You could get 10 year olds to make these calls for you and there would be no legal repercussions.
replies(2):
I suspect you are probably right about the timeline for swatting as shady VoIP providers started getting popular in the early 2000's and started being used for more than just spoofing text advertisements.
Aside from that, people who do so are despicable. 20 years is a light sentence. Taking money to put people in situations that could easily become deadly.
It'll happen when pigs fly.
Receiving an anonymous call claiming some not-particularly-plausible threat at a particular location probably DOES deserve a police investigation. I see no reason why it impels police to drag people from their house in chains, threaten to shoot them, or actually shoot them.
If police responses were reasonable and proportionate to the plausibility of the threat then swatters would not be able to use them as a weapon.
> Prosecutors say the ... teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response”, and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.
I don't think this is pranks. I had an antisocial stint in my late teens also and it was more about gaining some power over a world that wants to treat you like a cog. I bet it wasn't even about the money (at least it wasn't for me) it's just that having a "hussle" is a persona that you can wear if you want to focus somewhere besides the consequences of your actions.
But they seem to have decided this is the least bad option. They have a duty to respond to serious phone calls about armed situations.
The main issue is the insecurity of the old telecom system where spoofing is so easy. But we're heavily invested in it as a society.
When Caller ID became the norm, it completely ruined phone pranks like this.
> from approximately August 2022 to January 2024, Filion made more than 375 swatting and threat calls, including calls in which he claimed to have planted bombs in the targeted locations or threatened to detonate bombs and/or conduct mass shootings at those locations.
( from https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-teenager-pleads-gu... )
"Swatting" isn't really a thing in Germany, but we've always had other disproportionate responses to single phone calls. One call (or even an email) that threatens to blow up the air port, or some particular air plane, and it's shut down for hours until they've looked in all the places you could hide a serious bomb (presumably, I have no idea what their "okay, I guess it was a hoax" signal is).
But what's the alternative when somebody plausibly describes a situation that indicates someone is in extreme danger? Send out a single cruiser the next day to check out what was up?
Swatting wouldn't even be a thing if <any number of logical things>
- Anonymous calls should be treated with high levels of suspicion as to their legitimacy
- First response training that's even moderately appropriate
- Situational awareness beyond what one's been informed by third parties
- Empathy for all humans
- Any kind of notion of that a scenario may not actually be as described by a single anonymous voice
A very (un)funny irony is that there are numerous stories I've read about domestic violence victims being arrested, as opposed to the attacker, which implies there's some level of suspicion in some circumstances about the information the police are being fed. Swatting, as a thing, indicates there's some kind of hero-pressure build-up that overrules any kind of <all the things I listed above> whereby that pressure has the possibility of impending release.
It feels like between this and the prevalence of scam calls, the FCC has been asleep at the wheel for 20 years. There's some signs of the "sleeping dragon" waking up, but I fear all that will get walked back under the next administration.
Bonus good read on the topic:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/02/why-arent-police-doi...
"Love of the game", Jesus Christ.
Cops kill people on the basis of ludicrous anonymous phone call because they know they'll get away with it when it turns out to be false.
And they like it that way.
There needs to be a few very public cases of entire SWAT teams getting 20 year sentences.
ACAB
I don’t think we could have intentionally created an incentive structure for swatting more if we had tried.
And it’s going to continue because guess what was one of the major issues in this election? Domestic security!
One must not result in, or be able to cause, the other.
Let's say we have to deal with the fact that they do co-exist and interact. Maybe there should be additional protection and safeguards, and if there are some (which there probably are), don't stop there until the percentage of illegitimate calls is below a certain threshold.
And maybe it is already below a certain threshold, and I'm getting all hot under the collar about an incredibly rare scenario. Maybe it's better than it was. 20-year sentences should go part-way to reducing the frequency.
I'm mostly on the side of "letting a guilty person walk free is better than imprisoning (or arresting or shooting to death or even just violating the freedoms of) an innocent person".
Same way as the US is the only nation in the world where it's impossible to prevent weekly school mass shootings.
When you try and point this out, you're called various names, because apparently you either support the police 100%, or you're a criminal.
I've heard of reports of domestic violence, child molestation, things like that, and it's always the same. They rush to the place, knock on the door, look around, and arrest the people they need to arrest. What they don't do is start shooting.
Treat calls that don't have the hallmarks of an emergency as "maybe not an emergency" - I admit that sounds simplistic and requires heavy training, however.
But my commentary was more about the gung-ho-ness of the follow-up. Don't houses have windows that aren't always blocked by drawn curtains? Don't binoulars exist and are relatively portable? Aren't there relatively quick and painless methods to adjudicate a situation prior to knocking impolitely? Even if time may be of the essence. One day maybe the heavy knock on the door is a trigger that blows up an entire Police / SWAT response team - then there might be some new policies around situatonal awareness instituted. (not that I would in any way promote such a grotesque act of violence).
The police are putting themselves in danger by their own behaviour.
Re: Trump assassination attempt, wouldn't that have been averted if someone just "went and had a look"?
I disagree.
The main issue is qualified immunity.
The phone companies never killed anybody in a SWAT raid. The phone companies never claimed to be building a "secure telecom system", nobody ever offered to pay for them to ensure high grade authentication and integrity checking of phone calls.
And the cops know that. And don't care. They are the people showing uo with military weapons to people's homes. It's their responsibility to know and understand the reliability of the information they're acting on, and the ease with which the phone system can be made to show them misleading information.
Cops with guns and police unions and qualified immunity who now they're never going to be held accountable for killing people based on false information are the problem, not the phone system.
https://www.wired.com/story/alan-filion-torswats-guilty-plea...
That level of asynchrony is not how the system should work.
(Admittedly "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence).
