The issue isn't with responding, it's that cops love shooting and are poorly trained.

Did I mention that the wanna-be action heroes should be eased out?

Euphemism of the day. I would have preferred "told to get the fuck out", but boats floating and all that...

My dad works in police training and talks a lot about how systemic the violence is within the culture of these departments (this observation was made by training all different departments at all different levels, over years).

And the best part is, they don’t want change and I suspect a lot of them actually enjoy this entrenched Us v. Them position. I probably would too if I had qualified immunity. And a Humvee.

Either way you'll probably end up a statue.

Wtf? They don’t need that at all

I've no idea who is mentally prepared or adequately trained to pull out a gun and tackle a mass shooter, but I'd be very surprised if the overwhelming majority of gun enthusiasts didn't just do something like this in that situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saQ72NZtrS0

The parkland resource officer just got acquitted, partly because he wasn't equipped to rush the attacker.

Militarized police would have no excuse, and would be easy to convict for cowardness.

They'd have the same excuse they have now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...

Then again, if they did change that and use military-style regulations, complete with desertion and cowardice rules, maybe the equivalent of military police (police police?) can stamp out corruption and violence against the public, in the same way that a soldier stealing supplies or deliberately harming civilians would be (should be) punished harshly by a military court.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmerie

Honestly if you like guns, you should really hope you don't get what you're asking for. Because once the inevitable happens and it becomes clear that more guns isn't helping there's only one direction that can go - gun control.

If only we could pinpoint that something. Like if there was a lesson that could be learned from both of those cases, something the USA could take and apply to see a similar decline in such mass shootings …

I suppose you could fix this by making the phone system fully authenticated. DNS predates SS7 and somehow DNSSEC works just fine. So, probably, there is a technical answer that solves both swatting and spam calls and industry will eventually do it. Is anyone working on anything like that now?

Alternatively, you could have police require more confirmation than a phone call before kicking down doors. The police and public seem to both want more door kicking though, and that's unlikely to change. From the article, after they draw guns on you a few times, they do keep the guns holstered and just leave a business card and have a laugh about it. So maybe that's progress.

Or, we could compile a list of everyone we might suspect of swatting, and then raid them! We'll need some more budget, but the boys are getting pretty experienced kicking in doors, so I think they're up to the task. Go get 'em! (I guess? just please make sure it's them).

Yes. Slowly, though, like everything telecommunications. You're starting to see the introduction of Stir/Shaken everywhere. For the last six months, various VoIP providers have announced support because calls will get blocked/cut off without it. The deadline was yesterday, actually. https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication

Now, this doesn't exactly prevent spoofing from carriers not local to the US or from a number mistakenly added to more than one account, or a hacked voip account (surprisingly common), but it does provide an indicator of what might be valid vs invalid for caller ID phone numbers for destinations within the USA.

Now, whether this actually applies to 911 routing is still maybe a bit up in the air given that E911 was already supposed to exist and provide a location. And technically spoofing a SWAT call would only require a prepaid "burner" phone, and often you get caught anyway. The point maybe is to cause mayhem regardless of whether you get caught or not, so it's not clear if spoofing is required to "swat" in every circumstance. But sure, this makes it harder.

Edit: I am unfortunately speaking from experience.

New: The police are my weapon!

   - 911, what is your emergency?
   - Help me oh god! ... My husband he's going crazy he got a shotgun and is threatening to shoot my kids he...
   - [garble garble]
   - [Distant voice of a man] "get the fuck off that phone"
   - [Loud bang]
   - [Line clicks and goes silent]

Though I doubt fake swatting calls are so well produced.

edit: In this situation, whether real or not, obviously the police shouldn't murder people. If this was real, they should first exhaust their non-lethal options for keeping the crazy husband from murdering children. If it's a fake swatting call or the wrong address, they should discover that and especially not murder people. But in response to the parent's point about the police being eager to rush over from a single phone call, this seems like a 20 second phone call where they have no ethical choice but to rush over. How they behave when they arrive is a different topic from what I'm responding to.

Here in the UK the police would rush there without guns. There would be an armed response team to back them up, but only once the threat was confirmed. Maybe the UK just has braver police.

