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Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call? It would be

Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call? It would be nice to know the stats on false alarms vs actual threats in SWAT deployments. Having a prior would help a Bayesian analysis.

modriano 5y ago
I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago. There were over 4000 shootings and 769 homicides here last year. AFAIK, there were 0 swattings here. So, I don't think it would be a good idea to set "assume it's a swatting" as the default response to 911 calls for service in response to violent crime. At least for Chicago.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  How many times did the SWAT team do something useful last year in Chicago?
  - modriano 5y ago
    Hundreds. You may be surprised to learn this, but shooters and killers often violently resist being arrested unless they face clearly overwhelming force. A lot of murderers and shooters have been peacefully arrested by CPD tactical officers. You can see the use of force incidents that resulted in complaints here, on the Civilian Office of Police Accountability case portal [0] (although not all of these involve tac officers). You can also see the statistics on rates of use of force in this dashboard [1], and see what counts as use of force (as well as when use of deadly force is authorized) here [2]. It's important that people actually check up on their police departments. Police serve a vital and life-saving role in society, but they have to be actually monitored. Just assuming they're all bad gives cover to the bad ones and discourages good ones from signing up, and as someone who checks, I can tell you that the people most abused by America disproportionately call the police for help, and many of their emergencies are truly harrowing. [0] https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/ https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/ [1] https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboards/use-of-force-dashboard/ https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboar... [2] https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G03-02_Use-of-Force_TBD.pdf https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G0...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - someguydave 5y ago
      “ abused by America ” what does this mean?
      - hotcold 5y ago
        It's a cool little rhetorical trick that let's us redirect and spread blame around to everyone.
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  Too much time on the internet can give people a distorted view of things.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Say more about homicide research in Chicago? That sounds super interesting. (I'm a software developer in Chicago.)
  - dk775 5y ago
    I do the same for another major city, but I actually work for the dept and crunch more than just homicide numbers. Assuming poster isn’t with a dept or maybe city gov, Honestly it’s not that exciting to be on the outside crunching murder numbers. Me and op work in similar jurisdictions, and he seems to have a good grasp on his stuff, so I hope he’s working with the dept. It’s MUCH more interesting to get a job with the dept as they let you run wild on all their data from fleets to police locations, investigations, digital stuff like facial rec etc. most depts need good analysts too in beleaguered cities so go against the grain and join up, you’ll love it. Not to mention the security and benefits. Lot of my work revolves around holding cops more accountable that to me is the most interesting stuff, not crime analysis. Just had a meeting yesterday where the majors were asking me how our team can figure out what aspects of a detectives investigation leads to the maximum likelihood of case closures and identifying the largest factors for example. As much as Twitter/nonprofit/outsider crime analysts have access to open data, some stuff you gotta be on the inside to access let alone move the needle vs. just reporting analysis to followers. Highly encourage anyone reading to consider…
    - modriano 5y ago
      100%. I've largely been focused on implementing recommendations from a PERF report on Chicago homicide investigations [0] after years of attrition in the Bureau of Detectives collided with a massive spike in violent crime (in 2016, following the Laquan McDonald murder). My main projects have centered on developing CPD's capacity for recovering video evidence (mainly CCTV) in homicide and shooting cases, as well as teaching a special detail of detectives how to convert footage from proprietary codecs to standard codecs in a forensically sounds way (so that the footage can actually be viewed by less technologically savvy detectives and assistant state's attorney's). You can view seeking-to-identify focused samples of collected footage on CPD's YouTube channel [1] (although these are not representative of the breadth of footage now collected on each homicide). It's not as polished as LAPD's productions [2], but that's to be expected considering the well developed entertainment and digital media workforce in LA. Although I do want to praise Chicago for it's willingness to make data available publicly. I had been pushing for years to get shooting data posted publicly and we just got that added to the data portal in May [3]. Additionally, the Cook County State's Attorneys Office puts a lot of their case data on the CCSAO data portal [4]. These are only a tiny fraction of the tables in CPD's or CCSAO's respective data warehouses, but as far as public data ecosystems go, Chicago's is the least bad I've worked with of major US cities. Working with LAPD's or NYPD's open data is a real pain. [0] https://home.chicagopolice.org/homicideclearancereport2019/ https://home.chicagopolice.org/homicideclearancereport2019/ [1] https://youtube.com/c/ChicagoPoliceNews https://youtube.com/c/ChicagoPoliceNews [2] https://youtube.com/c/LAPDONLINE1 https://youtube.com/c/LAPDONLINE1 [3] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Violence-Reduction-Victims-of-Homicides-and-Non-Fa/gumc-mgzr https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Violence-Reduct... [4] https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/browse?tags=state%27s+attorney+case-level&sortBy=most_accessed https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/browse?tags=state%27s+a...