Even conservatives know the only hope is stacking the supreme court.
It's like sweeping categorizations of an entire country are usually not accurate or something.
It can certainly lead to echo-chamber mentality, but without it we'd see more low-effort, low quality posts drowning out discourse.
If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time. Training only goes so far. After that, you're investigating mistakes versus violent intent.
I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
He is very sweet and sheltered, so it's a good outlet. He literally tried the Prince Albert in a can one. That hasn't been relevant for like what, 50 years?
https://www.google.com/search?q=lv+killed+for+calling+the+po...
(Google link for choice of news sources...)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
Also, *67 also caused a lot of people to simply not answer calls that were blocked this way.
You’re right, but it is a problem and people who choose to abuse that fact deserve to have the book thrown at them.
In 2023 it's estimated police killed around 1,248 people. Notice I said killed vs Murdered as words matter. Out of that only 104 were unarmed. Now without looking at each case or example here, you can still account for the mass majority of police interactions ending in a death, the civilian was armed at a minimum.
Using the data provided we could say easily that 1,248 people is way too many. Hell, 1 is too many. That doesn't change reality though, if 1,248 deaths were related to individuals engaging in crime, this is a causality that you can lay solely on the civilian victim, as they chose to engage in this action.
We can argue how many were crimes, that's fair and i'm happy to throw out and say let's assume 25% were not crimes and really were just an escalated interaction. The bureau of justice statistics gave numbers for 2022 that estimated that 49.2 million people or 19% of the US had an interaction with the police. If that's true, napkin math would put the police murders at .0025% of the interactions, and assuming 333,287,557 million people in 2022 (census bureau) places it at .00037% of the population died by the hands of police.
Some related statistic. Roughly 500 people die from falling out of bed or off furniture, 300-400 die from drowning in a bath tub, 4,000 die from choking on food, 150 die from coconuts falling on their head, 500-600 die from falling from a ladder.
Looking at the numbers, it's very hard to say that police "Regularly murder people".
As for the "Everyone having guns" that's a separate debate, but I would posit you're correct with regard to criminals performing criminal acts, that are armed, increase the likelihood of a negative out come. Federal arrests for weapons offenses were around 8,000 with states being at close to 12,000. Putting that at 20,000 or so arrests per year. Even with those numbers if you're arrested with a firearm, you're still at around 6% chance of death. Again given the circumstances and propensity for needless escalation, these numbers while bad aren't crazy.
There are multiple problems in the US. We need better training and funding for police departments, we do need to weed out the bad cops (as with any field), but with all that the most common denominator is criminal behavior.
All of that said, If you've got data points or information that may be counter to the above, i'd be very curious to see it. I'm very much open to having my mind changed on the topic and encourage you to post it up for all of us here.
ALAN W. FILION,
a/k/a "Nazgul Swattings,"
a/k/a "Torswats V3,"
a/k/a "Third Reich of Kiwiswats,"
a/k/a "The Table Swats,"
a/k/a "Angmar," and
a/k/a "Torswats"
https://www.wired.com/story/alan-filion-torswats-swatting-ar...
There's no fixing the system when there is no onus on the police to act like they care. They enter a home that was a victim of swatting and kill everyone? Tough luck, "it's part of the job", "we told them to stand down and they didn't", "we couldn't risk the life of the first responders".
There's always a reason as to why police violence is fine. Its almost as if the police isn't really there to protect normal people.
Yes, this is so trivially true of any place that it's not worth mentioning, as generalizations are meant as just that: Something that a majority (or at least a large minority) are like. For example, people do say "people in the US speak English", even though there's a number of people that don't. This doesn't make the generalization any less useful than "Americans like baseball" or "Americans wear shoes around the house".
Swatting just isn't a thing here - our armed officers are trained completely differently and held to much stricter standards regarding the use of force. American police do have to deal with much more widespread gun ownership and higher rates of violent crime, but that's only one half of the equation.
Policing in the US is exceptionally fragmented across thousands of agencies, with no consistent standards of training and supervision. Even if there was a clear political mandate to reduce the number of police-involved shootings, there's no effective mechanism to change how policing is carried out on the ground.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shoo...
Does the Second Amendment not exist? Which other constitutional rights do you think we should use to justify these murders?
Well, it's not. Even here, the function of the police is to enforce the will of the state, not to protect people. The protection is a side-effect of the enforcement, but enforcement can also be things like terrorizing minorities.
Given that, if I was busting down doors in the US, I’d want to be armed to the teeth, equipped with the best body armour money can buy, and wouldn’t waste a lot of time on niceties until I was sure that nobody was going to attempt to kill me.
Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted.
And that's ignoring any of the armed individuals who are not, in fact, threatening anyone or committing a crime.
And the people for whom a crime may be being committed, but for which "death" is not an appropriate punishment - even ignoring the police being judge, jury, and executioner in a society where we presume innocence and require conviction by a jury of our peers.
Would personal protection devices (mace, batons etc) count as armed.
Call me a cynic, but 104 people being 'unarmed' makes me think the reports in those cases simply lack creativity in defining "arms" and, (again cynically) I expect some number of the other cases the individuals were either helpfully discovered to be armed after the fact. (And in some cases actually provided with arms after the fact.)
I would suggest that both appear here. Personally I would prefer votes to be on quality of post rather than popularity of position as that leads to the possibility of examining an issue from multiple viewpoints.
(When responding to a post that has been thought out, but down voted, I feel the need to point out that although I disagree, I'm not the one downvoting.)
I do think that voting improves the quality overall. But a better system might be separate options for 'agree/disagree' vs 'quality / pithy' posts. (I also thinkbthis would be horrible UI, so meh)
I’ve felt this way for nearly twenty years now, coinciding with the rise of reddit, twitter, and facebook alongside the decline of forums, blogs, and rss.
