"Swatting" isn't a significant problem in other parts of the world because the result is super boring: The police knock on the door, ask some questions, and then leave.
It is only a problem in the US because the response itself is terrifying and often dangerous. Multiple people have died from "swatting" in the US[0].
"Swatting" should carry a jail term for sure. But police reform is a large component in solving the problem (and many other topical problems).
Do you actually think the police send a SWAT team to every single call? 99% of calls in the US would be the exact normal response you said - police knock on the door and ask questions.
The problem is the swatters know the exact type of call to make to elicit a SWAT response, usually involving someone being held hostage and in imminent danger of being killed. The police can't just assume people making that kind of call are lying, they have to respond as if it's real. It's not a problem of the police just responding to every call like that.
There is a HUGE range of responses from nothing <-----> Full On military Assault shooting everything that moves.
That fact that citizens of the US have simply accepted that the latter is even remotely a proper response to even "someone being held hostage and in imminent danger of being killed" calls is both sadden, and maddening at the same time
In this hypothetical we’re beyond negotiation anyway. I think I made this clear with the clause “in imminent danger of being killed”. If hostage negotiation were possible, that would not be imminent danger of being killed.
I’m a member of a minority group that is currently experiencing an uptick in violence from the American public. I’m generally a good-natured person and tend not to make enemies. If someone is in my home with a firearm, they’re there to kill me for my perceived connections to big banking, a rational person does not commit random acts of violence like that.
You do, unintentionally, make a stellar point though. If someone in my part of America called the police because someone was trying to kill me, there will likely not be a police response once they see the last name of the target.
Hostage negotiations have a high success rate. It’s one of the very few things to be proud of about our law enforcement strategy. That being said, hostage crises generally happen in public places, and can only be successful if terrorism is not the goal. I would be deeply surprised if anyone decided to attack specifically me if their goal was not to strike fear into my community.
They are more or less stating that the problem is overzealous responses from police, rather than police receiving a fake call for which a SWAT team would be an appropriate response.
Do police in other countries simply not have the capacity to deal with people in imminent danger? Their response to getting a call claiming that there's a crazy person in the house about to murder the caller is to knock politely and ask questions? Seems more like the police in other countries suck then.
> They are more or less stating that the problem is overzealous responses from police, rather than police receiving a fake call for which a SWAT team would be an appropriate response.
The problem is that swatting is enabled precisely because the police's response isn't appropriate. The fact that swatting is so prominent, let alone an issue in the first place, is a testament to that.
Police forces demonstrably: tend to be hyper-militarized, do not train or require de-escalation, do not face legal repercussions for unlawful actions, do not keep up-to-date with various trends and technology, etc. Going in guns-blazing isn't going to save anyone if you don't validate basic information like "is this the right house?" or "did this call purporting to be from someone in our city come from a random Google Voice or Skype number?" or "have we received fake calls from this address already?"
I can’t think of a single kind of situation requiring a police response where surprise escalation is a key component that will help solve that situation in favor of controlled investigation and a focus on de-escalation.
surprise escalation into an unknown, unverified situation where the only basis for the use of deadly force is whether the police feel there is danger. Of course they are in fear for their lives because they are leaping into the unknown, unprepared.
We hear about the militarization of the police. I hate that term. They are playing soldier, not acting it. Having been in the military, if we had a situation and the time we would monitor a location and find out everything we could. Apparently that wasn't passed along to the police, only the guns were.
Ironically the standard US response for an active shooter in a school appears to be to wait outside for a good while and see if things work out for themselves.
The equivilant to SWAT in Germany is run by state police. They are used in specific situations, and most of those are never covered by the press. Statiscally, they are have on average around one deployment per day.
The big difference is, those units in Europe are a professiobally trained force and part of a professionally trained police force. And not somw wannabe commandos recruited from ill-trained police officers run by departments too small to even exist in Europe.
The French also have multiple: GIGN from the Gendarmerie, GIPN and RAID from the Police National. The small police departments and sheriffs offices, the latter with elected sheriffs without any real training and qualification requirements, are an US thing.