Bit of a smug take coming from a place with fewer guns than people.

One of the cops that responded tried to blame me.

The closest I've ever been to being arrested was when I had to call the cops because I got robbed while at work.

They had footage of another person entering the store and then sprinting out, but the 17 year old nerdy kid was a much easier target.

Never again.

In the end it's a really crappy situation for everyone. Police have to be super alert and are likely jumpy because they expect to be shot dead if they aren't the first to pull the trigger.

Personally I don't really blame the police. Rather I blame the phone industry for giving these callers way too much anonymity. It should be trivial to trace a 911 call to a real paying phone customer. That would make swatting a lot less attractive (assuming it carried a very heavy punishment too).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ODn6wuuVsU

In the Breonna Taylor incident [0], their eyes weren't closed, but they may as well have been:

> Police then fired 32 rounds into the apartment... Cosgrove fired 16 shots from the doorway area... Hankison fired 10 times from outside through a sliding glass door and bedroom window, both of which were covered by blinds or curtains... The officers' shots hit objects in the living room, dining room, kitchen, hallway, bathroom, and both bedrooms.

Now, granted that situation was out of the norm because an occupant of the apartment fired a shot first, since he thought they were being burgled and the police neglected to announce their presence. But that's exactly the kind of situation that could happen in a SWAT raid. Most victims of SWATTing don't expect police to show up to their door, so if they're someone who owns a firearm and they hear a loud bang at the door, they may quite rightfully fire a shot at it in self defense, just like happened in the Taylor residence.

The main lesson there is that it's up to police to properly announce themselves (no-knock raids should never be used in response to an emergency distress call such as the kind that triggers a SWATTing). But even if they announce themselves and receive fire in return, I'd argue they should at least make sure they've sighted a target before they pull the trigger, rather than indiscriminately shooting a volley of bullets through a window like they're some kind of gangster doing a drive by.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor#Shoo...

This reads an assasination attempt by a drug cartel. Which part of this is 'trained proffeshionals'? Which part is reasonable use of force, or restrain to make sure you don't kill rand9m innocent people nearby?

they are not even in the top 20 most dangerous jobs in america.

But that's why training of police is so important, and we as a society need to hold them to an incredibly high standard. But I think it's silly to tell police they shouldn't be jumpy because their occupation is safer than logging/fishing/piloting/roofing/etc.

I'm pretty sure gangsters and drug dealers are the most likely to be shot than any other occupation in the US as they make up the bulk of firearm deaths after accounting for suicides.

I agree they should be trained better and held to a high standard but they simply are not.

[1] https://neuhoffmediaspringfield.com/2021/03/24/study-jobs-yo...

[1] https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...

Their job has risks, they can't just starting shooting first and asking questions because of fear.

Is this one of those fabled edge compute use cases?

Cops aren't liable for shit.

We have real evidence of cops doing fuck all to "save the lives of children" or take "a clear imminent threat to life seriously" just last year in response to a much more credible threat in Uvalde.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...

They're going to wait until the shooter has shot all of the children at least once and run out of bullets before going in.

It's pretty well known that the police have no responsibility to help in a dangerous situation, only to arrest people once the situation has ended

Oh, and even after the shooter had been taken into custody the sheriff still denied access to the scene to emergency medical personnel.

There can't be an excuse for that degree of malicious incompetence but the courts gave them one anyway.

There's a disruption? They show up and un-disrupt it.

"The police" don't show up to calls with reinforced vehicles, ballistic helmets, vests, and shields, and an arsenal of assault weapons to deal with extensive threats. At best, beat cops have an anti-stab vest, a 9mm, a flashlight, and their choice of a shotgun or AR-15 in the car. It takes nothing to gun down a pair of cops.

We expect too much of law enforcement in these situations IMO. The military has intelligence units and recon teams to provide actionable advice. The cops are working with an anonymous call, unknown entities and unknown locations; they have to figure everything out ad-hoc in an urban warfare scenario. It's chaos. Imagine being told you have 5 minutes to introduce a change to a production distributed environment you've never even seen, and either you or an innocent civilian are summarily executed at random for each error you make. Those are the stakes they're working with, and they're nowhere near as smart as you.