On any topic with even slight amount of contention, you very quickly see people aligning toward the one-true-belief because they observe and react to the crowd supporting that opinion.
They do. It's not a perfect mechanism.
> But a better system might be
Yeah we've had 20 years or more of sites trying to find a good formula now. Slashdot's ratings and meta-ratings back in the day, where you rated something as Insightful/Informative etc, and then every so often you were asked to review other user's ratings so their future ratings could be weighted ... technically interesting but really cumbersome.
I like HN's choice not to display ratings on other people's posts, and I like the simple UI. I think it's better with up and down votes than without... I don't think we're going to find a perfect scheme but that doesn't mean we should abandon the imperfect ones.
I didn’t want to open that can of worms. Even the inclusive stat I cited is small enough to support the point I wanted to make.
Legal gun owners not committing obvious crimes are only rarely accosted by police, and shootings are exceedingly rare, and they usually make the news and result in legal action. They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.
"Unarmed" doesn't represent what the suspect was doing that got them shot. Were they resisting arrest or being noncompliant and reaching for their waist or a center console or glove compartment?
There are cases where police shoot suspects, armed or unarmed, unjustifiably. They're not as rare as anyone wishes they were. They're still fairly rare. Behaving civilly, even while recognizing that many police are like barely constrained wild animals, goes a long way toward ensuring that an accidental furtive gesture isn't interpreted as reaching for a weapon.
Pretty sure they managed to sneak this one (https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/john-fauver-harford-c...) in the armed category
Also dogs are not any more armed in the US than in Europe, yet American cops shoot a lot more dogs. They do so because they are antisocial and know they'll face no consequences (and even if they get fired from on PD, another will recruit them). I'd say there is both a recruiting issue and an immunity issue.
And, for anyone who isn't reading between the lines here, without a doubt I'm only so lucky as to avoid their attention today because I made it and have spent the last 2 decades living in nice neighborhoods and driving nice cars.
Someone else pointed out that the whole phone system is a dog's breakfast, which also needs to be fixed for various easy-scam-exploitation reasons as well. The only reason not to do it is that the corps that run the networks don't want to have to pay to make their shit fit for society's purpose rather than their own.
The guy in the article obviously belongs in jail. The question is how far up the scale he went in terms of actual damage and injury caused. It's just like if I read an article about Joe pleading guilty to shooting Fred, and facing 20 years in jail, but the article doesn't say whether Fred survived the shooting. I'm not out to make a big moral judgment either way, and I have no stake in it, but it's a natural question for a reader to ask.
We should never criticize people for actually bringing real numbers into a conversation to clarify things. I didn't know that statistic, and I suspect many "disagreements" are things where if the actual numbers and facts were known to all, they would actually agree.
More broadly, the British police are a service, not a force. A British officer would never refer to a member of the public as a "civilian", because our police are civilians in uniform. They have powers granted to them by Parliament, but their right to use those powers comes from the consent of the public that they serve. It's a radically different attitude that colours every interaction between police and the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Federation_of_England_a...
In the US, police officer does not even rise to top 10 most dangerous jobs. Groundskeeper is a more dangerous job than being a cop.
The lack of training and toxic culture of policing is far more dangerous to cops than criminals are. The average US citizen simply does not, and should not, trust the average cop.
Agreed on telephone infra in general
He's not facing 20 years; he's facing a small fraction of that.
Swatting victimizes the police as well, they’re responding to a potential hostage situation and do not have the benefit of hindsight. I guarantee these officers are horrified that the man was innocent and frustrated that they were put in this situation.
I encourage everyone who is adamantly “ACAB” to go on a ride along- contact your local department. At best, you get first hand experience to justify your beliefs and can virtue signal even more to your friends. Or you may be able to humanize the police.
> If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
To be clear, your 2nd statement is why ACAB. The police are the people fighting against the open & honest accountability you are asking for. When accountability comes up, they refuse to do their jobs[1], inflate crime numbers & incident severity[2], harass the few cops trying to improve accountability until they quit[3], and actively campaign against accountability[4].
If some cops are bastards, and people who shield those bastards from accountability are also bastards, then all cops are bastards. ACAB is not rough, it exactly describes the situation.
[1] https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...
[2] https://minnesotareformer.com/2020/12/15/the-bad-cops-how-mi...
[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/only-minneapolis-...
[4] https://apnews.com/article/elections-police-minneapolis-a1ce...
The kid should be punished, yes, but a quarter of his lifespan is not exactly a light sentence.
I wonder if this was supposed to be Nine Angels. Copy editing on the web is so sloppy that I'm going to assume so because it makes more sense (to me).
Wow, neo-nazis are a fun bunch. Their ideas about accelerationism and trying to induce race riots have got to be our biggest semi-organized domestic threat. It's encouraging to see authorities seemingly beginning to catch on to this, as well as widespread recognition of what swatting is. Five years ago was a very different story, especially on the latter.
Regardless, this is unlikely to be much of a deterrent. The police need to be held accountable at some point.
Police mostly act as professional witnesses taking reports and engage in revenue generating law enforcement.
The most high pressure situations they deal with with any regularity involve mediating domestic disputes or wrestling angry drunks.
Police absolutely are not dealing with violent criminals on the daily. And when they do go out of their way to deal with people who many become violent they show up with the kind numerical advantage that would make Stalin proud.
Your average beat cop probably un-holsters their handgun once a month to once a year depending on where and when they patrol. These high stress high stakes split second judgement call situations are not a daily or weekly thing.
>I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
They do accept this and did for decades. The only reason it's no longer being blanked accepted is because the modern media landscape makes it much harder to hide the fact that a huge fraction of these "honest mistakes" were in fact not so honest and not so mistaken.