In other parts of the world the police get a call saying there is an armed individual threatening to hurt hostages and they send a single unarmed officer to knock on the door?
You see the police normally do this thing called investigation. I know here in the US the police have forgotten what that word even means, as they just react, often emotionally, jumping wildly to conclusions based on zero evidence.
You see not every police dept in the world has removed all investigation from the responsibility of their police forces..
There will be a well proportioned response, but it won’t be an actual SWAT team. There’s typically one such team per five to ten million people and they won’t move for a joke call.
But more importantly, with an order of magnitude rarer killings, there is much less of a “we’re at war with the bad guys” culture. In some countries discharging a weapon brings automatic suspension for the investigation, even if nobody gets hurt. Cops simply don’t tend get trigger happy in this environment.
There are estimated to be thousands of swatting incidents in a given year, so the "super boring" result evidently happens the vast majority of the time in the US too.
It's also not always that boring in other countries. Here is an example that involved more than some questions and leaving:
> An 18-year-old has been arrested in Canada after investigators traced “swatting” calls at Volunteer High School in Hawkins County and Watauga High School in Boone, N.C. to him.
Note that the caller was in Canada, but the swatting and presumably violent police response was in North Carolina. Swatting is as American as apple pie and baseball, IMO.
Good to know I got only a 1 in 1000 chance of dying because Americans are so hyped up on fake maga tough guy takes that we can't agree to hold police accountable for their behavior.
I know I can't win the argument you'd like to start about the absolute risk and whether it's tolerable.
I don't want to!
My point was about the variance, and false confidence that two small rates are truly different. Even when one is zero, so the other is infinity percent larger.
It's not that 1/1000 is "low" or "high" in terms of human cost - that is in the eye of the beholder.
The point is that the frequency of rare events is highly sensitive to random chance, and so even with hypothetical perfect records you can't pretend different numbers are necessarily different rates.
Much less if you guess at numbers based on prejudices.
"How to Lie With Statistics" desperately needs a sequel.
>> "Swatting" isn't a significant problem in other parts of the world because the result is super boring: The police knock on the door, ask some questions, and then leave.
> Keffals was swatted in Canada, and Canada has a far less extreme police and gun culture compared to the USA.
I think it's egregious that she was actually arrested for something that the police should have realized was fake, or simply been able to sort out in-person. However, her claim that she woke up with an assault rifle in her face was simply not true. In the context of American swatting, it's more like swatting-light since Canadian police actually require training and attempt to de-escalate instead of solving every problem with guns.
> Officers did not conduct what is sometimes referred to as a “dynamic entry” into Ms. Sorrenti’s residence. Rather, they knocked on the door, announced themselves as police officers, and occupants answered. Any attempt by uninvolved third parties to suggest otherwise is inaccurate and irresponsible.
This is actually not true and it's just like myth propaganda propagated by Canada. The Royal mounted police are deeply murderous to native people till today. that's just a single example. in the same way that the American media blames every black man murdered by the police so does the Canadian.
That's because both countries are based on the continued enforcement of white supremacy.
'Starlight Tours' are a sordid stain in Canadian history, however, I don't see how that makes it untrue or a myth. Even if the RCMP is demonstrably bad, Ontario and Quebec have their own provincial police forces, and so do a few large municipalities.
Good? As a Californian who doesn't own a gun and hasn't fired one in 20 years, I'm unlikely to take advantage of that law, but I appreciate that it exists. A SWAT assault that isn't preceded by presenting a valid warrant is just a heavily-armed home invasion, and home owners absolutely should be able to respond to those. That was presumably already legal, but if "enshrining" it into law as you put it makes it pointedly obvious to the police that they can be legally shot dead if they don't follow a safe, legal procedure, great. Maybe swatting will be less of a thing then...
Edit: wow, just saw this part:
> Why did Indiana push this law?
The state Supreme Court had previously ruled that citizens had no legal right to resist police officers, even in a case of unlawful entry
What a crazy ruling. I guess this law is checks and balances in action in two ways...