- underdown 5y ago
  I assume you mean deaths from swattings. There are swattings every year in Chicago.
michaelmrose 5y ago
To be maximally fair they didn't kill the old guy a heart attack did which might have been unavoidable.
- duncan-donuts 5y ago
  Are we victim blaming now? Is that what we’re doing?
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Are we being deliberately obtuse in order to inject left-wing buzzwords into situations where they're completely inapplicable? It's that what we're doing?
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    I meant the cops dont apear to be at fault for a change.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bawolff 5y ago
  That's stupid. If you shoot someone, we don't say that technically the bullet killed them not the person who fired the shot.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    That's a false equivalence. If you shoot someone with a gun, it's reasonable to expect them to die. It is not a reasonable expectation that someone will die when you ask them their name and tell them to put down their weapon.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    You can reasonably know that shooting a person with a bullet will cause injury or death. Telling them to drop their weapon and surrender does not usually cause injury or death.
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
The police aren't the initiators of the death here. They get a call that someone is shot, and that soon others will be killed, they are going to call SWAT.
- mcherm 5y ago
  > They get a call that someone is shot, and that soon others will be killed, they are going to call SWAT. There is no law of nature requiring that police departments react that way. It is up to us as a society to decide what behavior we desire. If, for instance, I were to learn that 90% of all calls for SWAT teams are from "swatting" (baseless prank calls performed to create the reaction) while 10% were actual life-or-death situations it would affect my opinion of the right way for police to handle it. So I think knowing the actual statistics is important.
  - eyivghh 5y ago
    Swatting is effective because its rare. I doubt, nationwide, its more than 1%
  - Cyclone_ 5y ago
    You really think 90% could be pranks? Anything could potentially be a prank, that doesn't change the fact someone could be in imminent danger. Police need to always both exercise caution and respond quickly to potential crimes.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      There’s no winning for the cops. It’s a really hard job where you have to walk the correct route through a protocol in an emergency, often while being in danger yourself
      - thatguy0900 5y ago
        Crazy that this is being downvoted. The cops were responding to a call about a armed gunman actively killing. If they respond slowly or tepidly and people die, then they get yelled at. If they respond quickly and decisevly and they have been lied to, they get yelled at. They are not omnipotent.
deleted 5y ago
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grensley 5y ago
Totally agree. This is basically the same as blaming the first-day developer that wipes the production database. It's more on the police to change their behavior than to expect kids to stop being imbeciles.
- genocidicbunny 5y ago
  In my opinion, in these swatting incidents, the most responsible party is the police department answering the call without doing even a modicum of due diligence. The kids are stupid -- as kids will be, but there's not way a prank call should be able to summon a death squad to someone's door without there being _some_ checks.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Not doing due diligence is a legacy of Columbine, where waiting cost lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre#Police_tactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - watwut 5y ago
      They waited for very long time after many reports of shooting. The ongoing shooting was heard outside. You talk about the change of tactic in case of multiple times reported mass shooting in public building. It is not nearly the same situation.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    "There's a shooting going on at my neighbor's. Someone's already dead! Help! Help!" "Hang on... While we do due diligence!" What due diligence would or could the police do? Maybe they could tell if the caller location was far away or overseas, but beyond that... My intuition, without seeing the relevant data, is that rapid police response is worth the cost of occasional swatting.
MattGaiser 5y ago
I suspect that far, far, far, fewer die of heart attacks from being surprised by police than are shot by violent people.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
djrogers 5y ago
I don’t see anything in the article that claims an actual SWAT team was deployed here, or that the police did anything wrong or irresponsible. There was a report of an armed gunman who had already killed someone on this guy’s property, so cops went to search for him. What exactly would you have them do differently?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > "He went out the house with a gun, because he heard someone was on his property," Fitch explained. "He sees all these cops around him, and they ask if he is Mark Herring, 'put your hands up,' so he tosses the gun away from him to show he's not a threat, and [put his] hands up." If not a SWAT team, a large armed response.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    What do you propose as an alternative? They can’t send unarmed cops to respond to reports of gun violence, and it wouldn’t be responsible to simply send one cop. By all accounts, the police responded appropriately and de-escalating the situation when the man came outside with a gun. I don’t understand what people want to be different about this situation, other than for the police to become clairvoyant so they can know when reports are false before they get there.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >What do you propose as an alternative? From the police that regularly chokes people, shots unarmed men, women, and even kids, and likes to play with military gear, and are trigger happy? Probably one can't expect much of them, anyway. A competent police would have set up some kind of barricade to stand behind, call for the person to come out, try to watch the house from afar to see what's going on, and in any case, not have several people stand with drawn weapons aiming at a person...
