You'd think they'd be more concerned about constantly wasting time and resources to constantly send out SWAT to some random couple's house twice a week.
> Exclusive body camera video obtained by TMJ4 shows officers arriving at the couple's home on multiple occasions, even as both officers and the couple acknowledged the calls were fake.
> In one exchange captured on body camera, an officer can be heard telling a colleague, "This guy keeps getting swatted." In another, a body camera recording from inside a squad car captures an officer describing the address as "a known swatting location."
> Despite that awareness, officers continued to respond, at times with a full tactical presence. Body camera video shows one officer pointed a gun at the couple's door on their fourth response in a single day.
At some point, the people doing the "swatting" (false police call) should be held criminally liable, maybe even for attempted murder by cop. There's definitely a crime being committed there. I'm 100% sure that calling the cops on someone and making a false report is against at least one or two (or maybe even several) laws.
Which does raise the question: why is it SOP for the police to send a SWAT team to a random house based on nothing but an anonymous phone call? At the very least it should take some kind of statement from an actual identified human who can be held accountable if it turns out to be a hoax.
Act now (to reduce potential loss of life) and verify later
He wasn't.
I am being charitable with this assessment, too.
MacDonald was extremely funny, even if you were liberal. His comedy was not political, and maybe that is kind of the appeal to conservative leaning people - some kind of "retro" appeal. If you are wondering what I am getting at, read the book, "The Compleat Practical Joker" from 1953.
There's also more to the story here. Not that it's in any way justified, bur this guy's wasn't targeted only because he tweeted about Norm Macdonald.
At what point do the officials involved in this become involved with the criminal harassment themselves? At what point is it legal / acceptable (though unwise) to shoot the armed men entering your house?
This happened between July 25 of 2022 and (I believe) April of 2023.
The lawsuit is at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68293540/robinson-v-cit... and April is the last charge listed in the initial complaint. That's 35 weeks, not 104.
The powers that be like phone numbers because they're like a medium-level KYC. In many countries getting a phone number requires ID, and there was a recent proposal to do that in the US. Of course swatting and spam are used as excuses to introduce KYC requirements, but those problems are endemic to phone numbers, and more identity verification just causes more leaks, which gives them excuses to require more KYC.
My idea for replacing phone numbers and email: SimpleX for calls and texts (no accounts and therefore the least PII possible), and Monero micropayments for spam prevention. Most people spend way more on their wireless plan then they'd need to spend in Monero to make the initial connection, for publicly posted SimpleX links.
> Patrick Tomlinson and Niki Robinson awarded $575K US settlement from City of Milwaukee
> ...
> It was 1 a.m. on July 25, 2022, and someone had reported a hostage situation at his house in Milwaukee, where he lives with his wife, Niki Robinson.
> ...
> Over the course of the next two and a half years, Tomlinson and Robinson were swatted 55 times, despite repeatedly explaining their situation to the Milwaukee Police Department. They sued, and have been awarded a $575,000 US settlement from the City of Milwaukee.
---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHkRgfYmLrE for the local news (TMJ4) three weeks ago.
shockingly mild
…i was expecting something significantly more incendiary.
We can all say “well, if you get many calls about one location, maybe you should stop showing up” but wtf are you supposed to do if a real crime is being committed? The same couple getting swatted one day could get criminals breaking in another, possibly for the same reason even. How can you make the call not to show up if your entire existence and role in society is to show up?
What real solutions are there?
Edit: a bunch of identical responses to this comment with "just don't show up". I know it's easy to sit and judge from the comfort of your keyboard, but do a little bit of thinking. What should the rule be? When is it okay for police to receive a distress call and not show up in actual reality with actual lives at stake? Who's responsible for the consequences of not showing up?
Um, no. In a high trust society "swatting" would not be a thing--because people would understand that it's a huge violation of trust. And people who did make hoax calls like this would suffer severe punishment--because that's what a high trust society has to do to people who violate trust like that, in order to stay high trust.
> Act now (to reduce potential loss of life)
Not necessarily, since SWAT teams are generally not noted for their restraint--certainly not if their response on swatting call number 55 to the same house is the same as it was for call number 1.
> and verify later
Okay, let's say this is valid for call number 1. Still, what about call number 2 to the same house? Let alone call number 55? Especially when the owner of the house produces evidence that people had threatened to swat him?
So no, we do not have the kind of society where your logic makes sense; the rare cases where the quick knee jerk response actually prevents harm are more than overwhelmed by the much more common cases where it's a false alarm but the police keep on violating innocent people's rights anyway.
I fear to think about where we would be without the constitution considering how authoritarian law enforcement is in the US. It's definitely lacking, but I am still grateful for it.
[An old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee.]
And because their entire existence is to show up, you have a conflict of interests on how you answer the call.
You say that as if most of the world doesn’t get by just fine without any militarized SWAT law enforcement units whatsoever…
How about: Track down and identify the person making these calls?
silverFork•42m ago
" he wrote on Twitter, now X: “Hot take: I’ve never found Norm Macdonald funny and was pretty sure all my comedy friends who did were either nuts or screwing with me." "Two weeks later, here I am, you know, on my front porch in the middle of the night, exposed to all my neighbours with shxtgxns......... pointed at my head."
ks2048•28m ago
I didn’t even know he was sick.