If you think about it in practical terms, I don’t think this is a good law. What’s going to happen if a house owner is opening fire at a heavily armed police team that is conducting an illegal raid. Is the police going to stand down and reassess the legality of their entry? Or are they going to shoot back? And what’s the likely outcome? Dead owner and dead police. Great.
Now, if you’d really want to dissuade the police from making illegal raids, make them liable for all damages, slap on penalties and put the burden of proof on them. Police entered and cannot prove it was legal? Pay fine, repair damage. At the same time lower the bar for personal liability for the officers: Can’t demonstrate that they did at least the basic due diligence? Pay out of their own pocket.
> Now, if you’d really want to dissuade the police from making illegal raids...
Why not both?
I don't think it's necessarily wise for a homeowner to open fire when outnumbered like that, but it's their right to make that choice when armed intruders break into their home. (And really without the whole knock, announcement, warrant thing the home owner doesn't know the intruders are police.) Making this clear shouldn't exclude these other excellent ideas.
The police dont pay fines or repair anything - tax payers do. But cops do enter the houses where they might find someone that answers fire. Only the latter is a dissuasive.
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, "The only way to stop a bad guy from swatting you is a good guy with his own personal SWAT team."
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
There's evidence the framers of the Constitution intended for citizens to be able to own weapons that gave the federal government pause if the federal government decided to overstep its bounds.
Specifically, even in 1787 it was seeming likely that there was a good chance that at some point the federal government was going to abolish slavery by force, and the framers of the Constitution needed the southern states on board with the Constitution's stronger central government vs. the Articles of Confederation.
So, they probably intended weapons of some proportionate power compared to contemporary military weapons, but the ultimate underlying motivations are suspect.
On the other hand, I could imagine a world where in 1787 alcohol and/or marijuana were legal in some states and illegal in others and the framers were worried about federal troops imposing national drug policy on drugs that never crossed state lines. In that case, it seems more reasonable, which I guess lends respectability to their reasoning at a medium level of abstraction.
And yet those same people you mock, using only the tools you described, threw off the yoke of the largest world power at the time.
Amongst the reasons they did, were situations eerily similar to what we call "swatting" (and no-knock warrants), which were some motivations behind the fourth amendment.
An amendment that we have, through twisted legal interpretations and arguments for expediency, managed to largely de-fang (civil forfeiture, I'm looking at you).
He graduated top of his class in the Navy Seals and was involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, with over 300 confirmed kills. I think he knows what’s up.
The funny thing is, while "to protect yourself from government tyranny" is the favorite phrase of gun enthusiasts and gun lobbies in this country, whenever a citizen uses a gun in justifiable defense against police (the most recent notable one being Breonna Taylor's case) these same people side with the police every time.
This is inaccurate. I know many people on both sides of the gun debate and I don't know a single person who doesn't want police reform regarding no-knock raids. I don't know a single gun owner who supports the police in the Breonna Taylor incident.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of "protect yourself from government tyranny" types want to massively curtail police powers.
> The overwhelmingly vast majority of "protect yourself from government tyranny" types want to massively curtail police powers
I find this hard to believe. Back the blue, blue lives matter, thin blue line people are propagated by gun enthusiasts who use nice slogans like “government tyranny” to justify their positions in a shallow and emotional way. There’s no actual belief in government tyranny, otherwise they wouldn’t stand with the law enforcement arm of the government’s elevated agents.
You seem to be saying that if the majority of "back the blue" folks are gun enthusiasts, that means the majority of gun enthusiasts are "back the blue" folks. I'm not sure if either is true, but if it were, you still couldn't infer one from the other.
Some politicians have staked themselves on this issue publicly. Can't recall the name, but a GOP candidate explicitly said that he would shoot the police if the entered with a no-knock warrant into his home.
One challenge is that citizens side with the police in court.
I have a few questions about the relevance of this.
> 1.2 guns per citizen
After 1 gun, do guns truly become more dangerous? For someone opening a door, I don't think handgun vs AR vs shotgun is a very meaningful distinction - you're going to die if you get shot in the face
> loaded up to the gills
Isn't it true that one of the top arguments used against gun control that criminals will have the weapons anyways?