Mistakes get made, which is on them, but calling them in as a prank is monstrous for everybody involved. It's just fucking evil.

I think it's also a matter of urban gangsta warfare going on since time immemorial. The organized crime is rampant, and while the races change, the adversaries stay more or less the same. Since the 80s or so, you've had Crips and Bloods and everyone in between, with all their rap-video braggadoccio, ready to have a showdown with police at the drop of a hat. Ice-T, 2Pac, NWA, the flames have been stoked, and I mean, I guess it's not their fault, because it takes two to tango. The police have geared up and gotten ever-more militarized and hostile to ordinary citizens, wielding technology to match. So there's been an escalation.

And that's why we have #BlackLivesMatter today. Not because cops are inherently evil and shooting innocents on purpose, but because both sides have been warring for decades, and that makes for itchy trigger fingers.

So I think if pranksters are misusing SWAT teams for hoaxes and weaponizing them against their Fortnite adversaries, then perhaps it's a wake-up call to have a ceasefire, a disarmament, and both sides (or all sides) to stand down and rethink why we're all here.

"If just the police isn't good enough, we find ourselves further down an unpleasant spiral than we thought we were".

I also agree with the person to whom you're replying though.

[0] https://www.domesticshelters.org/resources/statistics/law-en... [1] https://everytownresearch.org/report/guns-and-violence-again... [2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/mar/15/joe-biden/...

From your source 6 cops died in 2022 due to disorder/disturbance (domestic disturbance, civil disorder, etc.) - so 6 at most. So I don't think it's reasonable to think of that as a "big cause" of police deaths. Also, and this is a personal thing that annoys me, innocent people being shot/killed by police is strictly worse than police being shot/killed. Police are knowingly taking these risks, they're compensated for them, and they are wearing protective equipment. I'd rather a police officer be shot in a domestic dispute than a guy getting shot in a swatting incident.

SWAT does not get called in to every domestic violence call.

The one in discussion isn't a welfare check or noise complaint, it's an angry man with a shotgun in a near-hostage situation. He's already angry, and now threatened by being outnumbered, and knows the night will end with him in jail. Desperation++. You've escalated the situation and increased risk to everyone. This is America, not Japan. When the SWAT team gets involved, it's a disruption tactic to deny him time to think or act.

> I'd rather a police officer be shot in a domestic dispute than a guy getting shot in a swatting incident.

"We won't have your back if you fuck up, and we'll leave you for dead either way" is not a selling point for any career. This one isn't exactly popular to begin with. Without the hero worship, there is little incentive to go into public service. The money is better in the private sector. Ask me how I know.

Firefighters and EMTs don't have to deal with this shit, so nobody has anything bad to say about them. We forgive their mistakes, even when people die.

https://sites.temple.edu/klugman/2020/07/20/do-40-of-police-...

so do we have enough information to determine? or do we need to push for that first.

Ready to endanger the life of children.

There's really no nice way to put this. This phenomenon does not exist in any other country in the world which is not a completely failed state.

And can't law enforcement map that to a physical address within a light speed equivalent amount of time?

Unless a swatter is "the phone call came from inside the house"-ing, it should have been easy to filter out for maybe, conservatively, the last two decades.

To make the above situation even trickier, let's say the homeowners had a landline for years, but just recently switched to a VoIP gateway. Their VoIP gateway operator advertised a feature that their outgoing caller ID will make it look like they're calling from their old number. This is a real and desirable feature for lots of people. I'd rather not have police disregard all calls from VoIP gateways.

But to GP's point, of course what we really need is a genuine verifiable caller ID. Or at least some sort of verification that's instantly available to 911 operators. In this case, the VoIP provider should be able to assert that the call really is coming from that address in a way no one else can spoof.

Similar with prepaid credit cards if memory serves.

Flipside would be: don't use a burner phone/SIM to call 911 - or at least have an alternative method of verifying location / address.

If not there is your problem. Fix the telecom network and prevent all spoofing of numbers.

Would solve lots of other things too

Q: Are the police required to protect you as a specific individual in the United States?

