CA Teenager Sentenced to 48 Months in Prison for Nationwide Swatting Spree | Hacker News Reader

CA Teenager Sentenced to 48 Months in Prison for Nationwide Swatting Spree

justice.gov

74 pointsimpish920853 comments

>he falsely identified himself as a senior federal law enforcement officer, provided the federal law-enforcement officer’s residential address to the dispatcher

I would guess this one really put him on the map

Given the scope (375 total!) and the for-hire nature, it seems like this kid got off easy. I'm not totally against it given his age, but wow.

4 years in federal prison is a long time, especially for an 18 year old. Even if he earns the full 54 days of good-time per year, that's still about 3.5 years in prison. Best case scenario, when he gets out, he'll be a 21 year old felon without much or any higher education or vocational training.

You could certainly argue that he deserves a longer sentence, given the volume of swatting crimes he committed, but the rest of his life just got a whole lot harder.

Yeah, I think you're right. His age is (and should be) a major mitigating factor.

> His age is (and should be) a major mitigating factor

Counterpoint: young offenders (those released under 21 to 30) have high rates of recidivism [1]. The logic for putting someone like this in a low-security and enriching environment until they’ve aged out of high-risk behaviour is there.

[1] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/effects-aging...

sounds like justice was served then.

This is a ridiculously light sentence for 375 calls and threats of mass murder. I don’t care about his age - he’s old enough to know better. He should have received 4 years per incident.

As always: not to acquit the heinous perpetrator but I can't help but think the bigger fundamental issue is that we maintain a tax-payer funded dial-a-juiced-up-hitman service in the first place.

My thought also

Maybe there is a risk/benefit. Maybe spending more time trying to make sure, would cost lives, or give criminals time to flee?

Hard to know...

Can't disagree more.

I am disgusted by abuse of power. One law enforcement officer who use excessive force or breaks the rules is too many. They should all be found and prosecuted. Systems which perpetuate abuse of power should be torn down and rebuilt. Systems which are designed to find fault with one group should be replaced by ones which are more deliberate and fair.

The big fundamental issue is that at least in the US, there is a significant need for law enforcement. There's trafficking, child abuse and neglect, drug proliferation, crimes against persons and property. And too many agencies are not provided with the support they need to best serve the community. For example, making social workers available to resolve what are fundamentally non-law enforcement issues would restrict the reliance on armed officers. And I say this as someone with an MSW who has spent 25 years working on local public policy issues, often ones including the police.

I'd love for the police not to be needed. Hell, I want firefighters, EMTs, and paramedics to get paid to hang out in the station because there are no calls for them to respond to. But if there are bad guys out there, I want trained and competent officers to respond, to protect me and mine. And you and yours.

Having better systems built and maintained is hard work and long-term diligence is necessary. In Washington, DC, for example, the police and fire clinic is underfunded and the quality of the work performed by credentialed professionals is generally sloppy. There are several instances where officers were put back on the street following what I understand to be poorly executed clinical assessments. Elected and appointed officials were aware of the situation and shrugged their shoulders. The problem was dull, boring, and technical, not shiny, new, and sexy.

>But if there are bad guys out there, I want trained and competent officers to respond, to protect me and mine. And you and yours.

The problem is the actual risk to self that most people face is vastly overstated in media. We do not need anywhere the degree of military-styled response to situations that do not require it, esp when it can be deployed anonymously at only the cost of a phone call.

This "anonymously at the cost of a phone call" thing doesn't get us anywhere. It's possible to do that because armed robberies happen, and people expect to be able to call in a police response to those on the phone. If you can propose a plausible alternative system that doesn't rely on "anonymous" calls, do so, but you can't just leave that argument hanging out there.

"Hello, 911? Someone is breaking into my house. I think they have a gun!"

"Authenticate yourself."

SWAT doesn't show up for home invasions, they're more of a hostage rescue force.

Besides, the swatter here wasn't impersonating a person begging for cops to rescue them, they impersonated the guy with authority to give the order to do it. I don't think it's too much to ask for these guys to use Signal or Matrix or /something/ with the ability to actually authenticate identity

We don't even have a SWAT team in our muni and people have been "Swatted" here.

I don't think OP is arguing against police or policing, they are arguing against the process that allows a single phone call to result in a pre-escalated military-style armed response.

There are other ways to investigate an anonymous phone call claiming this-and-that than to immediately kick the door in guns blazing.

Naw, the bigger issue is that we have system of physically networked devices but it takes 2 years ("from approximately August 2022 to January 2024") to figure out which device on that network was issuing requests.

There's some solid intentional negligence going on when the phone company can figure who to bill but they can't figure out who made the calls.

I don't know the details of the case, but in every country/telephone network I am familiar with, it's only a tiny bit of effort to get at least temporary access to a phone that has no direct connection to your identity. How would the phone company quickly track down someone using a phonelines not connected to their identity?