      - beervirus 5y ago
        Yes, when there's a report that a gunman has already shot someone, the police should respond by... hiding.
xenadu02 5y ago
This is a problem technology can help with. Emergency dispatchers could at least verify that any cellular call came from a tower near the supposed address or a landline call is nearby. I'm not saying police shouldn't respond if the call comes from an IP gateway or a different state - but dispatch should tell them confidence is low and in that case police could approach the scene much more skeptically.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Maybe ask caller to connect via FaceTime or similar for serious cases? IIRC most phones already share precise caller location when calling 911. Everything else should be treated as spam.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Maybe ask caller to connect via FaceTime or similar for serious cases? IIRC most phones already share precise caller location when calling 911. Everything else should be treated as spam. That obviously won't work, because you can't expect people in legitimate emergencies to do something like that. Say they don't even have one of those apps installed, is the 911 dispatcher supposed to talk them through installing Zoom before they send help? That's literally a Kafkaesque nightmare (or straight out of a political attack ad). Honestly, I think the most realistic way to solve this is my making investigations into SWATing really high priority (e.g. dedicated FBI people investigating these crimes), and then handing out heavy, punitive sentences as a deterrent. The only reason anyone does this is they think they can get away with it (and often do). I think it'd stop once that impression is changed.
    - dzhiurgis 5y ago
      Don't know much about Android but every iPhone comes out of the box with it. And it shouldn't even be an option, but default. Like smartphone makers should enforce this. Probably require you to stream from both cameras.
      - 5y ago
dougSF70 5y ago
Exactly!
patrickthebold 5y ago
The article doesn't give much details about what the police did. It says there were a lot of them, and that the victim came out of their house with a gun and was told to put their hands up. So they definitely didn't storm in. And he did have a gun.
- choward 5y ago
  > It says there were a lot of them > ... they definitely didn't storm in. Yes. There were a lot of them for absolutely no reason but for a completely baseless claim. > And he did have a gun. This is irrelevant. He was on his own property and did nothing wrong. The authorities didn't know he had a gun before sending so many cops.
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    > Yes. There were a lot of them for absolutely no reason but for a completely baseless claim. How would they know its baseless? If someone broke into your house with a gun do you want the police to show up assuming you're lying?
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call? The article doesn’t say a SWAT team was deployed, just that the police responded to a call. The image of a SWAT team is just a stock photo. The police also did not “storm” anything. The homeowner went outside with a gun in hand and they de-escalated the situation without “storming” or firing any shots. I don’t really understand what you want the police to do in these situations where they receive calls about gun crimes in progress. They can’t just assume it’s a prank and wait around to see if anyone dies before they choose to send some police to investigate.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >The police also did not “storm” anything. The homeowner went outside with a gun in hand and they de-escalated the situation without “storming” or firing any shots. In this case perhaps, but the parents' comment wasn't particular to this instance but generic. And there are tons of cases where SWATing actually happened, unecessary force was deployed, and so on, sometimes even captured on camera... >I don’t really understand what you want the police to do in these situations where they receive calls about gun crimes in progress. The same procedure that is followed in civilized countries would be a good start.
  - detaro 5y ago
    What exactly is that universal "same procedure" that "civilized countries" (please leave such flamebait out btw) follow? The primary reason this wouldn't happen like this in most other countries is that it's unlikely that the home owner would turn up with a gun - if they did, police would be pointing theirs too. Really the main missed opportunity here seems to be the call of the neighbor, which could have been used to coordinate, but overall it sounds like the one swatting death which really was a dumb accident.
    - rembicilious 5y ago
      It wasn’t a dumb accident, and law enforcement isn’t to blame in this case. The police response was deliberately incited by a group of malicious individuals. How can minors, who typically are given lighter sentences, be discouraged from “swatting”?
bpodgursky 5y ago
I would be pretty shocked if SWATting was any appreciable % of police responses. You can't delay response times by 50% to handle the .01% of cases which are falsely initiated.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  We're not asking police to delay response, we're asking them to delay shooting people. But when all you have is a hammer, every citizen looks like a nail.