A: No, the police are not required to protect you as an individual in the United States.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columb...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksim_Gelman_stabbing_spree...

And just yesterday the coward that hid outside Parkland High while a mass murder occurred was acquitted: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/6/29/us-officer-foun...

re: Your edit changing ‘liability’ to ‘being berated in the media’

George Floyd was murdered by cops in my city 3 years ago and the entire world heard his name.

A little condescending is OK when someone is posting authoritatively and they’re totally incorrect.

Also the police aren't required to enforce the law

Lol, a wild meme appears.

I think this is just a symptom of having so many weapons around, getting calls about dangerous gun owners is routine and resorting to swat is more "routine" than anywhere else.

Now SWAT teams are used to serve warrants in residential neighborhoods.

ie Please press 4 if you think they have a weapon.

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Welcome to hell.

Of course totalitarians want to solve it by making sure no one can make an anonymous phone call.

This isn't the state proactively keeping tabs on its citizens, it's asking for traceability when somebody initiates an action that might put lives at risk.

It’s like asking the fire department not to show up every time someone pulls a fire alarm in a building. Even if it’s some misbehaving kid who loves pulling the fire alarm, they still have to show up because if they ignore it even once and it happens to be a real fire then people will die.

The alternative is that police come into a scenario potentially unequipped to handle an actual violent situation.

I think the real solution is that SWAT teams need to be especially trained on the fact that swatting is a thing, and to try to recognize when they're in a swatting incident.

Police are now trained to treat EVERY situation as potentially violent, no matter how innocuous or factually safe. They assume everyone they interact with is a lethal threat.

> I think the real solution is that SWAT teams need to be especially trained on the fact that swatting is a thing, and to try to recognize when they're in a swatting incident.

That would require humility, which police don't have, because again they are trained to immediately escalate and use violence to control every situation.

Other countries don't arm every cop all the time, so every encounter isn't a potential standoff. We face every cop knowing that he is jumpy and checking your every move.

That is factually incorrect. 4 in 10 Americans (at most) own guns. Few of them carry them around.

No they don’t, the vast majority (99%?) of police interactions with the public are non-violent. I spoke with a cop in my city who told me that was at a new officer training where 13 out of 15 training scenarios were ‘violent encounters’. The man was a career officer with 25+ years and he said almost every interaction he has with the public is non-violent, and that training cops to expect every encounter to go sideways is creating expectations that don’t match reality. Violent encounters happen, but cops are trained like every interaction is going to turn violent.

Re: on average every American owns a gun

Something like 50% of the guns are owned by 3% of Americans or some ridiculous number. Roughly 1 in 3 adult Americans own guns.

Personally I agree with you that we would be better off without having more guns than people in this country, but reality is reality.

Dangerous for cops or for people? A gang of SWAT cops overreacted to an incident in my town and got scared to the point of shooting 30 rounds from their rifles in an apartment hallway. The bullets went through the walls of 5 apartments, none of which were the one they were responding to.

> potentially unequipped to handle an actual violent situation

Have you seen a cop lately? Like a regular cop on patrol in a cruiser? They are equipped to handle an actual fucking foreign invasion. And they act accordingly. Aside from running into someone armed with a grenade launched, a regular cop in the US is fully equipped to handle 99% of all violent situations.

But yeah, we need to rethink certain police protocols as well...

If the police can be used to commit a crime akin to murder, maybe it's not the criminal we should be worried about so much as the police.

No it doesn't miss any point entirey.

I said

> But yeah, we need to rethink certain police protocols as well...

You can create "zero trust" privacy implementations, but you can't create "zero trust" societies.

On the contrary, a high trust society is a good thing, and something we should strive towards. Getting back to high trust societies will be an incredibly difficult thing though, for various reasons better left for a different conversation.

Ofcourse you can, Russia is a zwr9 trust society. Thats why you cant organise even 3 people to protest without being afraid that someome will rat you outm

Although you could argue its not a society any more.

> he problem arises because society is fundamentally ripping itself apart at the seams, because trust between everyone just keeps dropping lower, while tensions keep rising.