Basically nobody has a problem with honest mistakes by themselves. What people have a problem with is thug behavior. Spending decades classifying various degrees of thug behavior as honest mistakes is why nobody wants to tolerate honest mistakes.
Which is really impressive for how much time cops spend standing on the side of highways.
Both issues need to be addressed and addressing one doesn’t relate to the other.
This kid shouldn’t get off easy just because his crime shouldn’t be possible. It is possible, and he chose to do it. Most people are good and choose not to do it.
His federal guilty plea appears to admit to 375 swatting calls. So I don't think the state or local courts can subsequently charge him for any of those calls - they would need to find evidence of some separate calls.
If there's a 1% chance that the house contains a deranged gunman threatening to shoot his family and then himself, that probably shouldn't be met with the same response as a 30% chance of the same... There are probably a lot of situations where it's a tough call though.
How many cops do you know? They might say they're horrified to the media, but that's not how they operate when no one's watching. There's a reason these SWATting events keep happening: cops enjoy them just as much as the SWATters do. They get to bust out their fun military surplus toys and do their SEAL Team 6 cosplay. If they wanted to stop these SWATting events, they would have found a solution by now.
Check out these highlights (lowlights?) from the Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department:
https://racketmn.com/human-rights-report-mpd-needs-major-ove...
These are not people known for nuance or remorse.
Link to the full investigation report:
https://mn.gov/mdhr/assets/Investigation%20into%20the%20City...
I'm going to assume that wired got it right and it's the neo-nazis that misspelled it; it's much funnier that way.
They have to enforce unjust laws and unjust outcomes, and statistically do so more heavily across minority populations.
The institution requires them to be bastards, ACAB is a statement about the institution of police and the people who elect to join that institution.
This is not accurate.
The timeframe is not wrong; it is true that the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s. But saying it evolved from "warehouse guards and slave patrols" is ahistorical. Most modern police forces modeled after London's Metropolitan Police replaced night watch systems that have been around for literally all of recorded history.
Yeah, I don't think "armed" means "was an imminent threat to life" in the slightest. It's much more likely it's a cover your ass designation.
Future headline: Police ignore mass shooting because they thought it was a prank
I'm not saying the night watches didn't evolve into police departments, I'm saying the night watches were co-opted prior to them becoming uniformed departments.
And slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US. I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments.
The big guns are hidden from sight anyway, and only brought out when need be. We don’t need any Oct 7th type attacks happening on home soil.
USA has 1-2 mass shootings everyday on average. This is far worse than a singular big attack. And how long would the reaction of police to any big attack even take? Is it actually realistic that they will have a useful impact with big guns?
>> This is not accurate.
> I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments.
What percentage of current police departments were conversions from slave patrols? What is the source of this data?
Not at all, Spain for example had local "brotherhoods" who were meant to protect the local communities against bandits and other unwanted people, and this was back in the 12th century. I'm sure other countries could have been even earlier with their early versions of a police force. "Santa Hermandad" is a term you can look up to find some history about it.
Probably a conclusion people come to when they compare US police looking more like the US military every day, while their local police doesn't go in that direction at all. At least that's true for me as a person living in Spain but sometimes seeing the really crazy equipment US police seems to have.
2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition so while what you say is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader as the typical mass shooting of the FBI definition consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.
Well homegrown attacks happen DAILY. "Averaging almost 50,000 deaths from firearms annually". But no, once they're not on the news like the Oct 7th attacks where, it's fine I guess.
https://www.statista.com/topics/10904/gun-violence-in-the-un...
Look, if you're not even willing to understand the argument, your refutation of it is toothless at best, worthless at worst.
Not to mention, your own claim is vague and without evidence. In point of fact, there's plenty of evidence to the counter. There are ample studies to choose from, but from just this year: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/police-budget-crime-...
It's been largely interpreted this way throughout most of our history, until around the 1960s when civil rights activists started carrying them. All the modern gun regulation started then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
Of course 1934 gun control came about due to people like Al Capone and the like.
Here is my reference for 3 events in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...).
For instance, several officers have been treated for severe symptoms after coming into contact with fentanyl. Except that there is no way, biochemically speaking, the kind of contact they had with fentanyl could have produced anything resembling those symptoms. It was an entirely psychosomatic reaction, brought on by the police's own utterly false propaganda about how terrifyingly dangerous fentanyl is.
Similarly, so much of their "high stress" is because they expect to be attacked/shot/killed at any given moment even when, by any reasonable analysis, they are 100% safe. Furthermore, a lot of the actual danger to them is manufactured by this exact phenomenon: they expect a physical confrontation, so, in order to ensure they "win" it, they create it, striking preemptively in one fashion or another.
Here is a reference for 3 events in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...).
Are we still spouting this nonsense? They do come from the mid 1800s. Modeled after the London Metro Police, where there were so many slaves to catch. American cities soon imitated, based on how many slaves were recovered.
> What is the source of this data?
https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=police+departments+were+conv...
It also seems like in 2015 there was limits added that made it so "the military was restricted from transferring some weapons, such as grenade launchers, weaponized vehicles, and bayonets to police". Why was that restriction needed if the police isn't becoming more and more like the military?
As for your link: the claim made by the “study” is false since it is ignoring virtually every obvious confounding factor to claim that the number of police officers doesn’t affect crime rates. Per capita police count is a measure of how effectively a city can respond to crime. If they can’t respond that means there aren’t consequences. When there aren’t consequences you end up with the disaster of public safety you see in west coast cities like SF, Portland, and Seattle.
> I'd love to see some statistics about how much worse it is now that we have professional police,
How fortunate that they're willing to collect statistics on their own performance for you.
If our legal system started recognizing that sending the police somewhere is equivalent to calling an assassin then we've got larger issues to address.