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    Actually, in this case, the police didn't shoot. The guy died anyway.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
So some of the big online streamers get swatted very frequently. They are generally reluctant to talk about it because they don't want to encourage the behavior. But a couple of the ones that live in Austin have revealed that they have an arranged visual signal they can use to tell the officers "we're ok this is just a swatting call."
- SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
  Evidence?
shadowlight 5y ago
We're in the habit of blaming the police for everything. No. When there is a call for danger assume the worst. Not doing so could mean a life is lost. It is very rare for someone to die of a heart attack because of a swat. How about we punish the hell out of anyone who does these stupid prank calls instead.
- adrianN 5y ago
  How about we do both? Think of strategies that minimize harm in case of a false alert and severe punishment for malicious false alerts? Death by heart attack is not the only possible bad outcome of a SWAT team storming a house.
- Retric 5y ago
  You can react without assuming the worst. For example after a bomb threat it is reasonable to calmly evacuate a school and do a search, that doesn’t mean people should be fleeing for their lives. Swatting however generally provokes an over reaction.
  - unishark 5y ago
    > Swatting however generally provokes an over reaction. How can you know this. My guess would be it's like hacking any other system. You hear about the few times they succeed. Especially if turns into a horrible incident the news media can use to fit one of their favorite narratives.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Several states recently passed anti swatting legislation, California (2013), Illinois (2015), etc because it’s common enough to be considered a significant issue. It’s not just about the risk to the public, these overreactions interferes with the police and waste significant resources. Really people have been doing this for a long time, the “boy who cried wolf” is part of Aesop's Fables dating to ~600 BCE. Swatting is significant because it’s harder for cops to filter based on internet famous than actually famous.
gorgoiler 5y ago
If the call doesn’t meet a particular threshold it can be treated as genuine while also ending the call with a pre-recorded message about the dangers of phoney SWAT calls. If this is a prank, we WILL find you. Please enter the last four digits of your social security number followed by the pound key to receive an automatic 90% discount on your sentence.
nindalf 5y ago
> Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call? You read about a few false positives and decide the police need to start assuming by default that every call is a false positive. You have no data on the number of calls where sending a SWAT team is the correct response (true positives), the number of calls where the responder correctly decides not to send SWAT (true negatives) or where the responder incorrectly decides not to send SWAT (false negatives). No, you have no data, just a handful of anecdotes and on that basis you want to completely change how first responders work. You talk about “Bayesian” but you couldn’t possibly calculate how many lives could be saved or lost by this change. Please, let’s stop acting like we’re experts at everything because we know a bit about software. Maybe other people are competent too. Maybe they know shit we don’t. Oh and by the way, like someone else pointed out, the article doesn’t even say SWAT was deployed or that any law enforcement entered his home.
- jdhendrickson 5y ago
  I don't assume competence of 911 responders because they regularly get the wrong house. Your aggressive screed really added nothing to the conversation. "It's probably correct so we should ignore the problem" isn't a sane perspective on police violence based on a prank call.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    My point is that they have more data and experience on deciding whether a call is legitimate or not. More than the GP here, who read two articles about SWAT-ing before deciding to upend the entire system. > regularly get the wrong house Citation needed, with data? Or do you, like GP, also want us to assume that your anecdotes are data? And getting the exact address isn’t the same thing as deciding the legitimacy of a call. > “it’s probably correct so we should ignore the problem” isn’t a sane perspective You’ve mischaracterised my comment and called me insane. That was uncalled for. I did not say this wasn’t a problem. I merely questioned whether a person with 0 data and 0 experience was qualified to call for upending the current system. More data is needed before we can hold such strong opinions. I would request that in future you don’t call people’s opinions insane without even understanding what they’re saying. You’re currently in violation of HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
peanut_worm 5y ago
One time I was talking to a police officer who was giving me a ticket and I asked him what his favorite part of the job was. He said “breaking down doors and kicking peoples asses”.
bobthechef 5y ago
That seems like a terrible idea and an unrealistic one at that. If someone is calling to report a violent crime in progress, you’re not coming to a theoretical judgement where you have the luxury of collecting facts to make a determination. This is a matter of prudential and practical judgement concerning human lives. It is not a joke. You must respond quickly in case it is true. This is not a horse race. We’re not taking bets on the most likely case. You will lose time if it turns out to be a prank, but the potential risk far outweighs that loss. This man also didn’t die because he was shot btw. The way you reduce these incidents is through severe punishments for reporting false crimes.