Therefore, as a LEO being summoned to a potential crime scene, isn't it true that they would behave in accordance with the person being a potential criminal, and therefore living outside of "guns per citizen" statistics? And therefore isn't the global approach to SWATting likely done without respect to the local environment, but instead in accordance with best practices of deescalation and safety?
I look forward to hearing you expand your thoughts.
It's best to look at households because children generally don't own their own gun, and often if there is a couple, only one of them will own a gun (usually the man).
44% of US households have at least one firearm in the house.
Not "a small group".
In terms of individuals of all ages, it's 32% of all individuals owning guns -- 45% of all men own a gun but only 19% of all women own a gun.
Therefore the population where it's unusual to own a gun is single women. Single men are also less likely to own a gun than married men.
If we look at those who are married, 52% of all married couples live in a household with guns.
You mean 44% of Americans have more like 3 guns, by the official record, which vaguely addresses my weakest point I suppose. Not sure this does anything to justify the US approach to policing
Ammunition is tightly controlled in Switzerland as far as I understand. Having guns is not that helpful without some ammunition. Most people are not going to be prepared to produce ammunition
You need a permit to buy ammunition in Switzerland, just as you need a permit to buy guns. But the permit is available if you do not have a criminal record. Ammunition is not more tightly controlled than guns, both are controlled, but not as tightly as in places like New York or California in the U.S.
There are also government subsidized shooting ranges that do not require these permits.
Buying guns requires a permit (and a background check and maybe a chat with the local police department) but to buy ammunition in Switzerland you don't need a permit. Just a clean background check that you can request online.
I’m unsure why people think this is true. If you have the ability to buy a gun in Switzerland you can buy any amount of ammo just as easily.
The difference is strong regulations disallowing carrying/transporting loaded weapons and enforcing storage requirements as well as a very different gun culture without the emphasis on handguns for self-protection.
As for Switzerland: "military service is required; and military firearms are kept in homes—which historians credit for Germany never invading Switzerland during World War II."
Far smaller population than the USA, and loads more variables to consider when comparing the two. But at least one country gets it pretty Damn Right with Guns!
You're suggesting that police officers would face a significant danger merely knocking on the door of a gun owner's home, which is silly. Just because someone has a gun doesn't mean they're going to unload on anyone knocking on their door, much less a uniformed police officer.
Also: 2/3rds of Americans don't own a gun, and only 44% even live in a house with a gun.
Ever notice that only in a very small number of cases does a "swatting" result in any danger to the officers, such as the homeowner shooting an officer? The number of times this has happened is in the single digits. Hint: that's because there's little danger to police responding to these sorts of calls.
In fact, there's very little danger to police officers in the US, period. They have a murder rate lower than the general population, because people know that cops don't give a shit about when you or I are murdered (nation-wide the clearance rate for homicides is abysmal, one of the lowest in the developed world) but if a cop is killed, the killer will be correctly identified, found, and arrested within hours.
Being a cop in the US doesn't even rank in the top ten in terms of deaths on the job. Retail workers and cab drivers have a far higher homicide-on-the-job rate;
Pre-COVID the #1 killer of police, overwhelmingly, was traffic collisions, suicide, and heart disease.
During/after COVID, the #1 killer, despite police getting first-in-line access to the vaccine, was/is COVID. Completely preventable.
The reason these "swattings" are so dangerous is because police show up expecting a dangerous situation, confrontation, even though it's incredibly rare.
Stopping the swatter doesn't do much, and still allows for people to be swatted.
The thing that needs an overhaul is the decision making on when to actually send out the swat team. It's lazy, expensive, and dangerous to send them out for every opportunity without any investigation
It doesn't mean a literal SWAT team any more. Many departments have truly gone overkill with their everyday gear and tactics, and many of those that don't still seem SWAT-like. I would argue that the SFPD are usually relatively low key, but they now carry around night sticks which seem pretty bad ass, but are really meant to be an alternative to deadlier force.