Really? Do you realize that the amount of civil asset forfeiture has exceeded burglaries? The militarization of police is absolutely a huge problem. As is mass-incarceration for non-violent crimes, over-criminalization, no-knock raids, etc. They just raided a dudes house for a squirrel.
And no, I don't advocate for the idiocy in CA where they legalized violent crime as a petty response to having their budgets threatened.
Also, HN seems to have a bad echo chamber on both policing and gun control.
https://www.kxan.com/investigations/everything-we-know-about...
I saw countless similar videos of cops violently attacking -- often with permanent, life-altering results -- people who were exercising their constitutional rights or simply minding their own business.
All of the above is true. In the US, slavery enforcement evolved into police forces and police forces were modeled after UK police.
Many police forces, many origin stores.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...
Do you mean for the US, rather than the human race? Some of us live in countries where the only weapons most cops carry are truncheons and tasers.
For the slave patrol point, I would appreciate a single example of this phenomenon. Is it the claim that there exists at least one professional police force that was created to replace a "slave patrol", which previously performed some subset of the civil duties of police officers? I have not been able to find an example; can you point me to one?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/249803/number-of-homicid...
Despite that the teenager will likely be going to jail, the most damning indictment is of the police forces that were repeatedly co-opted by the teenager. It should really take something much more clever to trigger this kind of systemic response repeatedly.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/06/1...
> The claim that modern police originated from slave patrols is a dangerous slur designed to delegitimize policing ... Bad policing must be criticized, but we should not do so by resorting to historically flimsy myths, especially myths that unfairly tarnish the reputations of those in law enforcement and cast aspersions on their motives.
source: the onion [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-9-11-helped-to-milita...
https://apbweb.com/2023/10/the-use-of-military-assets-by-u-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/why-are-some-u...
The driving force behind it is this LESO; established to facilitate the "1033 Program", which transfers excess weapons, equipment, and vehicles from the United States Armed Forces to civilian law enforcement agencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Support_Office
From 1997 until 2014, $5.1 billion in military hardware was transferred from the DoD to local American law enforcement agencies. 1/3rd of the equipment was brand-new.
One of their predecessor organisations was the Bow Street Runners which was set up by magistrates with the aim of providing a less corrupt system than that of "thief takers" and a more professional one than parish constables.
I think they're really fucking stupid. I think they think that since they are making up claims that everything will be alright. Like the cops are going to bust in, see that there's no drugs/hostages/satanic rituals/whatever, say "My bad", and fuck off.
But there's always the chance that things go horribly wrong. And that chance is actually pretty high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
Obama went so far as to say the following when trying to reign in the 1033 program in 2015
"We've seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like it's an occupying force as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them ... So we're going to prohibit equipment made for the battlefield that is not appropriate for local police departments."
Claiming that police are being militarized is a very broad statement. Depending on your perspective it can be positive or negative.
You could argue that consistency and having a common operating model with accountability is a good thing. Unfortunately many would argue the adopted model is very flawed and that the level accountability is tied to public outrage or scrutiny.
I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate. Some argue that sensitivity and deescalation training are where the focus should be, while others are arguing for the warrior training.
The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because doing it badly will be more harmful than not having done it at all.
There are some pretty big differences between the UK policing model and the one used in the US.
The UK model was set up against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars (the French police's role included monitoring dissent, suppressing political opposition [1] and even censoring books) and the Peterloo Massacre [2] (where cavalry were set on a peaceful protest campaigning for more than 2% of people to be allowed to vote)
The Peelian model [3] is one of 'policing by consent' where the police focus their efforts on the sorts of crimes the average citizen wants solved - rather than on suppressing political dissent, or censoring books, or launching cavalry charges against protests. Peel's police aren't a military force, which is why very few of them have guns.
If the American police are based on Peelian principles, then an awful lot of the principles have gotten lost in translation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fouch%C3%A9#In_Napoleon... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles#The_nine_pr...
During my childhood, it was common for police to defer to husbands regarding domestic abuse. And kids all over knew to not go to the police - for any kind of abuse from authority figures.
At least try to be persuasive. There are a myriad of ways that jobs can be stressful without endangering your life, that should not be difficult for you to imagine. Shift work, demands for quotas and metrics (sales people can tell you this), dealing with violent and erratic individuals in the public with sometimes insufficient support, etc.
Correctional Officers face similar circumstances and have a life expectancy of 58-59 years old. High divorce rate too, but people want to content themselves with the truism that "only bad people work these jobs", with no consideration for environmental effects. The divorce rate is higher among medical assistants and some skilled trades, for reasons that can just as easily apply: long hours, on-call, fatigue, etc.
> it would be mitigated by better training and careful psychological filtering.
Only on the conceit that any and all stress is imposed by lack of training and bad psychology.
The kid needs to be punished, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have a glaring hole in our law enforcement procedures so large that even children can exploit them. That’s insane. Children are always going to do dumb shit, we need to have policies and procedures to guard against that.
Potter, Gary "The History of Policing in the United States"[1] references Platt, Tony, "Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 18"
1. https://www.academia.edu/30504361/The_History_of_Policing_in...
The truth of the matter is this: if you refuse to believe that modern policing evolved directly from slave patrols, it means you are a racist and you voted for Trump. This is undeniable, and by denying it you prove it true. Nuanced and sophisticated descriptions of how historical circumstances came to be are repressive and the enemy of social justice. Thomas Jefferson ate babies and George Washington stomped on little latinx children.
If you are a content creator, or someone who might be at risk for swatting you can call your local PD and explain the situation. You can let them know that you understand they must respond to those types of calls, but just wanted to call in and let them know it could happen. Most are happy to hear from you and take note.
Before swattings became popular, people used to send pizzas (popularized by old 4chan) and you would have to call all the pizza places in your area and get your address blacklisted. That was a pain.