modriano 5y ago

I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago. There were over 4000 shootings and 769 homicides here last year. AFAIK, there were 0 swattings here. So, I don't think it would be a good idea to set "assume it's a swatting" as the default response to 911 calls for service in response to violent crime. At least for Chicago.

jeffbee 5y ago
How many times did the SWAT team do something useful last year in Chicago?
- modriano 5y ago
  Hundreds. You may be surprised to learn this, but shooters and killers often violently resist being arrested unless they face clearly overwhelming force. A lot of murderers and shooters have been peacefully arrested by CPD tactical officers. You can see the use of force incidents that resulted in complaints here, on the Civilian Office of Police Accountability case portal [0] (although not all of these involve tac officers). You can also see the statistics on rates of use of force in this dashboard [1], and see what counts as use of force (as well as when use of deadly force is authorized) here [2]. It's important that people actually check up on their police departments. Police serve a vital and life-saving role in society, but they have to be actually monitored. Just assuming they're all bad gives cover to the bad ones and discourages good ones from signing up, and as someone who checks, I can tell you that the people most abused by America disproportionately call the police for help, and many of their emergencies are truly harrowing. [0] https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/ https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/ [1] https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboards/use-of-force-dashboard/ https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboar... [2] https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G03-02_Use-of-Force_TBD.pdf https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G0...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - someguydave 5y ago
    “ abused by America ” what does this mean?
    - hotcold 5y ago
      It's a cool little rhetorical trick that let's us redirect and spread blame around to everyone.
travisjungroth 5y ago
Too much time on the internet can give people a distorted view of things.
tptacek 5y ago
Say more about homicide research in Chicago? That sounds super interesting. (I'm a software developer in Chicago.)
- dk775 5y ago
  I do the same for another major city, but I actually work for the dept and crunch more than just homicide numbers. Assuming poster isn’t with a dept or maybe city gov, Honestly it’s not that exciting to be on the outside crunching murder numbers. Me and op work in similar jurisdictions, and he seems to have a good grasp on his stuff, so I hope he’s working with the dept. It’s MUCH more interesting to get a job with the dept as they let you run wild on all their data from fleets to police locations, investigations, digital stuff like facial rec etc. most depts need good analysts too in beleaguered cities so go against the grain and join up, you’ll love it. Not to mention the security and benefits. Lot of my work revolves around holding cops more accountable that to me is the most interesting stuff, not crime analysis. Just had a meeting yesterday where the majors were asking me how our team can figure out what aspects of a detectives investigation leads to the maximum likelihood of case closures and identifying the largest factors for example. As much as Twitter/nonprofit/outsider crime analysts have access to open data, some stuff you gotta be on the inside to access let alone move the needle vs. just reporting analysis to followers. Highly encourage anyone reading to consider…
  - modriano 5y ago
    100%. I've largely been focused on implementing recommendations from a PERF report on Chicago homicide investigations [0] after years of attrition in the Bureau of Detectives collided with a massive spike in violent crime (in 2016, following the Laquan McDonald murder). My main projects have centered on developing CPD's capacity for recovering video evidence (mainly CCTV) in homicide and shooting cases, as well as teaching a special detail of detectives how to convert footage from proprietary codecs to standard codecs in a forensically sounds way (so that the footage can actually be viewed by less technologically savvy detectives and assistant state's attorney's). You can view seeking-to-identify focused samples of collected footage on CPD's YouTube channel [1] (although these are not representative of the breadth of footage now collected on each homicide). It's not as polished as LAPD's productions [2], but that's to be expected considering the well developed entertainment and digital media workforce in LA. Although I do want to praise Chicago for it's willingness to make data available publicly. I had been pushing for years to get shooting data posted publicly and we just got that added to the data portal in May [3]. Additionally, the Cook County State's Attorneys Office puts a lot of their case data on the CCSAO data portal [4]. These are only a tiny fraction of the tables in CPD's or CCSAO's respective data warehouses, but as far as public data ecosystems go, Chicago's is the least bad I've worked with of major US cities. Working with LAPD's or NYPD's open data is a real pain. [0] https://home.chicagopolice.org/homicideclearancereport2019/ https://home.chicagopolice.org/homicideclearancereport2019/ [1] https://youtube.com/c/ChicagoPoliceNews https://youtube.com/c/ChicagoPoliceNews [2] https://youtube.com/c/LAPDONLINE1 https://youtube.com/c/LAPDONLINE1 [3] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Violence-Reduction-Victims-of-Homicides-and-Non-Fa/gumc-mgzr https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Violence-Reduct... [4] https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/browse?tags=state%27s+attorney+case-level&sortBy=most_accessed https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/browse?tags=state%27s+a...
underdown 5y ago
I assume you mean deaths from swattings. There are swattings every year in Chicago.

