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I know everyone wants to be upset at the "swatter" but few people seem to be upset that it is even possible. It shouldn't be possible to be murdered from a phon

I know everyone wants to be upset at the "swatter" but few people seem to be upset that it is even possible. It shouldn't be possible to be murdered from a phone call.

eropple 5y ago
"It's possible" because a functional society requires trust in the case of extremity and extreme situations are difficult to adequately plan for, difficult to test, and once set in their ways difficult to change for next time due to significant institutional inertia. (Which, before one starts, is not evil, it is inevitable, and part of management and problem-solving is understanding this.) You can certainly be concerned about the procedures followed and whether they are wise or followed correctly. And should they be looked at and changed? Probably! Almost certainly! But somehow I doubt that the people who you are low-key castigating for their reaction towards the person breaking that societal trust are forgetting this. Most people are, after all, able to care about more than one thing at once. But the proximate cause is that broken trust, and that the safety measures have not succeeded does not reduce the magnitude of that broken trust. That breaking of that trust is primarily alarming to people is not a particularly humane reason to adjust one's pince-nez and hrm at them.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  We have door locks and passwords because you cannot blindly trust people. My bank asks for ID when opening an account because (in addition to KYC) it's not just going to trust me, a random customer. When I get pulled over, the cops ask for my license--they aren't just going to accept "I have a license. Trust me, bro". Imagine if everything worked on the honor system! Society would fall apart within hours. Trust-by-default just makes you vulnerable to being exploited by bad actors. It's pretty scary that an unauthenticated, anonymous phone call from an unknown location is enough to cause an armed police response. Do a little investigation first to try to corroborate the claim before treating it seriously!
  - xd 5y ago
    "Do a little investigation first to try to corroborate the claim before treating it seriously!" If the police don't act swiftly enough and harm was to come to anyone they'd be criticised for not taking it seriously. Police can't win either way. If you were the person in need would you want an immediate response or a little investigation first?
  - tptacek 5y ago
    The authentication system you're appealing to does not exist.
  - eropple 5y ago
    Door locks do not exist to stop people who try to subvert them. There is an argument that most passwords don't, either.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Neither of those things requires immediate response (in order of minutes), or lives are lost. I’m as disgusted with this story as most seem to be, but I don’t think running KYC and asking for documentation of the emergency is a good idea for 999 calls.
    - soco 5y ago
      In the age of the AI profiling a face in the crowd, it's very difficult to believe that some system to look up the caller ID cannot be brought to work.
      - lm28469 5y ago
        AI is still dog shit for 99.9% of applications, we're not playing chess here. It would add an insane amount of complexity and points of failure for an edge case. If it even fucks up once it would need to be retired. I know HN loves to think raw tech will save the world but come on... this is a societal problem, not a tech problem
      - therealEleix 5y ago
- ramblerman 5y ago
  If that were true then why is this mainly a us phenomenon
recursive 5y ago
> It shouldn't be possible to be murdered from a phone call. It shouldn't be possible to be murdered at all. But phone calls can transmit arbitrary information to arbitrary parties. So it's going to pretty tough to limit any particular consequence of them.
- content_sesh 5y ago
  GP isn't talking about any particular consequence of phone calls. It's talking about the specific consequence that, because American cops have a tendency to murder people instead of arresting them, you can use them as a hit squad with a simple phone call. Like what happened here: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/12/kansas-man-killed-in-swatting-attack/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/12/kansas-man-killed-in-swa...
  - recursive 5y ago
    When I said "particular", I meant it as a synonym to "specific". If that's wrong, my apologies, but that's how I understand it.
    - content_sesh 5y ago
      You're correct, "particular" and "specific" are synonyms, and I concede that I might have been unclear. I'll try again. What bothers me, and I imagine the original commentator, is that swatting works at all. It is deeply concerning that police in America are so reliably violent that they can be used as a fairly effective murder weapon. Discussing the fact that communication mediums that allow arbitrary messages to be sent allows one to construct abstract scenarios in which such a transmission causes a chain of events that leads to someone's death feels like it misses that point.
      - recursive 5y ago
        It bothers me too. It's just that the part about the phone call doesn't seem relevant to me. If the caller had used text or video instead, the problem is the same. Availability of military-style shoot-first-ask-later force to anyone is a problem, regardless of the communication mechanism used to request it.
whimsicalism 5y ago
What is your solution if police have to respond to the real crimes?
- gpm 5y ago
  Ask questions before shooting. One anonymous source is enough to justify the police putting resources towards investigating. Knocking on doors, calling phones, etc. It shouldn't be enough for even a 4th amendment search, let alone going in with guns blazing.
  - nickff 5y ago
    It seems like the police are guilty of negligence causing death in these sorts of instances.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > One anonymous source is enough to justify the police putting resources towards investigating. Knocking on doors, calling phones, etc. It shouldn't be enough for even a 4th amendment search, let alone going in with guns blazing. Police did not go in "with guns blazing". No shots were fired. The person who died of a heart attack came outside to greet the police with a gun in hand. The police de-escalated the situation without any shots fired on either side.