To add to your comment, payphones still exist. All it takes is some cash and a hoodie for an anonymous call.

Further, the ability to make an anonymous police report is a feature for the safety of the person reporting. Otherwise, the person reporting may face revenge if the police fail to keep their identity secret.

Nah, the dial-a-hitman militarized trigger happy police force still sounds like the bigger issue, by an order of magnitude...

Specially when they seem so poorly trained or coked up to repeatedly not verify information before going in guns blazing.

I'm sure we can get rid of it, if you're okay with a lot more innocent people being killed where real distress calls are being responded to.

The police in America don't exist in a vacuum. If there weren't...hundreds of millions of guns out there, our police wouldn't need to be as heavily armed as they are.

Coincidentally I ran across and read this fantastic WIRED article with a lot more detail today.

https://archive.is/OgYmI

Curious that the posted article credits a bunch of law enforcement departments but not the PI from the article.

Four years for attempted murder seems awfully short.

Moral of the story here really is that if you make the government enforcers look like fools by abusing their "service" for your own ends they will throw the book at you.

48 months for 375 attempted murders isn't exactly getting the book thrown at you. It should have been life.

Calling it attempted murder says a lot about the cops and how they do things does it not? Do the cops have no culpability? Were they not so predisposed to shoot first and ask questions later there would barely be a crime here. It would be on the same order as pushing a bunch of fraudulent paperwork.

They do not, as you can see from the fact that 375 people were not in fact killed.

What's an acceptable conversion ratio between false calls and bodies?

As far as I care it should be close enough to zero that if falls below the noise threshold of accidents en route and other occupational hazards.

It's beyond baffling that people will defend the existence of a magic phone number that can be called and if you say the magic words to it there's a really, really good chance a bunch of armed guys kick in the door of whoever you want. The system should not work that way. The fact that the thugs showed up and decided it was BS and shot nobody most of the time is not a redeeming factor. The "close calls" should not be that close.

With respect, I find your perspective hard to believe because I don't buy that you would not yourself call that very same number if something truly drastic happened to you. I have a difficult time believing any detractors of 911, for that matter, would truly actually abide by that standard.

Implying first responders are thugs irks me too, I'm unsure if you've considered the true proportion of cases they respond to that are time sensitive (during which, information parity is low). You could, of course, assert that this means they ought to not respond in the first place - but I think you would find there are a wide range of scenarios that strictly require a rapid and forceful response due to the potential for many victims to be involved (bolstered by gun ownership) with little time to actually validate the circumstances without incurring casualties.

Accidents are unacceptable but our world is complicated and sometimes requires we meet lack of information with immediate action. That is not to say accidents are permissible, but the men putting their lives in harms way to respond to these incidents don't actually know what's occurring either.

You seem to be fairly opinionated about what the system should or should not do, what have you personally done to help improve the conversion ratio between false calls and accidents? I understand this is theoretically ad hominem but I'm personally using it as a heuristic as to the likelihood that your perspective is a luxury belief. We agree that close calls should not be that close, but it's not very different from shaking your fist at the sky unless you actually happen to work in this space (in which case I'm actually very interested in hearing your thoughts). I don't mean to be rude, I'm just being blunt because I believe you're washing over some extremely difficult problems and have little to bring to the table - which is by definition unproductive.

I mostly agree with this, and also think the "magic telephone number" is a very message-boardy kind of argument, sort of like when software developers are aghast at the idea that the criminal justice system adjudicates "intent" ("you can't read people's minds!"). I think outside of message boards, people generally do want a phone number they can call during an armed robbery.

Local swat teams should not be a thing. They're the human resources equivilent of extraneous MRAPs.

The idea that we dispatch a bunch of thugs larping as infantry (because let's be real that's what swat teams are) based on a single piece of un-corroborated intelligence from a source of unknown quality (i.e. no preexisting reason to believe they're legit) would not pass muster in any situation with "real stakes" therefore it's not ok for local police departments to act that way. There needs to be some check.

Swat teams weren't even a common thing until the 80s. Society isn't gonna collapse without them. And their response times aren't that great anyway. Send a normal officer. Any situation demanding a real swat team probably needs to be triaged anyway.

You're fixating on the name "Swatting". The technique works whether or not you get an according-to-Hoyle SWAT team called.

Whatever word you use for it, a single, often anonymous, phone call should not directly and immediately result in an armed assault on an address.

> a single, often anonymous, phone call should not directly and immediately result in an armed assault on an address

It wasn’t anonymous. The teenager impersonated an officer.

> With respect, I find your perspective hard to believe because I don't buy that you would not yourself call that very same number if something truly drastic happened to you. I have a difficult time believing any detractors of 911, for that matter, would truly actually abide by that standard.