michaelmrose 5y ago

To be maximally fair they didn't kill the old guy a heart attack did which might have been unavoidable.

duncan-donuts 5y ago
Are we victim blaming now? Is that what we’re doing?
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Are we being deliberately obtuse in order to inject left-wing buzzwords into situations where they're completely inapplicable? It's that what we're doing?
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  I meant the cops dont apear to be at fault for a change.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bawolff 5y ago
That's stupid. If you shoot someone, we don't say that technically the bullet killed them not the person who fired the shot.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  That's a false equivalence. If you shoot someone with a gun, it's reasonable to expect them to die. It is not a reasonable expectation that someone will die when you ask them their name and tell them to put down their weapon.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  You can reasonably know that shooting a person with a bullet will cause injury or death. Telling them to drop their weapon and surrender does not usually cause injury or death.

x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago

The police aren't the initiators of the death here. They get a call that someone is shot, and that soon others will be killed, they are going to call SWAT.

mcherm 5y ago
> They get a call that someone is shot, and that soon others will be killed, they are going to call SWAT. There is no law of nature requiring that police departments react that way. It is up to us as a society to decide what behavior we desire. If, for instance, I were to learn that 90% of all calls for SWAT teams are from "swatting" (baseless prank calls performed to create the reaction) while 10% were actual life-or-death situations it would affect my opinion of the right way for police to handle it. So I think knowing the actual statistics is important.
- eyivghh 5y ago
  Swatting is effective because its rare. I doubt, nationwide, its more than 1%
- Cyclone_ 5y ago
  You really think 90% could be pranks? Anything could potentially be a prank, that doesn't change the fact someone could be in imminent danger. Police need to always both exercise caution and respond quickly to potential crimes.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    There’s no winning for the cops. It’s a really hard job where you have to walk the correct route through a protocol in an emergency, often while being in danger yourself
    - thatguy0900 5y ago
      Crazy that this is being downvoted. The cops were responding to a call about a armed gunman actively killing. If they respond slowly or tepidly and people die, then they get yelled at. If they respond quickly and decisevly and they have been lied to, they get yelled at. They are not omnipotent.

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grensley 5y ago

Totally agree. This is basically the same as blaming the first-day developer that wipes the production database. It's more on the police to change their behavior than to expect kids to stop being imbeciles.

genocidicbunny 5y ago
In my opinion, in these swatting incidents, the most responsible party is the police department answering the call without doing even a modicum of due diligence. The kids are stupid -- as kids will be, but there's not way a prank call should be able to summon a death squad to someone's door without there being _some_ checks.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Not doing due diligence is a legacy of Columbine, where waiting cost lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre#Police_tactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...
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  - watwut 5y ago
    They waited for very long time after many reports of shooting. The ongoing shooting was heard outside. You talk about the change of tactic in case of multiple times reported mass shooting in public building. It is not nearly the same situation.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  "There's a shooting going on at my neighbor's. Someone's already dead! Help! Help!" "Hang on... While we do due diligence!" What due diligence would or could the police do? Maybe they could tell if the caller location was far away or overseas, but beyond that... My intuition, without seeing the relevant data, is that rapid police response is worth the cost of occasional swatting.

MattGaiser 5y ago

I suspect that far, far, far, fewer die of heart attacks from being surprised by police than are shot by violent people.

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djrogers 5y ago

I don’t see anything in the article that claims an actual SWAT team was deployed here, or that the police did anything wrong or irresponsible. There was a report of an armed gunman who had already killed someone on this guy’s property, so cops went to search for him. What exactly would you have them do differently?

ceejayoz 5y ago
> "He went out the house with a gun, because he heard someone was on his property," Fitch explained. "He sees all these cops around him, and they ask if he is Mark Herring, 'put your hands up,' so he tosses the gun away from him to show he's not a threat, and [put his] hands up." If not a SWAT team, a large armed response.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  What do you propose as an alternative? They can’t send unarmed cops to respond to reports of gun violence, and it wouldn’t be responsible to simply send one cop. By all accounts, the police responded appropriately and de-escalating the situation when the man came outside with a gun. I don’t understand what people want to be different about this situation, other than for the police to become clairvoyant so they can know when reports are false before they get there.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >What do you propose as an alternative? From the police that regularly chokes people, shots unarmed men, women, and even kids, and likes to play with military gear, and are trigger happy? Probably one can't expect much of them, anyway. A competent police would have set up some kind of barricade to stand behind, call for the person to come out, try to watch the house from afar to see what's going on, and in any case, not have several people stand with drawn weapons aiming at a person...
    - beervirus 5y ago
      Yes, when there's a report that a gunman has already shot someone, the police should respond by... hiding.