    - gpm 5y ago
      In this case, yes. In many cases of swatting no. In this case, the heart attack is likely directly linked to the numerous cases were police did shoot people for no justifiable reason, and the victims fear that they would do the same to him. The police did not de-escalate the situation, they gave orders both impossible to comply with, and in my opinion unconstitutional (they had no probably cause with which they could seize the victim), with the implicit threat that they would shoot the victim if he did not comply.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Exactly. It reminds me of the Tamir Rice incident. If cops rush in, primed to look for violent confrontation, they can easily find it. I also saw this some in college after sports wins, where the local police turned peaceful, happy crowds into angry mobs by behaving aggressively. And then once they had people angry, that justified further escalation.
happytoexplain 5y ago
This isn't my observation. Every time this topic comes up, there is tons of (rightfully) critical comments about what the feasibility of this murder tactic says about the responding police and the system in general.
throwaway9980 5y ago
The US is a militarized police state where citizens are armed to the teeth. This is a natural consequence of that reality.
- cle 5y ago
  Genuinely curious, do you know how police would respond in a country with stricter gun control, if you called in a report that someone was armed with assault rifles and bombs?
  - throwaway9980 5y ago
    I honestly don’t know. I don’t live in a country with stricter gun control. I live in the United States. I’m not blaming loose gun control alone. There has been an increasing militarization of the police in the US for at least the last 30 years. Is this happening because citizens are buying greater firepower? Are citizens buying greater firepower because the police are militarizing? Are these two things unrelated? Probably not, but I don’t know. My point is that mixing these two things together produces bad outcomes.
  - yongjik 5y ago
    Judging from my life experience as South Korean, it would go something like: First, the police may flat out refuse to believe you (which is also a problem in its own, but in a country without guns, what's the probability that such a call is not a prank?) Assuming the police decides it's somehow a credible threat, the police will most likely call for the help of the best trained, best equipped, elite anti-terror squad, because that's what they're trained for. It being such an unusual occurrence, the incident will certainly feature in that day's national news. Which also means that the officer commanding the operation knows their actions will be dissected to death by armchair quarterbacks - which might be a bad thing in general, but on the other hand, the officer will certainly NOT order anyone to "just bang on the door and start shooting." Their reputations and jobs are at stake. And, in the 99% of case it turned out to be a prank, well, you can assume the police will do everything to swiftly find the perpetrator and bring them to justice - after all, the police office has a reputation to protect.
austinheap 5y ago
While I fully agree w your sentiment the legal definition of “murder” is not what you’re implying it is.
- vmception 5y ago
  imagine not being able to separate a colloquialism with a legal definition dont you think thats the most useless rebuttal? everyone knows that the context was “randomly killed without cause” not “do the courts count that kind of random killing without cause to be a crime of the killer” colloquially, people say “murder” for emphasis, to emphasize their disdain for the action It isnt productive to say “welllllll murder legally means” when the lowest hanging fruit is really to discuss their sentiment
  - austinheap 5y ago
    Simply asserting that it’s possible to discuss an important issue without cheapening it w hyperbole.
    - vmception 5y ago
      Given how frequent that is with regard to the word murder, I wouldn't be surprised if the definition in all official dictionaries gets updated to include “vehement disapproval and acknowledgment of a killing regardless of legality” Actually I’ll petition for that right now, since the stewards of those dictionaries probably noticed that context too and would be willing to do their part so that less conversations get auto-derailed
- lupire 5y ago
  It's "felony murder".
joe5150 5y ago
agreed. obviously the police should have never been there, but once they were involved, they had the power to prevent this by not, for example, demanding that this man "somehow climb over the fence with his hands up". this is the kind of nonsensical order that got Daniel Shaver killed in 2016.
_-david-_ 5y ago
Lets take a situation where someone reports something like a shootout inside a house. What would you have the cops do in that situation? If this is a real event, they don't go in quickly in order to confirm the situation and someone dies because of it would you blame the cops?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 6nf 5y ago
  If your ONLY source is a single, anonymous phone call, you need to verify the situation before sending armed men to a random address. For example convince the anonymous caller to give up their anonymity or call the house you're concerned about and try to speak to people who live there
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    It is probably best to verify the situation on an anonymous call, but my point is people will absolutely blame the cops if they assess the situation and that extra time results in people dying. The cops seems to be in a lose lose situation. If they go quickly without fully validating the situation they will be blamed for any death. If they take additional time to confirm the situation and that results in somebody dying they will be blamed. There needs to be validation, but there also needs to be quickness. It is impossible to get the right mix of the two in a consistent manner.
- matz1 5y ago
  >Lets take a situation where someone reports something like a shootout inside a house. What would you have the cops do in that situation? How do they handle it in other countries? >If this is a real event, they don't go in quickly in order to confirm the situation and someone dies because of it would you blame the cops? Yes i would blame the cops, its the police job to handle the situation without causing someone to dies. How exactly they should do is for the police to figure out. You can't expect general public to figure out the solution.
