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Comment by downer73 | Hacker News Reader

Oh, I'd really like to know where they got that number from first.

If it includes the salaries of the officers involved, by allocating the man-hours consumed by each response, then that number needs to be lowered.

I'll accept the fact that vehicles consume gallons per mile in gas, and that private residences have to repair busted down doors and damaged sheetrock, and maybe if some other expendables were used, if say some shots were fired and it cost 50 cents in bullets, but the officers would have been on the clock anyway (overtime or no), and the taxes are already budgeted for salaries.

Did the counties get sued by the swatted? If that's the source of the number, maybe he owes a large percentage of that, but then again, maybe the lawsuit has a point and how swat teams respond to prank calls should be changed?

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It's not just the monetary cost.

Every time first responders of any kind are deployed there is an inherent risk to their lives.

First responders have to drive fast to get to their destination quickly. SWAT teams are heavily armed and accidents do happen. Innocent bystanders could get shot, pets could get shot, other officers could get shot in a confusion. They might get called out on a prank call but end up finding a sovereign citizen freeman-on-the-land at home who hates the government and is willing to get into a firefight anyway.

All these things are potential liabilities on the department, not to mention the danger of having your entire SWAT force deployed to a prank call while there's a real incident on the far other side of town and not enough time to get there.

So yeah, we can argue about the cost as long as we want, but at the end of the day the primary cost on the minds of the police departments are these dangers, and the actual price tag quoted by them must take these into account.

That's exactly why they should be more circumspect when busting down citizens' doors. It's just irresponsible to allow this kid to cause this much damage.

Consider this situation (numbers fictional):

1. It costs 10 dollars an hour to keep a cop on active duty.

2. You need 10 cops to handle a specific region based on the fact that you receive 10 incidents a day.

3. You now get an additional 2 fake incidents a day but you don't know which of the 12 incidents are fake.

4. You therefore need cops to check out these incidents. You must hire them.

5. Your cost of operation goes up.

Lesson #1: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

$10k for a major incident sounds in the right ball park including what a couple of SWAT fire teams plus say another 8-12 ordinary coppers to form a cordon.

Plus there might have call out off duty cops on overtime to cover and then there is the paperwork and reports which will have to be written up and analysed.

Plus there is the cost of damage to property, disruption to traffic and so on.

Plus the host of investigating the hoax

Don't forget all the time required to write up all the reports, I'm sure there's a crazy amount of paperwork after an incident.

Bureaucracy is very expensive.

Bureaucracy is very expensive.

But sometimes, accountability makes it worth the expense.

I think a large part of that cost could also be in the paperwork after the event also

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