xenadu02 5y ago

This is a problem technology can help with. Emergency dispatchers could at least verify that any cellular call came from a tower near the supposed address or a landline call is nearby. I'm not saying police shouldn't respond if the call comes from an IP gateway or a different state - but dispatch should tell them confidence is low and in that case police could approach the scene much more skeptically.

dzhiurgis 5y ago
Maybe ask caller to connect via FaceTime or similar for serious cases? IIRC most phones already share precise caller location when calling 911. Everything else should be treated as spam.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Maybe ask caller to connect via FaceTime or similar for serious cases? IIRC most phones already share precise caller location when calling 911. Everything else should be treated as spam. That obviously won't work, because you can't expect people in legitimate emergencies to do something like that. Say they don't even have one of those apps installed, is the 911 dispatcher supposed to talk them through installing Zoom before they send help? That's literally a Kafkaesque nightmare (or straight out of a political attack ad). Honestly, I think the most realistic way to solve this is my making investigations into SWATing really high priority (e.g. dedicated FBI people investigating these crimes), and then handing out heavy, punitive sentences as a deterrent. The only reason anyone does this is they think they can get away with it (and often do). I think it'd stop once that impression is changed.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Don't know much about Android but every iPhone comes out of the box with it. And it shouldn't even be an option, but default. Like smartphone makers should enforce this. Probably require you to stream from both cameras.
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dougSF70 5y ago

Exactly!

patrickthebold 5y ago

The article doesn't give much details about what the police did. It says there were a lot of them, and that the victim came out of their house with a gun and was told to put their hands up. So they definitely didn't storm in. And he did have a gun.

choward 5y ago
> It says there were a lot of them > ... they definitely didn't storm in. Yes. There were a lot of them for absolutely no reason but for a completely baseless claim. > And he did have a gun. This is irrelevant. He was on his own property and did nothing wrong. The authorities didn't know he had a gun before sending so many cops.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  > Yes. There were a lot of them for absolutely no reason but for a completely baseless claim. How would they know its baseless? If someone broke into your house with a gun do you want the police to show up assuming you're lying?

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call? The article doesn’t say a SWAT team was deployed, just that the police responded to a call. The image of a SWAT team is just a stock photo. The police also did not “storm” anything. The homeowner went outside with a gun in hand and they de-escalated the situation without “storming” or firing any shots. I don’t really understand what you want the police to do in these situations where they receive calls about gun crimes in progress. They can’t just assume it’s a prank and wait around to see if anyone dies before they choose to send some police to investigate.

coldtea 5y ago
>The police also did not “storm” anything. The homeowner went outside with a gun in hand and they de-escalated the situation without “storming” or firing any shots. In this case perhaps, but the parents' comment wasn't particular to this instance but generic. And there are tons of cases where SWATing actually happened, unecessary force was deployed, and so on, sometimes even captured on camera... >I don’t really understand what you want the police to do in these situations where they receive calls about gun crimes in progress. The same procedure that is followed in civilized countries would be a good start.
- detaro 5y ago
  What exactly is that universal "same procedure" that "civilized countries" (please leave such flamebait out btw) follow? The primary reason this wouldn't happen like this in most other countries is that it's unlikely that the home owner would turn up with a gun - if they did, police would be pointing theirs too. Really the main missed opportunity here seems to be the call of the neighbor, which could have been used to coordinate, but overall it sounds like the one swatting death which really was a dumb accident.
  - rembicilious 5y ago
    It wasn’t a dumb accident, and law enforcement isn’t to blame in this case. The police response was deliberately incited by a group of malicious individuals. How can minors, who typically are given lighter sentences, be discouraged from “swatting”?

bpodgursky 5y ago

I would be pretty shocked if SWATting was any appreciable % of police responses. You can't delay response times by 50% to handle the .01% of cases which are falsely initiated.

himinlomax 5y ago
We're not asking police to delay response, we're asking them to delay shooting people. But when all you have is a hammer, every citizen looks like a nail.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  Actually, in this case, the police didn't shoot. The guy died anyway.