bena 5y ago
I would like to say that SWAT should never be the first response to a situation. But the problem is that the first time somebody gets killed or harmed because the authorities took any amount of time to confirm the necessity of the response, you'll have people then asking why SWAT wasn't deployed to start with. As with most things, the problem is people.
- tptacek 5y ago
  The SWAT team wasn't deployed here at all.
  - bena 5y ago
    Then swap with "excessive police response" if you want. The term "swatting" is derived from the acronym SWAT because originally, that was the goal, to get police to respond to targets with SWAT teams/tactics/gear. The point remains, filling the street with police in response to an anonymous tip should not be the police's first response. A single car should suffice.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      The police received a distress call about an armed assailant. There isn't anything disproportionate about sending multiple cars to respond to an event like that. Moreover, the victim of this attack was in fact armed, which certainly had something to do with how seriously the police took the event. The simple fact is that the person who made this fake distress call intended to cause mayhem, predictably succeeded, and that mayhem killed someone. People who call in fake SWAT calls are culpable for homicide.
      - bena 5y ago
        No one is trying to excuse them from blame. We're discussing how to make this tactic less effective. Because there is something disproportionate about sending multiple cars to respond to some guy just sitting in his house who didn't want to give up a twitter handle. Also, I see nothing in the article about Herring being armed in general and especially nothing about him being armed during the encounter. The fact of the matter is that the police had no clue as to the truth of the situation and responded based on nothing but a random phone call. That does have to stop.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> It shouldn't be possible to be murdered from a phone call. The man who died came at the police with a gun in hand. The police de-escalated the situation without any shots being fired, but the man was so startled that he had a heart attack. I know police are not popular on HN, but so far I haven't seen any suggestions for what the police should have done differently, other than unrealistic suggestions that they ignore the call and not act on reports of a violent crime in progress. Note that it's called "swatting" but it doesn't appear an actual SWAT team was dispatched, just the local police responding to a call of a violent crime in progress.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Do you have a source on the gun in hand thing? That isn't mentioned in the linked article. The only information provided in this case is that he stepped out to investigate and then had trouble with a fence. Presumably if he had a gun he dropped it at some point between walking outside and crawling under the fence in an attempt to comply with police.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    There was another article posted on HN yesterday with more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900825 > "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." The police responded to reports of a violent crime in progress, confronted a man with a gun, and de-escalated the situation without any shots fired. There are a lot of bad assumptions in the comments on both articles assuming that the police shot the man, which isn't correct.
- Retric 5y ago
  Police showing up without SWAT doesn’t really describe the situation in full. Walking home, I once saw a huge number of cop cars lights flashing on my parents property and was quite concerned. Only by getting close did I realize they where surrounding a burnt car. Lights flashing is reasonable for a traffic stop but it’s not sending a calming message. At the other end I had a cop calmly knocking on my door and everything from his posture to the force and rhythm he used was keeping the situation calm. First case bank robbers abandoned and set fire to their getaway car in an empty field, the second someone handed in my cellphone to lost and found. First case had nothing to do with me and I was flipping out, second a cops at my front door and everything is calm. Long story short, the description is quite a few cops where there which is inherently a very stressful situation.
matz1 5y ago
Unfortunately, its consequences of people allowed to have guns.
- loco5niner 5y ago
  Take away guns, and you'll have a knife problem. What we really have is a people problem.
throwawaycities 5y ago
> I know everyone wants to be upset at the "swatter" I feel sorry for everyone of the people in the discord channel. Well before they “swatted” this guy an entire group of people whose lives are so devoid of meaning, opportunity, and hope they had organized to take social media handles to resell for a few thousand dollars (maybe a couple hundred per person once split amount the group). Those focusing on the militarization of the police don’t appear any more sympathetic to the deceased than those responsible. This group was intent on ruining lives, and they successfully achieved that long before swatting him which resulted in his death. Swatting is just 1 of the tools this group used, if it didn’t exist they’d have used the next tool at their disposal, just look at the testimony from the other victims.
- laurent92 5y ago
  SWATting is typically using the resources of the state weaponized against someone else, for private means. The state shouldn’t delegate free resources like this at the whim of citizen. If citizen want to cause duress to each other, they should do it with private means, especially since it’s easier much harder or will get them arrested or will get them more conscious that they will definitely be caught. But you’re also right concerning the boys. If society took proper care of them, instead of making IRL socialization for boys so miserable that a whole generation finds life through Discord more attractive, we’d have much fewer of those occurrences.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Is there an argument you can make that would be persuasive to ordinary people who believe that the police should be a public resource, as they are today, and that ordinary citizens shouldn't have to employ private security forces in order to resolve distress calls?