That won't happen because cops love any excuse they can get to dress up, play with their shiny toys/weapons and crack some skulls while accruing overtime pay. We can't trust them to regulate themselves.
The overhaul we need is community oversight, community decision making and community policing.
Sure but the ultimate perpetrator of the violence in these cases is the police. We can solve the swatting problem and other serious problems simultaneously by stopping the police from bursting in to peoples homes with guns blazing and other unnecessary behaviors.
Specifically police need to learn about time, distance, and cover. Arrive on the scene and take cover a safe distance away from the perceived threat. Take time to identify the perceived threat and confirm they are really a danger. Only then should they attempt to deal with the threat if it actually proves to be one. This would have saved the life of Tamir Rice, a harmless child who was shot by a police officer who had not even finished stopping his car when he shot and killed the unarmed 12 year old. This would have saved the life of 22 year old John Crawford III who was shot by a police officer at WalMart. Crawford had picked up an un-packaged BB gun and then continued shopping. Someone misunderstood the situation and called the police. When officers arrived they ignored the lack of distress among other customers which should have been present, and fired shots at Crawford almost immediately upon entering the store.
There are many accounts like this. Police behavior leads to many unnecessary deaths and swatting is only a threat because of police failing to assess a situation firsthand.
If I call the cops because some armed gunman is breaking into my house, I don’t want them to send some unarmed patrolman to politely knock on my door and check whether everything is okay.
By the time you make that call, regardless of who responds, you'll be dead OR the gunman will have what they want. Home invasions rarely result in hostage situations.
You haven't seen US houses. They call them McMansions for a reason. The intruders will still be searching the third hallway to nowhere while I'm comfortably calling the police from my summertime reading nook.
If the authorities are too slow to respond they get crucified (extreme case: Uvalde, Texas school shooting earlier this year where the cops sat paralyzed while children were actively being murdered by a gunman).
I don't like the five-oh but going the route you're proposing will make some instances much worse with avoidable loss of life.
I don't think that's a good comparison. That was 100+ cops standing around while kids were being shot. How often do swat type all out assaults from cops into buildings save people? They are rare. The cops add risk more than they save risk from attackers.
In this case, there is a demonstrated and repeated danger from these swatting attacks. They don't have proper risk management in the police forces of the us, as demonstrated by swatting killing people. The authorities being too slow is not a demonstrated problem, it's the opposite.
This is an extremely poor example that further illustrates the murderous recklessness of swat teams. The fact that there was a shooter at Uvalde was obvious upon arriving at the scene. Meanwhile, a traditional swat involves a completely innocuous house with no apparent hostiles, because there aren't any hostiles, and yet deaths still occur because of the recklessness of the swat teams. Imagine if you had a school with no shooter and a false report; would the swat teams burst through the windows and start mowing down students at random? Unthinkable, yes?
Are you proposing a mechanism by which this decision can reliably be made? If not I'm not sure you're asking for something reasonable. The first person who dies because the police were too slow or too weak to respond will cause as much outrage as what you express here.
Well yes, if there are gunshots or similar sounds indicating urgent entry is needed then do so, otherwise maybe knock on the door. People die all the time because police don't intervene, there was even a Supreme Court ruling that found that police have no duty to intervene to save your life. The least they can do is not rashly toss an incendiary device through your window or into your child's crib[1].
Every officer on the scene at Uvalde knew there was a shooter in the classroom. Gunshots had been heard by people on the scene. Eyewitnesses on the scene had seen a shooter entering with weapons. Children in the classroom were calling in from their phones.
If the only information police had was a phone call from an anonymous VOIP number, then they'd be comparable.
The police were following a shooter as he entered the school. The police knew there was a shooter in the school the second the shooter walked through the door.
There is a middle ground between, for example the shooting of Tamir Rice, where the officer shot and killed this innocent 12 year old boy before his police car had even come to a stop, and Uvalde where police stood around for an hour. Police should take time to observe the situation (this could be 30 seconds), take cover a safe distance away (this was not done with Tamir Rice), confirm the threat is real, attempt to de-escalate, and shoot only if necessary. We see in many cases police burst on to the scene and shoot almost immediately, and this leads to unnecessary death.