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jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

So some of the big online streamers get swatted very frequently. They are generally reluctant to talk about it because they don't want to encourage the behavior. But a couple of the ones that live in Austin have revealed that they have an arranged visual signal they can use to tell the officers "we're ok this is just a swatting call."

SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
Evidence?

shadowlight 5y ago

We're in the habit of blaming the police for everything. No. When there is a call for danger assume the worst. Not doing so could mean a life is lost. It is very rare for someone to die of a heart attack because of a swat. How about we punish the hell out of anyone who does these stupid prank calls instead.

adrianN 5y ago
How about we do both? Think of strategies that minimize harm in case of a false alert and severe punishment for malicious false alerts? Death by heart attack is not the only possible bad outcome of a SWAT team storming a house.
Retric 5y ago
You can react without assuming the worst. For example after a bomb threat it is reasonable to calmly evacuate a school and do a search, that doesn’t mean people should be fleeing for their lives. Swatting however generally provokes an over reaction.
- unishark 5y ago
  > Swatting however generally provokes an over reaction. How can you know this. My guess would be it's like hacking any other system. You hear about the few times they succeed. Especially if turns into a horrible incident the news media can use to fit one of their favorite narratives.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Several states recently passed anti swatting legislation, California (2013), Illinois (2015), etc because it’s common enough to be considered a significant issue. It’s not just about the risk to the public, these overreactions interferes with the police and waste significant resources. Really people have been doing this for a long time, the “boy who cried wolf” is part of Aesop's Fables dating to ~600 BCE. Swatting is significant because it’s harder for cops to filter based on internet famous than actually famous.

gorgoiler 5y ago

If the call doesn’t meet a particular threshold it can be treated as genuine while also ending the call with a pre-recorded message about the dangers of phoney SWAT calls. If this is a prank, we WILL find you. Please enter the last four digits of your social security number followed by the pound key to receive an automatic 90% discount on your sentence.

nindalf 5y ago

> Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call? You read about a few false positives and decide the police need to start assuming by default that every call is a false positive. You have no data on the number of calls where sending a SWAT team is the correct response (true positives), the number of calls where the responder correctly decides not to send SWAT (true negatives) or where the responder incorrectly decides not to send SWAT (false negatives). No, you have no data, just a handful of anecdotes and on that basis you want to completely change how first responders work. You talk about “Bayesian” but you couldn’t possibly calculate how many lives could be saved or lost by this change. Please, let’s stop acting like we’re experts at everything because we know a bit about software. Maybe other people are competent too. Maybe they know shit we don’t. Oh and by the way, like someone else pointed out, the article doesn’t even say SWAT was deployed or that any law enforcement entered his home.

jdhendrickson 5y ago
I don't assume competence of 911 responders because they regularly get the wrong house. Your aggressive screed really added nothing to the conversation. "It's probably correct so we should ignore the problem" isn't a sane perspective on police violence based on a prank call.
- nindalf 5y ago
  My point is that they have more data and experience on deciding whether a call is legitimate or not. More than the GP here, who read two articles about SWAT-ing before deciding to upend the entire system. > regularly get the wrong house Citation needed, with data? Or do you, like GP, also want us to assume that your anecdotes are data? And getting the exact address isn’t the same thing as deciding the legitimacy of a call. > “it’s probably correct so we should ignore the problem” isn’t a sane perspective You’ve mischaracterised my comment and called me insane. That was uncalled for. I did not say this wasn’t a problem. I merely questioned whether a person with 0 data and 0 experience was qualified to call for upending the current system. More data is needed before we can hold such strong opinions. I would request that in future you don’t call people’s opinions insane without even understanding what they’re saying. You’re currently in violation of HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

peanut_worm 5y ago

One time I was talking to a police officer who was giving me a ticket and I asked him what his favorite part of the job was. He said “breaking down doors and kicking peoples asses”.

bobthechef 5y ago

That seems like a terrible idea and an unrealistic one at that. If someone is calling to report a violent crime in progress, you’re not coming to a theoretical judgement where you have the luxury of collecting facts to make a determination. This is a matter of prudential and practical judgement concerning human lives. It is not a joke. You must respond quickly in case it is true. This is not a horse race. We’re not taking bets on the most likely case. You will lose time if it turns out to be a prank, but the potential risk far outweighs that loss. This man also didn’t die because he was shot btw. The way you reduce these incidents is through severe punishments for reporting false crimes.