I know everyone wants to be upset at the "swatter" but few people seem to be upset that it is even possible. It shouldn't be possible to be murdered from a phone call.

eropple 5y ago

"It's possible" because a functional society requires trust in the case of extremity and extreme situations are difficult to adequately plan for, difficult to test, and once set in their ways difficult to change for next time due to significant institutional inertia. (Which, before one starts, is not evil, it is inevitable, and part of management and problem-solving is understanding this.) You can certainly be concerned about the procedures followed and whether they are wise or followed correctly. And should they be looked at and changed? Probably! Almost certainly! But somehow I doubt that the people who you are low-key castigating for their reaction towards the person breaking that societal trust are forgetting this. Most people are, after all, able to care about more than one thing at once. But the proximate cause is that broken trust, and that the safety measures have not succeeded does not reduce the magnitude of that broken trust. That breaking of that trust is primarily alarming to people is not a particularly humane reason to adjust one's pince-nez and hrm at them.

ryandrake 5y ago
We have door locks and passwords because you cannot blindly trust people. My bank asks for ID when opening an account because (in addition to KYC) it's not just going to trust me, a random customer. When I get pulled over, the cops ask for my license--they aren't just going to accept "I have a license. Trust me, bro". Imagine if everything worked on the honor system! Society would fall apart within hours. Trust-by-default just makes you vulnerable to being exploited by bad actors. It's pretty scary that an unauthenticated, anonymous phone call from an unknown location is enough to cause an armed police response. Do a little investigation first to try to corroborate the claim before treating it seriously!
- xd 5y ago
  "Do a little investigation first to try to corroborate the claim before treating it seriously!" If the police don't act swiftly enough and harm was to come to anyone they'd be criticised for not taking it seriously. Police can't win either way. If you were the person in need would you want an immediate response or a little investigation first?
- tptacek 5y ago
  The authentication system you're appealing to does not exist.
- eropple 5y ago
  Door locks do not exist to stop people who try to subvert them. There is an argument that most passwords don't, either.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Neither of those things requires immediate response (in order of minutes), or lives are lost. I’m as disgusted with this story as most seem to be, but I don’t think running KYC and asking for documentation of the emergency is a good idea for 999 calls.
  - soco 5y ago
    In the age of the AI profiling a face in the crowd, it's very difficult to believe that some system to look up the caller ID cannot be brought to work.
    - lm28469 5y ago
      AI is still dog shit for 99.9% of applications, we're not playing chess here. It would add an insane amount of complexity and points of failure for an edge case. If it even fucks up once it would need to be retired. I know HN loves to think raw tech will save the world but come on... this is a societal problem, not a tech problem
    - therealEleix 5y ago
ramblerman 5y ago
If that were true then why is this mainly a us phenomenon