Uvalde probably would have gone down better without a swat team because the beat cops actually would have gone in when they got there if they knew they didn't have backup to wait for.
Why does the claim that a police presence is needed somewhere result in the death of innocent people? Why are the police prepared for war when visiting someone's residence? What situation, time and time again, can possibly justify this kind of repeated response?
Put in another, more unpleasant way, how many innocent deaths are worth one police officer death, because law enforcement justifies this due to (truly existent, but I think extremely overstated) danger inherent in the job.
But I think any rational mind can perceive it's way too far skewed in one direction.
It already is considered attempted murder by some localities. The issue is usually catching the swatter. They often use anonymous VOIP services and voice changers (if they are even in the same country as the target), so it is effectively impossible to track them down.
The question is: why is it possible to place a 911 call without all that information being laid bare before the dispatcher and logged. There are extraordinary regulations on carriers for E911, and thus a means to impose that requirement.
This is a problem created and continued by phone companies. It wasn’t a huge problem before VoIP because the phone company networks didn’t allow everyone to forge sender info (SS7, not CallerID). When VoIP came along they didn’t put strict authentication in because it would have cost more, and that really opened things up.
Right now, you could have extra caution for 911 calls which originate from VoIP. Pass a law that in five years telco CEOs are charged as assisting murder the next time a SWATing happens and they’d magically discover that egress filtering is easy to implement once you’re not looking at the revenue generated by spammers.
Sounds easy, but I think you'll find that in practice, it's not so easy to just toss around murder (or accessory to murder) charges because something annoys you. Even if it annoys you a lot. It's a slippery slope from that to making basically anything a "murder" charge. Not saying you can't pass some sort of law or create some sort of penalty, but murder-related charges aren't going to fly.
First, it’s a thought exercise - people are talking like this some unavoidable fact of nature when it’s largely unique to the United States where we have the combination of heavily armed cops with poor trigger discipline and a phone system which is increasingly useless because the companies were allowed to prioritize revenue over security.
Second, you can argue anything will be a slippery slope (you should hear what people say raising the capital gains rate 1% will do) but it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend there’s no distinction between contributing to a violence death and “basically anything”. Operating critical safety infrastructure should carry responsibilities beyond the average business.
Slippery-slope fallacies are bad to use, it's a slippery-slope to literally anything being called a "slippery-slope" to literally anything else. Eating beans causes more vandalism? Slippery slope! Poodles with weird haircuts cause global warming? Slippery-slope!
Because the system has to fail safe. If there's a network glitch or somebody is using a bottom-tier pay-as-you-go mobile or a cheap-ass VOIP phone, they still need to be able to call for an ambulance, a fire truck, or the police.
It’s calling a branch of the government and describing a situation involving imminent or ongoing violence which the government is expected (though not legally obligated) to respond to.
It's one thing that it happens, but the fact that it is being normalised is what's truly repugnant. 'Swatting' someone in Britain does not cause any deaths.
I hope that one day we can trust cops not to murder people based on anonymous phoned-in tips. Seems more rational than expecting random marginal people and the mentally ill to care about some draconian penalty for something they don't think they're likely to get caught for.
As far as I can tell from this report, no-one was shot at, so maybe the correction is already being made. On the other hand, I would not mind those who still find swatting appealing to be presented with plenty of time to develop some form of maturity before they are in a position to repeat. It's not like these are contradictory goals.
Proving attempted murder is very difficult, but "SWATting" already falls under the broad umbrella of 'assault'. It seems like the police are likely guilty of criminal negligence as well.
Genuinely curious: What is the crime if I shoot a gun at a house knowing that it is occupied?it seems obvious that if I kill an occupant it would be murder, but what happens if I don’t?
Not a lawyer, but if you intentionally shoot a gun at somebody and miss, that's attempted murder. Just because there's a house in the way doesn't change that, if the prosecutor wants to play it that way.
