> On Aug. 3, 2022, one officer sent a memo to the acting police captain requesting the couple's home be marked as a "swatter house." The captain declined, saying it could cause a "complacency issue for responding officers.”
You'd think they'd be more concerned about constantly wasting time and resources to constantly send out SWAT to some random couple's house twice a week.
I think they'll just take any excuse to LARP as soldiers, play with guns, and bully people. They know they don't have to worry about facing any consequences for their actions so they can do whatever they like.
> Exclusive body camera video obtained by TMJ4 shows officers arriving at the couple's home on multiple occasions, even as both officers and the couple acknowledged the calls were fake.
> In one exchange captured on body camera, an officer can be heard telling a colleague, "This guy keeps getting swatted." In another, a body camera recording from inside a squad car captures an officer describing the address as "a known swatting location."
> Despite that awareness, officers continued to respond, at times with a full tactical presence. Body camera video shows one officer pointed a gun at the couple's door on their fourth response in a single day.
I think they should be more concerned with public safety. If the couple asks them to stop, maybe but if they are slow to respond to those calls because of the history, they're going to get skewered when a real call comes in.
So many replies here are blaming the police but despite how screwed up the situation is there isn’t much they can do. Not responding to a swat call is not really an option with the way the system is setup.
We can all say “well, if you get many calls about one location, maybe you should stop showing up” but wtf are you supposed to do if a real crime is being committed? The same couple getting swatted one day could get criminals breaking in another, possibly for the same reason even. How can you make the call not to show up if your entire existence and role in society is to show up?
What real solutions are there?
Edit: a bunch of identical responses to this comment with "just don't show up". I know it's easy to sit and judge from the comfort of your keyboard, but do a little bit of thinking. What should the rule be? When is it okay for police to receive a distress call and not show up in actual reality with actual lives at stake? Who's responsible for the consequences of not showing up?
This is an amazing top comment. Like maybe almost anything. So many better options. For one if I were the subject of this harassment I would prefer the cops to never come.
At some point, the responding local police should be held criminally liable. A tiny brass badge should not shield you from having to comply with society's laws.
> At some point, the responding local police should be held criminally liable.
At some point, the people doing the "swatting" (false police call) should be held criminally liable, maybe even for attempted murder by cop. There's definitely a crime being committed there. I'm 100% sure that calling the cops on someone and making a false report is against at least one or two (or maybe even several) laws.
The cops are accomplices and need to be prosecuted now. There’s no need to wait until forever for the cops to track down the false reporters providing them with an excuse to live out their sadistic fantasies and terrorize ordinary citizens.
I'm guessing the calls were anonymous, and the police didn't bother tracing the numbers.
Which does raise the question: why is it SOP for the police to send a SWAT team to a random house based on nothing but an anonymous phone call? At the very least it should take some kind of statement from an actual identified human who can be held accountable if it turns out to be a hoax.
Um, no. In a high trust society "swatting" would not be a thing--because people would understand that it's a huge violation of trust. And people who did make hoax calls like this would suffer severe punishment--because that's what a high trust society has to do to people who violate trust like that, in order to stay high trust.
> Act now (to reduce potential loss of life)
Not necessarily, since SWAT teams are generally not noted for their restraint--certainly not if their response on swatting call number 55 to the same house is the same as it was for call number 1.
> and verify later
Okay, let's say this is valid for call number 1. Still, what about call number 2 to the same house? Let alone call number 55? Especially when the owner of the house produces evidence that people had threatened to swat him?
So no, we do not have the kind of society where your logic makes sense; the rare cases where the quick knee jerk response actually prevents harm are more than overwhelmed by the much more common cases where it's a false alarm but the police keep on violating innocent people's rights anyway.
Having that badge should cause you to be held to a higher level of accountability. Abusing the power given to you by being an officer should mean getting much more severe consequences.
This is primarily a failure of the police, but second place goes to data brokers and anyone who collects unnecessary data and doesn't secure it. A flood of personal information already leaks illegally through cybercrime and companies not protecting data, and we haven't even stopped the huge legal industry of public-info data brokers. You shouldn't be able to look up an email or phone number and get someone's family and address.