I think that actually shows the problem and solution. If we stop to realize that most people are pretty similar and that your environment plays a huge role, then we have some clear problems and solutions. There are things like us being less communal in person and concentrating into bubbles, but there are bigger issues. Right now we have no trust for our authorities and that's not without good reason. The US has always had a level of distrust, but that is more for a defense mechanism: checks and balances. The fourth and fifth estates.

But there are good reasons to be cynical, not just critical. We've seen our lawmakers diverge from public opinion significantly[0]. We see them being able to play by rules that normal citizens cannot, given them "elite" class status (something antithetical to the founding of the country: no monarchy)[1]. We've seen a growing wealth divide (creating oligarchs or nobles)[2]. And we see an abusive local power structure (police). A big issue is that we can't talk honestly about any of these things because we do divide ourselves into bubbles and are primed to believe anyone slightly deviating from our "correct" opinion is of the other side and so we make sweeping assumptions about their views instead of communicating like fucking adults.

Rome wasn't built in a day, but neither did it collapse overnight. The problems are fixable, but take serious effort, nuance, and long term thinking. Things we generally aren't good at, but also things that separate us from most other animals. We don't need a "zero trust" society, we _need_ trust. Nothing works without trust. But right now we have every reason not to.

[0] You can look at public opinions on a subject and then look at how congress votes on them. This even extra common for the highly debated issues. Look at things like weed legalization, family leave, health care, and more. We often frame things as one of two extremes, but public opinion is often quite okay with something a bit more central, though usually clearly on one side of the isle.

[1] The famous insider trading issue is one. We talk about Pelosi a lot, but she's far from the only one and not even the biggest fish. She's #6 in 2021, just the highest democrat (https://hackernoon.com/members-of-congress-beat-the-snot-out...) (though not as good in 2022: https://unusualwhales.com/politics/article/congress-trading-...). There's other issues, but this is the clearest.

[2] We've just seen an ever increasing growth in the wealth divide. It isn't a "rising tide lifts all ships" situation (like it could be) but that bigger ships are dismantling smaller ones. From 1989 to 2023 (Q1) we've seen the top 0.1% / 99%-99.9% / 90%-99% / 50%-90% / <50% go from 8.6/14.1/37.3/36.2/3.8 to 12.8/18.5/37.7/28.6/2.4 (https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...). That's +4.2% / +4.4% / +0.4% / -7.6% / -1.4%. That's the shrinking middle class, and by a lot! We don't see this in other western countries.

[other note] You don't see violent crimes or petty theft as common in middle or upper class neighborhoods. The reasoning is because there's high cost and low reward. In low income neighborhoods this reverses. Sometimes in this area you have a better economic advantage by joining a gang than getting an actual job. That's clearly an economic failure. Obviously there is far more nuance to these things and can't be just a single comment in isolation, but we should be realizing that there's a chain of events and some complicated interconnections at play. That things aren't "simple" and we need to think deeply instead of quickly.

Sometimes the cop does pull a gun, but it's honestly why this should be attempted murder. How do you blame the cop for pulling the gun on someone who was reported to already have killed 4 people and said they were going to kill another. The alternative is basically ignoring all threats pretending they're fake, putting the cops lives in danger in a real situation.

That's an odd take. What would a college degree bring to the table for a regular beat cop/patrolman?

> showing up at your door with military surplus equipment wanting to play hero

What education level do you think a typical military service member has to wield the same equipment?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232726/education-levels-...

Also, US Army Infantry training is only 22 weeks long.

And all that to get on the street without a gun. To get a gun you need another half to one year of on the street training.

But the problem is the gun ho culture. Here are some on the news examples.

a) there is an armed robbery with an ak-47: US go in and start a gun fight, EU/Greece: tell everyone to let the robbers go and note the license plate, catching them a few hours later with no shots fired;

b) person wants to commit suicide by cop, everyone else has left the building: U.S. cops rush in blind, get shot and kill the guy; Greece: there is nothing really equivalent, cops just try to get a psychologist and stay away;

And if the cops shoot someone the public disagrees with, expect weeks of lynching and rioting.

c) mental I'll person with a gun: U.S.: full escalation and long gunfight; Greece: in front of the parliament: chat de-escalation no shot fired by anyone.