I don't know if I would dare call the police, for any reason. Inviting poorly-trained, on-edge, armed brutes into your home who have legal immunity from anything they do, who do not have to justify escalation to violence, are not held accountable for inappropriate escalation... I don't know if I like the odds. I might just roll the dice with the home invader and hope he just wants my TV.

As someone deeply involved in local politics and in close touch with a large number of neighbors across one of the bluest, police-skeptical municipalities in the United States: this is a message board trope. Everybody expects to be able to call the police. You might, if someone is being their best self, get some hesitation before a call about someone playing at the park who doesn't look like they belong there. Someone trying car doors? 911. You'd be excoriated for seeing something like that and not calling.

This is just not a real thing, this idea that normal people will never call the police under any circumstances. It's even less the case as you go into majority-black neighborhoods, where one of their big complaints is that the police don't come when they call, only when they're walking down the street. They're being actively victimized police, and they're still upset that it's not easier to summon them.

I am speaking positively here, not normatively.

People claiming on HN they won't call the cops might be all talk, I can't possibly know, but if you don't know anyone who won't call the police, you don't know people low on the socioeconomic ladder. And that's fine, there's no shame in that. But people who are frequent harassed by police - yeah, they don't call the police.

Ask a homeless person how they're treated by police and whether they would call 911.

Yes, I do. Not only that, but those people organize and write position statements, and those statements are: "we can't get the police to come fast enough when we call".

If I have to go all the way to "unhoused person" on the SES spectrum to see the evidence for your argument, I'll consider my point made.

Consider that the people who feel most disenfranchised might not be coming to the meetings and such you're drawing from.

I don't really understand your second statement, it would only make sense to me if you didn't consider the homeless to exist as people. But I take the impression that you don't feel that way. So I don't really see why you feel you can discard them and conclude not calling the police is a "message board phenomenon" rather than a "very low on the ladder" phenomenon.

I've met people offline who tell me they don't call the police in a way I find credible, I don't know what else to tell you. I suppose the reason I responded to your comment was because it felt like a "message board phenomenon" to me, it didn't match my experience interacting with people offline.

>this is a message board trope

Speaking of message board tropes: <screeches in samplin bias>

You're not hearing about all the cases where people didn't call the police. You're doubly so not hearing about all the cases where somebody pulled a gun on a package thief (or whatever) because the kind of people who are not calling the police know very well that there's nothing the police hate more than peasants DIYing what they think is their job.

>Everybody expects to be able to call the police. You might, if someone is being their best self, get some hesitation before a call about someone playing at the park who doesn't look like they belong there. Someone trying car doors? 911. You'd be excoriated for seeing something like that and not calling.

Thank god I do not live in your municipality. Sounds like the most unholy fermented cesspit of Karens.

Nobody calls the cops on such trivial "I have no problems so I'll create some out of thin air" problems as "a man in the park who doesn't look right". People have better crap to be doing. I don't even live somewhere particularly poor either.

Last time I saw a guy trying car doors I said "Hey, leave my car alone. Get the fuck out of here!" and he immediately left the area. This seems identical to the best result the police could of provided and probably was much quicker.

He immediately left the area to go try car doors a block down.

Probably, but this is what he does after the police talk to him as well.

And really, we want it this way, because the alternative is that the police rough him up or arrest him on basically random hearsay.

The only other thing the police could do is connect multiple calls to one area and increase the presence of random cruisers there for a while in which case the perp will just move to an entirely different area.

This same result can be achieved if each of those concerned citizen callers simply approached the guy and said "Hey, get the fuck out of here!"

Some level of policing is probably necessary for crimes more serious than car-prowling but at a certain point we need to accept what we can and can't change about the world and try to implement policies that reduce the overall societal harm.

I think we could probably save a lot of police resources by adopting a societal focus on civil interpersonal conflict resolution and working to build a society where fewer and fewer individuals consider car-prowling to be a reasonable pursuit.

(man standing up in the town hall meeting meme)

I am fine with the idea of people stealing stuff from cars spending the night in lockup.

This is what I mean by how message-boardy this logic is. Ordinary people call the police when this kind of thing happens.

At this point this is just a "no true Scotsman." Any counterexample you're offered, you decide doesn't count. I don't know why you're entrenched in this position, but I don't think you're willing to engage with it in a manner compatible with curious conversation. I think you're personally invested in this community and it's guidelines, so I think that's something worth pointing out to you.

I would rebut that by saying you're the one making an extraordinary claim, and I don't think it's out-of-bounds for me to note that.

That's pretty weak tea. A retort, not a rebuttal. Since you aren't interested in engaging with the substance of my comment, I'll not engage any further with yours.

> Calling it attempted murder says a lot about the cops

That they’re operating at a high-trust setting in a high-stakes context, yes. The flip side is more Uvaldes, where everyone is waiting for paperwork or their balls to drop before bothering with doing something productive.

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