The powers that be like phone numbers because they're like a medium-level KYC. In many countries getting a phone number requires ID, and there was a recent proposal to do that in the US. Of course swatting and spam are used as excuses to introduce KYC requirements, but those problems are endemic to phone numbers, and more identity verification just causes more leaks, which gives them excuses to require more KYC.
My idea for replacing phone numbers and email: SimpleX for calls and texts (no accounts and therefore the least PII possible), and Monero micropayments for spam prevention. Most people spend way more on their wireless plan then they'd need to spend in Monero to make the initial connection, for publicly posted SimpleX links.
There's so many common sense, bipartisan things like those. A few are are uncapping the house, a federal holiday for election day, stock trading ban for politicians, data broker loophole, warrant requirement for your data on service providers.
I fear to think about where we would be without the constitution considering how authoritarian law enforcement is in the US. It's definitely lacking, but I am still grateful for it.
It's the CBC reporting on it in here, but the location was Milwaukee.
> Patrick Tomlinson and Niki Robinson awarded $575K US settlement from City of Milwaukee
> ...
> It was 1 a.m. on July 25, 2022, and someone had reported a hostage situation at his house in Milwaukee, where he lives with his wife, Niki Robinson.
> ...
> Over the course of the next two and a half years, Tomlinson and Robinson were swatted 55 times, despite repeatedly explaining their situation to the Milwaukee Police Department. They sued, and have been awarded a $575,000 US settlement from the City of Milwaukee.
The problem seems to be that a certain tribe of always online far-right leaning sociopaths have decided MacDonald is one of them.
He wasn't.
I am being charitable with this assessment, too.
MacDonald was extremely funny, even if you were liberal. His comedy was not political, and maybe that is kind of the appeal to conservative leaning people - some kind of "retro" appeal. If you are wondering what I am getting at, read the book, "The Compleat Practical Joker" from 1953.
I'm a huge Norm fan. Having watched his many interviews, seen and listened to his stand-up, seen his podcast and netflix show many times, I can say that he was clearly quite conservative, though not a bigot or hateful.
There's also more to the story here. Not that it's in any way justified, bur this guy's wasn't targeted only because he tweeted about Norm Macdonald.
55 times over two years, so basically every two weeks on average?
At what point do the officials involved in this become involved with the criminal harassment themselves? At what point is it legal / acceptable (though unwise) to shoot the armed men entering your house?
Norm Macdonald would be telling this as a joke and laughing from his grave if it wasn't a tragedy.. It is not April!
" he wrote on Twitter, now X: “Hot take: I’ve never found Norm Macdonald funny and was pretty sure all my comedy friends who did were either nuts or screwing with me."
"Two weeks later, here I am, you know, on my front porch in the middle of the night, exposed to all my neighbours with shxtgxns......... pointed at my head."
You'd think they'd be more concerned about constantly wasting time and resources to constantly send out SWAT to some random couple's house twice a week.
> Exclusive body camera video obtained by TMJ4 shows officers arriving at the couple's home on multiple occasions, even as both officers and the couple acknowledged the calls were fake.
> In one exchange captured on body camera, an officer can be heard telling a colleague, "This guy keeps getting swatted." In another, a body camera recording from inside a squad car captures an officer describing the address as "a known swatting location."
> Despite that awareness, officers continued to respond, at times with a full tactical presence. Body camera video shows one officer pointed a gun at the couple's door on their fourth response in a single day.
We can all say “well, if you get many calls about one location, maybe you should stop showing up” but wtf are you supposed to do if a real crime is being committed? The same couple getting swatted one day could get criminals breaking in another, possibly for the same reason even. How can you make the call not to show up if your entire existence and role in society is to show up?
What real solutions are there?
Edit: a bunch of identical responses to this comment with "just don't show up". I know it's easy to sit and judge from the comfort of your keyboard, but do a little bit of thinking. What should the rule be? When is it okay for police to receive a distress call and not show up in actual reality with actual lives at stake? Who's responsible for the consequences of not showing up?