recursive 5y ago

> It shouldn't be possible to be murdered from a phone call. It shouldn't be possible to be murdered at all. But phone calls can transmit arbitrary information to arbitrary parties. So it's going to pretty tough to limit any particular consequence of them.

content_sesh 5y ago
GP isn't talking about any particular consequence of phone calls. It's talking about the specific consequence that, because American cops have a tendency to murder people instead of arresting them, you can use them as a hit squad with a simple phone call. Like what happened here: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/12/kansas-man-killed-in-swatting-attack/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/12/kansas-man-killed-in-swa...
- recursive 5y ago
  When I said "particular", I meant it as a synonym to "specific". If that's wrong, my apologies, but that's how I understand it.
  - content_sesh 5y ago
    You're correct, "particular" and "specific" are synonyms, and I concede that I might have been unclear. I'll try again. What bothers me, and I imagine the original commentator, is that swatting works at all. It is deeply concerning that police in America are so reliably violent that they can be used as a fairly effective murder weapon. Discussing the fact that communication mediums that allow arbitrary messages to be sent allows one to construct abstract scenarios in which such a transmission causes a chain of events that leads to someone's death feels like it misses that point.
    - recursive 5y ago
      It bothers me too. It's just that the part about the phone call doesn't seem relevant to me. If the caller had used text or video instead, the problem is the same. Availability of military-style shoot-first-ask-later force to anyone is a problem, regardless of the communication mechanism used to request it.

whimsicalism 5y ago

What is your solution if police have to respond to the real crimes?

gpm 5y ago
Ask questions before shooting. One anonymous source is enough to justify the police putting resources towards investigating. Knocking on doors, calling phones, etc. It shouldn't be enough for even a 4th amendment search, let alone going in with guns blazing.
- nickff 5y ago
  It seems like the police are guilty of negligence causing death in these sorts of instances.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > One anonymous source is enough to justify the police putting resources towards investigating. Knocking on doors, calling phones, etc. It shouldn't be enough for even a 4th amendment search, let alone going in with guns blazing. Police did not go in "with guns blazing". No shots were fired. The person who died of a heart attack came outside to greet the police with a gun in hand. The police de-escalated the situation without any shots fired on either side.
  - gpm 5y ago
    In this case, yes. In many cases of swatting no. In this case, the heart attack is likely directly linked to the numerous cases were police did shoot people for no justifiable reason, and the victims fear that they would do the same to him. The police did not de-escalate the situation, they gave orders both impossible to comply with, and in my opinion unconstitutional (they had no probably cause with which they could seize the victim), with the implicit threat that they would shoot the victim if he did not comply.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Exactly. It reminds me of the Tamir Rice incident. If cops rush in, primed to look for violent confrontation, they can easily find it. I also saw this some in college after sports wins, where the local police turned peaceful, happy crowds into angry mobs by behaving aggressively. And then once they had people angry, that justified further escalation.

happytoexplain 5y ago

This isn't my observation. Every time this topic comes up, there is tons of (rightfully) critical comments about what the feasibility of this murder tactic says about the responding police and the system in general.

throwaway9980 5y ago

The US is a militarized police state where citizens are armed to the teeth. This is a natural consequence of that reality.

