Maybe The Best Way To Stop All This Swatting Is To Have Fewer SWAT Teams?

from the just-a-suggestion dept

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

As you may have heard, last week, a 13-year-old boy admitted to calling in three separate swattings . This came about a month and a half after another person accused of a swatting incident was arrested in Las Vegas . Swatting -- the act of calling in a bogus "hostage situation" (or something similar) to a 911 line -- has been around for a while, but has really taken off recently, especially in connection to online gamers who live stream their games. Some gamers seem to think that it's somehow a fun thing to see a SWAT team raid someone via a livestream video. The excellent podcast "Reply All" recently had a really great episode all about swatting.For years, there have been different questions raised about how to stop such things. Educating police about the practice of swatting is a big one -- so that, at the very least, they have some basic realization that not every such call is a real situation. But, of course, people are always looking for a "complete" solution to the problem, not recognizing that sometimes there are no perfect solutions. Swatting is a monumentally stupid practice. It puts completely innocent people (often including small children) inof being killed. And it's happening enough that rather than being some totally rare occurrence there are semi-regular news stories on it happening. It has all the ingredients of a moral panic, in which people will freak out and demand that "something must be done" and that "something" will likely be some sort of regulation that will have all sorts of unintended consequences.But there does seem to be one solution that isn't even on the table: maybe have fewer SWAT teams and stop arming police like they're in a war zone.Radley Balko has been talking about this stuff for ages, including in his excellent book, Rise of the Warrior Cop . But this idea that arming police ever more heavily as a way to deter or prevent crime doesn't have much support at all. There are very rare instances where the level of militarization of police would ever be necessary (if ever). Yet, when police have such equipment, they inevitably use it whenever an opportunity presents itself.And now, all too often, that "opportunity" is when some teenager makes a prank phone call for laughs, and succeeds in putting real lives in danger. So rather than trying to pass stringent new laws that won't do a damn thing in stopping teenagers from being teenagers, how about we take a step back and perhaps pull back on the idea that we need to arm police to this level in the first place?

Filed Under: militarized police, pranks, swat teams, swatting