You say that as if most of the world doesn’t get by just fine without any militarized SWAT law enforcement units whatsoever…
How about: Track down and identify the person making these calls?
And because their entire existence is to show up, you have a conflict of interests on how you answer the call.
[An old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee.]
At some point, the people doing the "swatting" (false police call) should be held criminally liable, maybe even for attempted murder by cop. There's definitely a crime being committed there. I'm 100% sure that calling the cops on someone and making a false report is against at least one or two (or maybe even several) laws.
Which does raise the question: why is it SOP for the police to send a SWAT team to a random house based on nothing but an anonymous phone call? At the very least it should take some kind of statement from an actual identified human who can be held accountable if it turns out to be a hoax.
Act now (to reduce potential loss of life) and verify later
Um, no. In a high trust society "swatting" would not be a thing--because people would understand that it's a huge violation of trust. And people who did make hoax calls like this would suffer severe punishment--because that's what a high trust society has to do to people who violate trust like that, in order to stay high trust.
> Act now (to reduce potential loss of life)
Not necessarily, since SWAT teams are generally not noted for their restraint--certainly not if their response on swatting call number 55 to the same house is the same as it was for call number 1.
> and verify later
Okay, let's say this is valid for call number 1. Still, what about call number 2 to the same house? Let alone call number 55? Especially when the owner of the house produces evidence that people had threatened to swat him?
So no, we do not have the kind of society where your logic makes sense; the rare cases where the quick knee jerk response actually prevents harm are more than overwhelmed by the much more common cases where it's a false alarm but the police keep on violating innocent people's rights anyway.
The powers that be like phone numbers because they're like a medium-level KYC. In many countries getting a phone number requires ID, and there was a recent proposal to do that in the US. Of course swatting and spam are used as excuses to introduce KYC requirements, but those problems are endemic to phone numbers, and more identity verification just causes more leaks, which gives them excuses to require more KYC.
My idea for replacing phone numbers and email: SimpleX for calls and texts (no accounts and therefore the least PII possible), and Monero micropayments for spam prevention. Most people spend way more on their wireless plan then they'd need to spend in Monero to make the initial connection, for publicly posted SimpleX links.
I fear to think about where we would be without the constitution considering how authoritarian law enforcement is in the US. It's definitely lacking, but I am still grateful for it.
> Patrick Tomlinson and Niki Robinson awarded $575K US settlement from City of Milwaukee
> ...
> It was 1 a.m. on July 25, 2022, and someone had reported a hostage situation at his house in Milwaukee, where he lives with his wife, Niki Robinson.
> ...
> Over the course of the next two and a half years, Tomlinson and Robinson were swatted 55 times, despite repeatedly explaining their situation to the Milwaukee Police Department. They sued, and have been awarded a $575,000 US settlement from the City of Milwaukee.
---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHkRgfYmLrE for the local news (TMJ4) three weeks ago.
shockingly mild
…i was expecting something significantly more incendiary.
He wasn't.
I am being charitable with this assessment, too.
MacDonald was extremely funny, even if you were liberal. His comedy was not political, and maybe that is kind of the appeal to conservative leaning people - some kind of "retro" appeal. If you are wondering what I am getting at, read the book, "The Compleat Practical Joker" from 1953.
There's also more to the story here. Not that it's in any way justified, bur this guy's wasn't targeted only because he tweeted about Norm Macdonald.
At what point do the officials involved in this become involved with the criminal harassment themselves? At what point is it legal / acceptable (though unwise) to shoot the armed men entering your house?
This happened between July 25 of 2022 and (I believe) April of 2023.
The lawsuit is at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68293540/robinson-v-cit... and April is the last charge listed in the initial complaint. That's 35 weeks, not 104.
" he wrote on Twitter, now X: “Hot take: I’ve never found Norm Macdonald funny and was pretty sure all my comedy friends who did were either nuts or screwing with me." "Two weeks later, here I am, you know, on my front porch in the middle of the night, exposed to all my neighbours with shxtgxns......... pointed at my head."
I didn’t even know he was sick.