cle 5y ago
Genuinely curious, do you know how police would respond in a country with stricter gun control, if you called in a report that someone was armed with assault rifles and bombs?
- throwaway9980 5y ago
  I honestly don’t know. I don’t live in a country with stricter gun control. I live in the United States. I’m not blaming loose gun control alone. There has been an increasing militarization of the police in the US for at least the last 30 years. Is this happening because citizens are buying greater firepower? Are citizens buying greater firepower because the police are militarizing? Are these two things unrelated? Probably not, but I don’t know. My point is that mixing these two things together produces bad outcomes.
- yongjik 5y ago
  Judging from my life experience as South Korean, it would go something like: First, the police may flat out refuse to believe you (which is also a problem in its own, but in a country without guns, what's the probability that such a call is not a prank?) Assuming the police decides it's somehow a credible threat, the police will most likely call for the help of the best trained, best equipped, elite anti-terror squad, because that's what they're trained for. It being such an unusual occurrence, the incident will certainly feature in that day's national news. Which also means that the officer commanding the operation knows their actions will be dissected to death by armchair quarterbacks - which might be a bad thing in general, but on the other hand, the officer will certainly NOT order anyone to "just bang on the door and start shooting." Their reputations and jobs are at stake. And, in the 99% of case it turned out to be a prank, well, you can assume the police will do everything to swiftly find the perpetrator and bring them to justice - after all, the police office has a reputation to protect.

austinheap 5y ago

While I fully agree w your sentiment the legal definition of “murder” is not what you’re implying it is.

vmception 5y ago
imagine not being able to separate a colloquialism with a legal definition dont you think thats the most useless rebuttal? everyone knows that the context was “randomly killed without cause” not “do the courts count that kind of random killing without cause to be a crime of the killer” colloquially, people say “murder” for emphasis, to emphasize their disdain for the action It isnt productive to say “welllllll murder legally means” when the lowest hanging fruit is really to discuss their sentiment
- austinheap 5y ago
  Simply asserting that it’s possible to discuss an important issue without cheapening it w hyperbole.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Given how frequent that is with regard to the word murder, I wouldn't be surprised if the definition in all official dictionaries gets updated to include “vehement disapproval and acknowledgment of a killing regardless of legality” Actually I’ll petition for that right now, since the stewards of those dictionaries probably noticed that context too and would be willing to do their part so that less conversations get auto-derailed
lupire 5y ago
It's "felony murder".

joe5150 5y ago

agreed. obviously the police should have never been there, but once they were involved, they had the power to prevent this by not, for example, demanding that this man "somehow climb over the fence with his hands up". this is the kind of nonsensical order that got Daniel Shaver killed in 2016.

_-david-_ 5y ago

Lets take a situation where someone reports something like a shootout inside a house. What would you have the cops do in that situation? If this is a real event, they don't go in quickly in order to confirm the situation and someone dies because of it would you blame the cops?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
6nf 5y ago
If your ONLY source is a single, anonymous phone call, you need to verify the situation before sending armed men to a random address. For example convince the anonymous caller to give up their anonymity or call the house you're concerned about and try to speak to people who live there
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  It is probably best to verify the situation on an anonymous call, but my point is people will absolutely blame the cops if they assess the situation and that extra time results in people dying. The cops seems to be in a lose lose situation. If they go quickly without fully validating the situation they will be blamed for any death. If they take additional time to confirm the situation and that results in somebody dying they will be blamed. There needs to be validation, but there also needs to be quickness. It is impossible to get the right mix of the two in a consistent manner.
matz1 5y ago
>Lets take a situation where someone reports something like a shootout inside a house. What would you have the cops do in that situation? How do they handle it in other countries? >If this is a real event, they don't go in quickly in order to confirm the situation and someone dies because of it would you blame the cops? Yes i would blame the cops, its the police job to handle the situation without causing someone to dies. How exactly they should do is for the police to figure out. You can't expect general public to figure out the solution.

bena 5y ago

I would like to say that SWAT should never be the first response to a situation. But the problem is that the first time somebody gets killed or harmed because the authorities took any amount of time to confirm the necessity of the response, you'll have people then asking why SWAT wasn't deployed to start with. As with most things, the problem is people.

