Serial swatter who caused death gets five years in prison

Re:Serial swatter who caused death gets five years in prison by tptacek on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @05:19PM (#27912352)

In the real cases where distress calls are made to the police, which must far, far outnumber "swattings", it's often the case that all the available "evidence" is contained in the phone call, which may itself be made under duress and with limited time. The police cannot reasonable dispatch a detective to look into the circumstances of a distress call.

Nobody busted down the doors here; in fact, in no US swatting fatality have the police ever busted doors down.

"First do no harm" is not a universal norm. It applies to medicine because so much of what happens in medicine is in some sense elective; there is an option not to intervene. No such option exists in distress call situations.

I don't think axiomatic reasoning is going to solve the problem of swatting. It's also noteworthy that, even in this case, it wasn't just the police who were tricked into intervening; the swatters got a strange man to break into the victim's house by spoofing messages on Grindr.

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Re:Serial swatter who caused death gets five years in prison by gpm on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @05:36PM (#27912518)

If the police can afford to dispatch a team of people with guns, and enough cars to fill up the street (in this case), they can afford to dispatch people to investigate. I do not accept your assertion to the contrary as true. It is the case that investigating instead of immediately reacting might allow crimes to occur that could have been prevented, but it seems to me to be what the constitution demands.

Certainly there have both been cases were US police busted doors in response to swatting, e.g. [1] and killed someone in response to swatting, e.g. [2]. Admittedly I'm not sure if they ever happened simultaneously, nor do I think that's relevant to any of the points I have made. The points I made were

- People have been killed while attempting to comply with police orders, which incidentally [2] is an example of (as well as an example of swatting).

- Busting doors during actual hostage situations would get people killed, not swatting. [3] is a particularly powerful example of that...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVkQ-yheOEE

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wichita-officer-who-kil...

[3] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/video-four-dead-in-p...

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Re:Serial swatter who caused death gets five years in prison by tptacek on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @06:18PM (#27912903)

No, they can't. The resource they're limited on isn't money, it's time. The window of time they have to respond to a genuine distress call is very small.

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