The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.

What makes you think they aren't? All news media is inherently biased if they want or not. Not to mention "fact checker" are a prime candidate for corruption.

But I think a lot of it needs to be treated as a significant mental health issue

As Musk said: state sponsored propaganda(1).

I don't like the guy, but this one he had it right. (1) NGOs, i know.

Regardless, this is unlikely to be much of a deterrent. The police need to be held accountable at some point.

The courts wanting to make an example of those that have embarrassed the government is a different issue entirely.

As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people who cooperated with the US or the Afghanistan government against the Taliban. When the Taliban found out about such people they would go after them.

We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks because there is no way to know if the Taliban found them out through the leaks or through some other source. The odds are pretty good that it was more than one, probably a lot more.

The swatting teen on the other hand is known to have not actually gotten anyone killed.

A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you. They were there to do something that sometimes goes wrong and does kill, but most of the time that doesn't happen.

Someone coming to your house because the Manning leaks identified you as cooperating against the Taliban was there to kill you.

In the US, police officer does not even rise to top 10 most dangerous jobs. Groundskeeper is a more dangerous job than being a cop.

The lack of training and toxic culture of policing is far more dangerous to cops than criminals are. The average US citizen simply does not, and should not, trust the average cop.

> If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.

To be clear, your 2nd statement is why ACAB. The police are the people fighting against the open & honest accountability you are asking for. When accountability comes up, they refuse to do their jobs[1], inflate crime numbers & incident severity[2], harass the few cops trying to improve accountability until they quit[3], and actively campaign against accountability[4].

If some cops are bastards, and people who shield those bastards from accountability are also bastards, then all cops are bastards. ACAB is not rough, it exactly describes the situation.

[1] https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...

[2] https://minnesotareformer.com/2020/12/15/the-bad-cops-how-mi...

[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/only-minneapolis-...

[4] https://apnews.com/article/elections-police-minneapolis-a1ce...

Police mostly act as professional witnesses taking reports and engage in revenue generating law enforcement.

The most high pressure situations they deal with with any regularity involve mediating domestic disputes or wrestling angry drunks.

Police absolutely are not dealing with violent criminals on the daily. And when they do go out of their way to deal with people who many become violent they show up with the kind numerical advantage that would make Stalin proud.

Your average beat cop probably un-holsters their handgun once a month to once a year depending on where and when they patrol. These high stress high stakes split second judgement call situations are not a daily or weekly thing.

>I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.

They do accept this and did for decades. The only reason it's no longer being blanked accepted is because the modern media landscape makes it much harder to hide the fact that a huge fraction of these "honest mistakes" were in fact not so honest and not so mistaken.

Basically nobody has a problem with honest mistakes by themselves. What people have a problem with is thug behavior. Spending decades classifying various degrees of thug behavior as honest mistakes is why nobody wants to tolerate honest mistakes.

Compared to other countries American cops aren't really trained at all.

In Germany the training period for a police officer is 2 to 3 years, in the US it's usually less then 6 months.

The kid should be punished, yes, but a quarter of his lifespan is not exactly a light sentence.

How many cops do you know? They might say they're horrified to the media, but that's not how they operate when no one's watching. There's a reason these SWATting events keep happening: cops enjoy them just as much as the SWATters do. They get to bust out their fun military surplus toys and do their SEAL Team 6 cosplay. If they wanted to stop these SWATting events, they would have found a solution by now.

Check out these highlights (lowlights?) from the Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department:

https://racketmn.com/human-rights-report-mpd-needs-major-ove...

These are not people known for nuance or remorse.

Link to the full investigation report:

https://mn.gov/mdhr/assets/Investigation%20into%20the%20City...

They have to enforce unjust laws and unjust outcomes, and statistically do so more heavily across minority populations.

The institution requires them to be bastards, ACAB is a statement about the institution of police and the people who elect to join that institution.

Not only do I have zero interest in speaking with SWAT team members, I have very real reasons why I choose wherever possible to not talk to any cops at all.

https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE

The fact that you "know a few" SWAT team members immediately makes me strongly suspicious that you are part of the problem, perhaps not directly corrupt yourself, but very likely to be complicit in hiding the misbehaviour of police you know who are corrupt.

ACAB

I'd take the AR.

The main point of the Second Amendment from the framers perspective was to prevent the need (or even the existence) of a standing army. Of course from a modern perspective this is near-ridiculous.

I suspect you are probably right about the timeline for swatting as shady VoIP providers started getting popular in the early 2000's and started being used for more than just spoofing text advertisements.

I don’t think we could have intentionally created an incentive structure for swatting more if we had tried.

And it’s going to continue because guess what was one of the major issues in this election? Domestic security!

Same way as the US is the only nation in the world where it's impossible to prevent weekly school mass shootings.

I've heard of reports of domestic violence, child molestation, things like that, and it's always the same. They rush to the place, knock on the door, look around, and arrest the people they need to arrest. What they don't do is start shooting.

source: the onion [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

He is very sweet and sheltered, so it's a good outlet. He literally tried the Prince Albert in a can one. That hasn't been relevant for like what, 50 years?

Also, *67 also caused a lot of people to simply not answer calls that were blocked this way.

I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think that song was colored by their experiences with the notoriously corrupt LAPD of the 1980s.

Yes, this is so trivially true of any place that it's not worth mentioning, as generalizations are meant as just that: Something that a majority (or at least a large minority) are like. For example, people do say "people in the US speak English", even though there's a number of people that don't. This doesn't make the generalization any less useful than "Americans like baseball" or "Americans wear shoes around the house".

And, for anyone who isn't reading between the lines here, without a doubt I'm only so lucky as to avoid their attention today because I made it and have spent the last 2 decades living in nice neighborhoods and driving nice cars.

Well, it's not. Even here, the function of the police is to enforce the will of the state, not to protect people. The protection is a side-effect of the enforcement, but enforcement can also be things like terrorizing minorities.

https://www.kxan.com/investigations/everything-we-know-about...

I saw countless similar videos of cops violently attacking -- often with permanent, life-altering results -- people who were exercising their constitutional rights or simply minding their own business.