tptacek 5y ago
The SWAT team wasn't deployed here at all.
- bena 5y ago
  Then swap with "excessive police response" if you want. The term "swatting" is derived from the acronym SWAT because originally, that was the goal, to get police to respond to targets with SWAT teams/tactics/gear. The point remains, filling the street with police in response to an anonymous tip should not be the police's first response. A single car should suffice.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    The police received a distress call about an armed assailant. There isn't anything disproportionate about sending multiple cars to respond to an event like that. Moreover, the victim of this attack was in fact armed, which certainly had something to do with how seriously the police took the event. The simple fact is that the person who made this fake distress call intended to cause mayhem, predictably succeeded, and that mayhem killed someone. People who call in fake SWAT calls are culpable for homicide.
    - bena 5y ago
      No one is trying to excuse them from blame. We're discussing how to make this tactic less effective. Because there is something disproportionate about sending multiple cars to respond to some guy just sitting in his house who didn't want to give up a twitter handle. Also, I see nothing in the article about Herring being armed in general and especially nothing about him being armed during the encounter. The fact of the matter is that the police had no clue as to the truth of the situation and responded based on nothing but a random phone call. That does have to stop.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> It shouldn't be possible to be murdered from a phone call. The man who died came at the police with a gun in hand. The police de-escalated the situation without any shots being fired, but the man was so startled that he had a heart attack. I know police are not popular on HN, but so far I haven't seen any suggestions for what the police should have done differently, other than unrealistic suggestions that they ignore the call and not act on reports of a violent crime in progress. Note that it's called "swatting" but it doesn't appear an actual SWAT team was dispatched, just the local police responding to a call of a violent crime in progress.

mulmen 5y ago
Do you have a source on the gun in hand thing? That isn't mentioned in the linked article. The only information provided in this case is that he stepped out to investigate and then had trouble with a fence. Presumably if he had a gun he dropped it at some point between walking outside and crawling under the fence in an attempt to comply with police.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  There was another article posted on HN yesterday with more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900825 > "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." The police responded to reports of a violent crime in progress, confronted a man with a gun, and de-escalated the situation without any shots fired. There are a lot of bad assumptions in the comments on both articles assuming that the police shot the man, which isn't correct.
Retric 5y ago
Police showing up without SWAT doesn’t really describe the situation in full. Walking home, I once saw a huge number of cop cars lights flashing on my parents property and was quite concerned. Only by getting close did I realize they where surrounding a burnt car. Lights flashing is reasonable for a traffic stop but it’s not sending a calming message. At the other end I had a cop calmly knocking on my door and everything from his posture to the force and rhythm he used was keeping the situation calm. First case bank robbers abandoned and set fire to their getaway car in an empty field, the second someone handed in my cellphone to lost and found. First case had nothing to do with me and I was flipping out, second a cops at my front door and everything is calm. Long story short, the description is quite a few cops where there which is inherently a very stressful situation.

matz1 5y ago

Unfortunately, its consequences of people allowed to have guns.

loco5niner 5y ago
Take away guns, and you'll have a knife problem. What we really have is a people problem.

throwawaycities 5y ago

> I know everyone wants to be upset at the "swatter" I feel sorry for everyone of the people in the discord channel. Well before they “swatted” this guy an entire group of people whose lives are so devoid of meaning, opportunity, and hope they had organized to take social media handles to resell for a few thousand dollars (maybe a couple hundred per person once split amount the group). Those focusing on the militarization of the police don’t appear any more sympathetic to the deceased than those responsible. This group was intent on ruining lives, and they successfully achieved that long before swatting him which resulted in his death. Swatting is just 1 of the tools this group used, if it didn’t exist they’d have used the next tool at their disposal, just look at the testimony from the other victims.

laurent92 5y ago
SWATting is typically using the resources of the state weaponized against someone else, for private means. The state shouldn’t delegate free resources like this at the whim of citizen. If citizen want to cause duress to each other, they should do it with private means, especially since it’s easier much harder or will get them arrested or will get them more conscious that they will definitely be caught. But you’re also right concerning the boys. If society took proper care of them, instead of making IRL socialization for boys so miserable that a whole generation finds life through Discord more attractive, we’d have much fewer of those occurrences.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Is there an argument you can make that would be persuasive to ordinary people who believe that the police should be a public resource, as they are today, and that ordinary citizens shouldn't have to employ private security forces in order to resolve distress calls?