I’m not sure what it means for US police to have “evolved out of” slave patrols in places that never had slaves, like New York City (northern states didn’t want to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act), or even in places like Hawaii that were founded well after slavery was abolished.
(There was never a bomb.)
Whatever is wrong with kids these days is nothing new.
No amount of opsec can save you from corrupt employees making below minimum wage.
Why would that require that a "captain" has several subordinates ranked "Lieutenant" and "Sergeant"? Why do the highest ranked police have caps with brocade, and gold braid on their shoulders? Is that part of the consistency? Why does the NYPD have dress uniforms? Why do they give military style funerals for those who die, or x-gun salutes? We're often told they're out there fighting "wars", though everyone is always vague about who the other side is.
I'm not making the claim that they've been militarized recently. It seems to have been the case no matter how far you go back.
> I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate.
I don't think this is a training problem. When they shoot some grandma or shake down travelers for the cash in their wallets, I don't think this could ever be corrected no matter how much or what sort of training they are required to undergo. This is some baseline ethics problem, that could only be corrected with initial selection, and then only if the selection process itself were relatively uncorrupted (and it's not).
Your comment doesn't just suggest you are mistaken about this or that, but that you aren't in a frame of mind where you could recognize or appreciate that there is a problem.
> The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because
What if the task were something absolutely morally abhorrent? What if the task was to efficiently and artfully carve the hearts out of newborn babies and toddlers, and to terrorize the parents with the mutilated remains of their children? But you've been doing this task for so long, that you and everyone else just assumes that it's something that needs to be done. You're sitting around arguing "ok, maybe we need to do only have as many satanic baby sacrifices, and I won't listen to the people who say we need to have more not less". And there's another guy sitting next to you saying "I don't know why we need the terror... we could kill just as many babies without being cruel, they could get anesthesia, and we could do grief counseling for the mom and dad".
And you endlessly yammer about this stuff, for decades, never noticing that you're all lunatics. The concept that this just shouldn't be done at all, in any manner, it's something you can't possibly hear. Even those who can understand this like to whine that they're powerless to stop it, that they don't have the tools to put a stop to it, etc. The truth is we all have the power to stop, none of you want to.
(And it's exceedingly rare that cops will believe an upstanding citizen who's legally armed and behaving civilly is a criminal. It happens, for instance in the two cases I cited, but it's rare. They're a rounding error in the police killing stats.)
More to the point, if you went to your local PDs website and watched body cam from the last 10 shootings, how many do you think would be involve law abiding gun owners with CCWs using guns in a way consistent with the 2nd Amendment vs people brandishing or using their guns in a criminal and/or dangerous way?
The problems with American policing aren't merely that the cops have to enforce the law.
It's the qualified immunity, the get-out-of-jail-free cards for their buddies, and the dog shootings.
If the police never shot the wrong guy, always replaced your door after breaking it down, and were polite and apologetic when a mistake was made - people in this thread wouldn't be equating swatting with attempted murder.
The separation of empathy from an 18 year old online kid from his peers is the true tragedy here.
Isn't this just guilt by association? Whether police are bad or not should be judged on its merits, not what its history is. The Autobahn and VW was built by Nazi Germany, but it'd be absurd to bring that factoid up when discussing road transport or the German car industry.
Should progressive academics declare all CATO papers invalid because they are ideologically misaligned with the institute?
As a side note, when trying to research this you'll see weird double speak fact checks like below:
> Fact Check: 11-year-old arrested on suspicion of violent disorder after riots, not ‘mean tweets’
> Sending grossly offensive, obscene, indecent, or menacing messages on public electronic communication networks is a criminal offence in Britain under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003
> Misleading. An 11-year-old was arrested on suspicion of violent disorder, not for social media posts, during a swathe of arrests by British police targeting those involved in rioting.
But then the authors don't write what 'violent disorder' is.
Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson
> The spokesperson said the 11-year-old, one of five juveniles arrested on suspicion of violent disorder by the force on Aug. 28 in relation to the riots, was later bailed.
> Cleveland Police arrested another 11-year-old on suspicion of arson after a police vehicle was set alight in Hartlepool on July 31, according to the spokesperson and an Aug. 1 statement, opens new tab . The child was also released on bail, the spokesperson said.
And this isn't some weird online political rag, it's Reuters. It's all very strange.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/11-year-old-arrested-susp...
https://livinglifefearless.co/2020/features/queensryches-emp...
And be careful about brining the First Amendment into that... the First Amendment as it was understood by its creators was not about your write to say anything you wanted without government response, it was about your right to publish your own newspaper (or broadsheet/advertisement) without the government issuing you a license or collecting a tax (both of which the colonial government did).
The second amendment was ratified in 1791, and just 7 years later (1978) the Alien and Sedition Acts were ratified by congress, in large part other silence critics of the federal government by making it illegal to say "false, scandalous, and malicious" about it (with the exception of about the Vice-President). And it was absolutely used as a political tool, and this was approved of by the Supreme Court at the time.
So I don't think that anyone really wants this horrible president that the modern Supreme Court has yoked us with. Unfortunately, given the election results, it appears we are going to be subject to these horrible ideas for a whole generation.
How many were using their guns in a dangerous and/or criminal way? We may never know, because they were deprived of their right to the trial by jury which would have determined that.
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/federal-crimes/is-it-doubl...
The main point of the Second Amendment from the framers perspective was to prevent the need (or even the existence) of a standing army. Of course from a modern perspective this is near-ridiculous.
Unfortunately, I speak from experience. I received a credible threat, called my local PD, and they began to investigate immediately. They also put notes in their dispatch system (which is shared by the local SWAT team) indicating that this had happened before, and to proceed with extreme caution.