Comments are yours.

P.S. (And gun ownership has nothing to do with it. Where I am from there is practically WWII weaponry -- minus the tanks -- everywhere. People learn to shoot really young and keep it up.)

Bad policing in the USA gets attention from around the world. Good policing in the USA gets none. Your comments betray a deep ignorance of policing challenges in the USA.

As a word of advice, commenting on domestic political issues of foreign nations often causes one to appear quite foolish, due to a lack of understanding the constituent factors.

Cops are expected to be able to descalate situations, identify suspicious situations, in theory behave in accordancd with the rule of law and limitations on police force, and much more. These all seem like things that could be in a degree program.

I’m not saying the theory is not important - I just don’t see how years of theoretical study is warranted

I’m not saying we need 10+ years of study, but at least a bachelors focused on civics and humane treatment + a psych evaluation would do wonders to clearing out abusers.

Being a street cop is not.

But if you hire an untrained one, or one that only learned on the job, you'll have a way, way worse end result than if you hire a formed one (or it will take trice the time and double the materials, if I listen to my father's stories). Two years is enough for low-level workers, i'd guess 3 to 4 should do the work for the police (considering it's 6 to 8 years and a masterwork for compagnons, pro woodworkers/upholsterers would still be better trained than police).

Cops in pretty much any developed country go through one to four years of training. Most give trainees extra points for related studies, like law or criminology. South Korea, for example, has a police university.

Then you have places like the US, where training plus probation time is, on average, less than a year.

I’m not saying that it would make US police necessarily better, but it is clear that they need better, harder, and more comprehensive training, given the current state of affairs.

My main gripe is that over the last 40 years we have worked hard to force people to get college degrees even for work were on the job training produce more competent individuals.

I don't know about others professions a lot since I only met a US woodworkers/carpenter, but I'm pretty sure others would be a bit ashamed comparing an out-of school French/Swiss compagnon to any woodworker with less than 30 years of experience. The one I met was ashamed that an formed upholsterer was more precise and knew more about angles than him, despite him being 24 years older (and at that time, my father wasn't working in construction at all).

In fact, considering the number of 'X-doing American react to X in Europe' video, you might find one showing exactly how your carpenters aren't that good (or at least, those working in WV/Ohio, the US is a big country).

Soldiers aren’t armed in the normal course of a day on base.

Massive difference.

Fact is American police are under-trained and over-armed.

Because Reasons, it's become expected that anyone capable of getting a college degree will get one. Which in turn means that not having one gets used as a signal of not being able to get one.

The push to stop listing a degree in job postings that don't actually use one is partly intended to correct this.

Meanwhile, the UK is moving to a model that requires the equivalent of a three-year undergraduate in policing[0]. Also the po-po there generally don't have guns.

0: https://www.prospects.ac.uk/jobs-and-work-experience/job-sec...

    You can choose to undertake a three-year Level 6 degree apprenticeship, which involves both on and off-the-job training. As with other apprenticeships, you'll earn while you learn and upon successful completion of the programme, you'll have finished your probation as a police constable and will have achieved the BSc Professional Policing Practice.

Looks appopriate though.

Basic Constable here is two years - six month coursework, 18 month probie.

https://www.jobsandskills.wa.gov.au/jobs-and-careers/occupat...

Sure, medical degrees include time in hospitals after the basics are completed, etc .. all that aside this really does read like a (good) trade apprenticeship program - time split between course work and supervised practice, which I agree with.

But a Bachelor of Science equivilent undergrad degree?

Apparently technically yes .. but that does seem a stretch.

[1] https://youtu.be/0bNy7XO-SCI?t=23

I'm sure there are situations where a swat team is genuinely needed, but I'm also sure those cases make up an extremely small percentage of the times they're actually used. In any case, if police are called out to an innocent person's house and they kill the innocent people there it shows pure incompetence on the part of the officers involved. A little restraint and a lot more training would probably go a long way to preventing tragedy.