In places where there are strong gun laws, like Queensland, you have offences relating to the weapon, separate laws for damaging the building and circumstances of aggravation if you do some real damage with risk of loss of life
WEAPONS ACT 1990 - SECT 78 Weapons not to be discharged or operated - a fine- but also usually, a range of offences related to use, possession, storage of the weapon and ammunition
CRIMINAL CODE 1899 - SECT 69
Going armed so as to cause fear
(1) Any person who goes armed in public without lawful occasion in such a manner as to cause fear to any person is guilty of a misdemeanour, and is liable to imprisonment for 2 years.
469 Wilful damage
(1) Any person who wilfully and unlawfully destroys or damages any property is guilty of an offence which, unless otherwise stated, is a misdemeanour, and the person is liable, if no other punishment is provided, to imprisonment for 5 years.
Punishment in special cases
1 Destroying or damaging premises by explosion
If—
(a) the property in question is premises; and
(b) the destruction or damage is caused by an explosion; and
(c) either—
(i) anyone is in or on the premises when the explosion happens; or
(ii) the destruction or damage actually endangers anyone’s life;
the offender commits a crime.
Penalty—
Maximum penalty—life imprisonment.
but what you will find is that this sort of activity rarely happens randomly- usually there is a relationship between the victim and the attacker- so something related to stalking, extortion (demanding money with menaces) etc. And those all carry heavy possible penalties. (5 years, 7 years etc)
> Whoever discharges a firearm as defined in section one hundred and twenty-one of chapter one hundred and forty, a rifle or shotgun within five hundred feet of a dwelling or other building in use, except with the consent of the owner or legal occupant thereof, shall be punished by a fine of not less than fifty nor more than one hundred dollars or by imprisonment in a jail or house of correction for not more than three months, or both.
This is the law that would definitely apply. Interestingly, it appears that there is a bill before the state legislature that would cover specifically shooting at a dwelling (with intent to hit it), which would carry 5 years/$10k fine.
Depending on particular fact patterns, it might fall under attempted murder, reckless endangerment, or other charge in a similar vein. This sort of stuff tends to be extremely jursidiction-dependent.
It might not be murder if you shoot a gun at an occupied house; it could be manslaughter, the laws vary by jurisdiction.
One definition (there are many) of assault is as follows: "... the intentional application of force upon another person, directly or indirectly, without the other person’s consent. Classified as a criminal act, it can and will be tried in court."
There is indeed a substantial risk with police, but I think it would set a bad precedent to say that death is an expected outcome of being SWATted. Reckless endangerment would be more appropriate. From a quick glance on Wikipedia it has death as a likely outcome, not an expected one like with attempted murder.
Here in Australia the incarceration rate of men vs women is about 12.5 : 1
So I'd guess the answer to your question is something like: for the same reasons that men commit the overwhelming majority of violent crime, which probably has something to do with evolution and testosterone and culture.
Interesting, I always loosely considered the Bath, Michigan incident the first “shooting” though it was actually a bombing, more so Mass School Violence.
I think it’s some kind of subculture, not sure whether women ever do it though but I suspect gaming to be somewhat involved, mainly shooting/war games where boys/men are in larger numbers
That seems excessive. I would consider swatting lesser than attempted voluntary manslaughter which carries a maximum 10 year federal sentence. It’s also typically prosecuted at the state level, which kinda messes things up for the Feds. Reckless endangerment feels more appropriate, perhaps a bit too soft at 2 years maximum, though it is rarely prosecuted at the federal level. So 5 years maximum for the federal conspiracy charges seems basically in-line with any reasonable expectation.
Attempted manslaughter is a federal crime? This doesn't sound right to me, as a (former) lawyer. I would think that special circumstances would be necessary for a homicide or attempted homicide to be a federal crime, which would explain why there might be a mandatory minimum.
Yes, 18 U.S. C. § 1113. The special circumstances can be as simple as breaking another Federal law while committing manslaughter. Of course the Feds would much rather stick to prosecuting crimes that don’t overlap state laws.
The section you cite appears to only apply to crimes committed "within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States", which is defined here [1]. By my reading, it does not include crimes committed inside of US states. It is limited to ships, areas outside of other countries, and various other places. Am I missing something?