The "swatter" never did follow through on the first attempt, but did follow through about 6 months later. I didn't get any threats from the swatter that time, but did get a call from my local PD while I was at work, and they let me know they'd driven by my place and called it off after being confident it was a false alarm.
Anticipating questions: no, there's no sort of protocol I setup with the PD. They have to investigate every threat, and even if we setup some sort of "shared secret" ahead of time, if a swatter says I'm cutting up my family in the basement, the PD can't know with certainty that I'm not. About the best I can do is make sure to answer the door when/if the PD shows up so they can more quickly establish things are safe.
Also: the attackers were after some OG Twitter accounts I used to use, and they thought they could intimidate me into giving the accounts to them.
Private citizens can actually buy mine resistant vehicles. We can even buy main battle tanks - though the turret needs to be disabled without a Destructive Device permit.
With a Destructive Device permit, you can also buy a grenade launcher.
We don't sell predator drones to local police departments. Police use the same commercial drones any other private citizen can buy - though cities often restrict whether non-police can fly them.
I am pretty happy with the police hardly ever killing anyone, and that almost always someone who is a real danger to others. I am happy fewer people being killed by police so far this decade (and that includes road accidents involving police!), than have been killed by police in the US so far this month.
I'll grant I didn't cite sources, because this is HN, not a scientific journal, and if you're interested enough you can Google it (or DDG it, or Kagi it) for yourself, but the basis really is right there in my post.
While it is true that slave patrols were a form of American law enforcement that existed alongside other forms of law enforcement, the claim that American policing “traces back” to, “started out” as, or “evolved directly from,” slave patrols, or that slave patrols “morphed directly into” policing, is false. This widespread pernicious myth falsely asserts a causal relationship between slave patrols and policing and intimates that modern policing carries on a legacy of gross injustice. There is no evidence for either postulate.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...
"Violent Disorder" is a specific offence listed in the Public Order Act.
> Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson
The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.
Potter: The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982).
Potter: Platt, Tony, “Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 18 (1982).
"CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES: IMMEDIATE AND LONG-TERM REFORMS FROM A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE"
Tony Platt
Crime and Social Justice, No. 18, REMAKING JUSTICE (Winter 1982), pp. 38-45 (8 pages)
That US 6 month number excludes field training (typically 1 year) whereas the 2-3 year German number includes it (6 months I believe).
This largely stems from a difference in how academies work. In many countries, field training is required to graduate. In the US, field training is required after you graduate in order to get a permanent job. This skews the total training time numbers.
That said, American police are still undertrained by comparison.
> The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
https://ia600300.us.archive.org/30/items/the-ted-k-archive-t...
So the article should explain it.
> The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.
How is this related apart from the person sharing the same age and the town being the same? One is suspected of arson and the other of Violent Disorder? Does this add value to the fact check?
https://www.policemag.com/weapons/article/15348048/how-the-n...
Of course, there must have been many other causes. It wasn’t the first time in US history that police were outgunned.
As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people who cooperated with the US or the Afghanistan government against the Taliban. When the Taliban found out about such people they would go after them.
We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks because there is no way to know if the Taliban found them out through the leaks or through some other source. The odds are pretty good that it was more than one, probably a lot more.
The swatting teen on the other hand is known to have not actually gotten anyone killed.
A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you. They were there to do something that sometimes goes wrong and does kill, but most of the time that doesn't happen.
Someone coming to your house because the Manning leaks identified you as cooperating against the Taliban was there to kill you.
So you don't know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile
But if you believe that only the US has this problem, I am sad to inform you that Taylor Swift and Hollywood Movies are not the only American cultural exports eagerly consumed around the world.
Do you really think that dressing in military special ops tactical clothing, with advanced and powerful weaponry, balaclavas, helmets and responding to a call in a armoured vehicle doesn't create any weird expectations on the mind of police officer of how they should behave in a call?
Spoofable local number: slightly less trustworthy
Non-local number: less trustworthy
International number: barely trustworthy
VoIP: maybe slightly more trustworthy than international.
Said infra probably limits the ability to distinguish between these, however, so that becomes the primary issue.
You pulling an argumentative sleight of hand here conflating your run of the mill gun violence with terrorist attacks or mass shootings isn't cool.
It doesn't matter how the police is equipped, they can't stop a guy from walking up to his neighbor and shooting him in the face unless they're already there pointing guns at him. Although, maybe some sort of remote mind control chip is the answer there?
Also, I'm certain every shooting ends up on local news.
> They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.
“Not advisable”, of course, being a goalpost on wheels that allows them to justify police misconduct.
If it's that easy to spoof a phone number then that system is completely fucked and not fit for purpose.
And the efforts that a private investigator needed to go to, to track down the perpetrator, indicates that there is no way to track the source of the phone calls - that's ludicrous (but probably the norm).
The history of the United States is well documented - it was only for a brief period during reconstruction that policing was deracialized in the American South, and even saw a number of formerly-enslaved lawmen. There were numerous violent revolts against this, and in support of white supremacy in places like Oklahoma, Louisiana[1], Mississippi and elsewhere where egalitarian leaders were ran out of town, and the law enforcement (along other administrative leadership) was reconfigured against the then "new", post-civil-war ways.
Do you see any functional differences between slave patrols (membership free from white land owners or their nominees) and the group that overthrew and reconstituted reconstruction-era law enforcement (mobs drew from white landowners, or their hired grunts).
I believe the argument is that deliberately killing another person is always wrong. It does’t matter if it’s in self defense - taking a life is such a morally abhorrent thing to do that it’s always indefensible. It’s always murder.
Some who wouldn’t go that far would still argue that for police to do it - people who are in a position of power, and who should know there are risks associated with the job of protecting society - is indefensible even if it would not be for a regular person.
Not my position - self defense if you know you’d otherwise die is, I think, morally justified. But I can see the argument.
Not only do I have zero interest in speaking with SWAT team members, I have very real reasons why I choose wherever possible to not talk to any cops at all.
The fact that you "know a few" SWAT team members immediately makes me strongly suspicious that you are part of the problem, perhaps not directly corrupt yourself, but very likely to be complicit in hiding the misbehaviour of police you know who are corrupt.
ACAB
Do you tell emergency responders not to turn their lights on en route? To put it at the bottom of the queue after helping the old lady cross the street? To politely knock on the alleged hostage-taker's door instead of kicking it in?
A landline call tagged as "same town" or cell call tagged as "pinged tower near reported location" could be treated more seriously than a VoIP call from "Fly-by-night VoIP Gateway Plc".
If evidence for your claim was as plentiful as you claim, you would just add another link. You didn’t.
They still exist for that purpose in the US.
They do not exist to protect people. They are a tool of the state and capital.
The years post slavery still were used to enforce Jim Crow laws, segregation, and violence against minorities. They still used dogs to attack peaceful protestors. SWAT teams are a continuation of an ethos of being warriors, willing to do violence at the behest of the government and capital at the expense of the people.
The antecedent organizations to the modern Charleston police department, notably the Town Watch and the City Guard, were both dissolved in the aftermath of the civil war, while civil order was kept by federal forces until the end of reconstruction.
But regardless of whether we can chase down a chain of organizations that meets the colloquial meaning of "evolved", it does not appear that either the City Guard nor the Town Watch were principally slave patrols, although they did enforce the slavery regime as part of their policing functions.
An organization that participates in the suppression of slaves as part of its function is not a "slave patrol". If the statement "[modern police forces] evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols" is to be parsed as "modern police forces evolved out of earlier organizations that sometimes protected private property or enforced slavery laws" then I grant the accusation, but it is rather hollow and meaningless at that point.
This is no more complicated than grade school playgrounds: don't give the bully what they want.
Assuming you are not making the entirely reductionist argument that requires every law be tied back to capital (in other words, murder is illegal because it brings down property values or something) this is an extremely narrow view of the purpose of police. This everything-is-capital framing doesn’t explain consumer protections or environmental laws or labor laws.
The purpose of police is to enforce the laws. Many of those laws have been significantly and disproportionately controlled by corporate and monied interests but again there are too many clear counterexamples to conclude as you did.
My bad, but still egregious nonetheless.
> As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people
You're after different people. It's Luke Harding and David Leigh from the Guardian that published the password to the unredacted files.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/unredacted_us...
> We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks
This is exactly what I meant by "unspecified and theoretical." The government had over 2 decades to point to any instances of harm. Where are they?
Also again, Chelsea Manning didn't publish the unredacted files. It's rich to blame her for Afghanistan deaths while ignoring the actions of Bush and every president after him, where the ultimate responsibility lies.
> A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you.
No, the crucial difference is intent. Swatting kills people, swatters know that, but they do it anyways for their own pleasure. Obviously, swatters aren't sending trigger-happy cops so that their victims can survive.
Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes. This is whistleblowing, not some selfish "leak." The intent here is to save lives, the exact opposite of swatting. I don't know how anyone can demonize whistleblowing while trivializing swatting.
> "According to court records, Filion was also part of a high-profile international swatting group that targeted several prominent figures"
...or was I right?
I gave examples of 3 southern states (and a link to one, detailing how the law enforcement was devolved to antebellum mores in Louisiana)
What makes you think they aren't? All news media is inherently biased if they want or not. Not to mention "fact checker" are a prime candidate for corruption.
I'd challenge that view by claiming that if the threat is of someone holding their family hostage threatening to kill them (just a guess at what these "swatters" might say to the dispatcher to get cops to actually kick in some doors, I don't know what their state-of-the-art accusation is), then sending one cop car, poorly equipped, sounds a bit silly for multiple reasons.
> Mass shootings like Columbine happen every day in America.
The guy you’re replying to (and I as well) are saying that this is an intentionally misleading statement. Three people being wounded but not killed in a shootout they started is still considered on the same level as dozens of innocent children being hurt and killed. IMO that’s straight up misinformation. It’s designed to illicit the strongest emotional reaction possible, while being not even technically wrong.
America has lots of problems, and guns are definitely one of them. Everyone agrees with this, we just disagree on how to fix it. Twisting words and lying is never helpful.
It sucks this person was so angry and unfeeling to the world at a young age.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sangnoir
Again, if evidence was as plentiful as you claim, a person would add a link instead of typing about examples and links elsewhere.
Imagine a world in which someone is trying to murder you or your children. You know who they are, and you even have incontrovertible evidence they are doing it. Yet they get off scot-free every time because their bullets missed the mark.
(This is covered in the mandatory first-year criminal law course in law school, BTW.)
Plus calls all over the country require national level investigation, not local police efforts. And that's what happened: the FBI had to step in.
Popping in here to say that it's funny how you said this then go on about baby sacrifice.
Post-Belesiles [0], I would want to see a body of relatively objective records that can be independently verified in the form of adversarial cooperation. Say some significant number of individuals of slave oriented occupations moving into net new police-specific occupations.
Your use of the word “sheriff” is significant here because sheriff and constable are occupation terms that predate the Atlantic slave trade. These were civil enforcers for what represented law and justice in the English system. They still exist today in name and function. Moving from slave patrol to sheriff doesn’t necessarily support the thesis since sheriff and constable are not net new police forces.
0. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.016/--why-foo...
They like opportunities to play with their tech toys and rough up some "suspects." A compelling story about someone in distress is the perfect excuse, whether the message comes in via VOIP, TOR or 4chan.