Also, it doesn't require a 10 year sentence — it refers to "not more than seven years or fined under this title, or both.". [2] That literally means that no prison time is required. There is a cap on prison time, and it could be completely eliminated if a fine is given instead. Not exactly harsh treatment!
> The section you cite appears to only apply to crimes committed "within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States", which is defined here [1]. By my reading, it does not include crimes committed inside of US states. It is limited to ships, areas outside of other countries, and various other places. Am I missing something?
It applies to land in states that is owned by the US government, which can include a lot of land thought of as inside states (national parks and military bases are the goto examples here). If you want real fun, try working out which law applies when you're on tribal land.
It’s not. The premeditated part gets you “voluntary” but the activity they chose to engage in carries only a very minor risk of death. They haven’t set out to kill somebody.
No. If I drive to a random house and start shooting at it, I don’t get to call that reckless endangerment. If I kill someone I sure as hell don’t get to call it an accident.
It does not matter if you think how is police operate is unreasonable, what matters is that what they do is well known and established, and the outcome is foreseeable.
Also, if your best defense is “this isn’t attempted murder, it’s just terrorism” I have questions.
Your analogy doesn’t hold because it’s a very different crime with very different intent and culpability.
I’m simply pointing to the most similar Federal crimes and pointing out that the sentences are proportional. For comparison, Federal attempted murder-to-hire is only 10 years and that’s clearly a much worse crime.
Tragically there’s now over 1000 cases of swatting per year. Only one person (Andrew Finch) has been killed by police. (The swatter in this case was charged with involuntary manslaughter and got 20 years in jail).
It’s not comparable to murder because it’s much more likely that someone would be killed by you offering them a ride in your car than by swatting them.
>It’s not comparable to murder because it’s much more likely that someone would be killed by you offering them a ride in your car than by swatting them.
My car rides don't come with a 0.1% chance of death. I'm not that bad of a driver.
If I drive 1 trip per day, a 0.1% chance of death on each trip means I would only survive 3 years on average. And I take more than 1 trip per day. Most people live much more than 3 years, so the risk is certainly less than 0.1% per trip.
Let's calculate it. There were 42,915 traffic deaths in the US in 2021.[1]
Americans take 411 billion trips per year.[2]
That's 42915/411000000000 = 0.00001% chance of death per trip. So a driving trip is 10000x safer than being swatted.
>Surely if the caller is getting charged with attempt to murder, then the SWAT doing the swatting should be charged with the same crime?
The SWAT team didn't intend to hurt innocent people. They thought they were saving innocent people. The swatter was intentionally terrorizing innocent people.
What you just said is "if someone falsely accuses another person of a crime, and the police arrest them, then the police are guilty of kidnapping", "if someone falsely reports a house fire and fire fighters break into the house to put it out, they are guilty of breaking and entering", etc.
Emergency services respond to the reported emergency, for SWAT that often involves an immediate threat to people's lives, so they come in with the expectation that they will need to use force. Now the increasing occurrence of swatting means that US swat teams should be aware of the possibility of false call outs, but they have to deal with "is this a case where me turning up results in someone killing their family if I don't stop them immediately, or is it a case where some dude on the internet doesn't like someone else?".
The whole point of a swatting is police are being told that the victim is has a gun and is threatening to kill people, which is effective because you get the same call when there is an actual person with a gun threatening to kill people.
Now US SWAT does have an issue (imo) that goes with US policing in general of putting safety of police/swat above anyone else, which is a real issue, but as everyone knows this it merely adds to the "you knew your actions had a significant likelihood of getting someone killed".
I mean yes, cops are mostly above the law, and in the US they definitely murder enough (disproportionately PoC) people without consequences to be a problem.
But in this case police are being told their are people with guns threatening to kill people, which is exactly the case where police are ostensibly justified in using force.
Police killing a swatting victim is meaningfully difference from police making up a fake claims to get a warrant, breaking down a door without notice, and then shooting at anyone who moves, or pulling someone over, asking if they have a gun, and then shooting them if they say yes, etc