If only there was some way to make sure people didn't just have access to the weapons they need to successfully perpetrate a hostage situation... almost as if the glorification of weapons and the military is at the core of this eh?

the number of stories that I read per day about bad police officers is insane.

there are too many people in law enforcement positions because they want authority and power over others.

lately I find myself believing that anyone who desires to be in law enforcement should be forbidden from ever having authority over anyone, in any form.

Do you ever read stories about good police officers? Are such stories so scandalous they can sell advertising space en masse?

I think that your wording implies an accidental oversight.

Practically no other profession gets such exceedingly positive and prolific press for doing the most charitable version of their job description. You never see stories like “trash collector relieves neighborhood of unwanted refuse without crushing anyone in the compactor”, even though their job is more dangerous and much less controversially beneficial to society.

The reason there’s even an appetite for “stories about good police officers” is specifically as a counterpoint to the continuous story of cops behaving badly, either by their direct action or pointed inaction, or by their collective activity to protect other cops from scrutiny when they directly do harm.

If cops want a better rep, they could be more deserving by not doing bad things and protecting other cops who do the same. If they don’t want to do that professionally (understandably! actually good cops are afraid of retaliation, or become afraid when they exercise their principles and find out what the consequences entail), they are always welcome to leave the profession.

Admittedly there should be a better support system for cops who want to change careers for these reasons. But there isn’t a lot of demand for that so

I could do 10 really nice things a day for you all week long, but if on Saturday I rape your whole family you're not going be happy with me. This isn't about keeping score, it's about making sure that things that should never happen don't, and that when things do go wrong the police are held accountable for their actions, and meaningful steps are taken to prevent situations like that from happening again. Cops don't get to save up enough "nice points" that they still get our support after they murder one of us and get away with it again, and again, and again.

Once the problems that allow the abuses by police to persist start to be addressed trust between the police and the people they've been abusing will improve, but until that happens, the "good cops" who are sitting in a barrel full of rotten apples will just have be patient with us when we're embittered and skeptical after seeing example after example, week after week, of what the "bad cops" have been doing.

We can both have a perception bias AND have the system be corrupt. I'm pretty confident that this is the situation we're on. If you want to get nuanced, let's. But comments like these are swinging too far in the opposite direction, hand waving away objectively terrible things. If it is bad, it is bad. Doesn't matter if 1% of officers or 100%, the incidents are still bad and should be dealt with accordingly.

Would it be possible for some random evil asshat to execute violence via swatting if the swat police wasn't so trigger happy?

No?

Then maybe swat is the big problem.

You really don't hear about swatting being a thing in the UK because the police don't have nearly the same level of license and impunity for violence. So everytime there is such an incident it's national news.

The by far most common crime involving cops and phones is to call elderly people pretending to be cops to extort money. They usually spoof the caller ID of the local PD or even the emergency number itself in some cases.

Oh, yeah, SWAT teams are violent toward and kill innocent people.

That would seem to be a key issue that warrents some degree of blame.

This is ridiculous.

The ADL says that 1 out of 9 teens have been a victim of a false-alarm SWAT raid. I know the US has over-militarized its police force but…come on.

And reading their source, it actually says that 5% of adults say they’ve been swatted in their lifetime.

I’ve been missing out.

> Over the past year, online hate and harassment rose sharply for adults and teens ages 13-17.

> What might be behind these alarming results? Hateful rhetoric from political leaders, celebrities, and other public figures often spurs online hate, just as online hate can often spur offline harm.

> The annual online hate and harassment survey of American adults is conducted on behalf of ADL by YouGov, a public opinion and data analytics firm. The survey examines American adults’ experiences with and views of online hate and harassment. A total of 2,139 completed surveys were collected [...]

Even if it was 1:10,000 you'd see like 4200 teens swatted. Back of the napkin math would mean roughly 1:10 SWAT calls are pranks. I kinda doubt that too.

1 in 9 lunacy. If 1 in 9 teens got swatted it would be a huge deal. (for a good time let chatgpt + wolfram do all the calculations and start comparing to the 240 million 911 calls made each year... you'd be looking at 1 in 100 911 calls being swat pranks....

1 in 9 is pretty insane, if that's actually reality there's gotta be some extreme compounding factors influencing it.

The other explanation is that the data is heterogeneous but then that means we have an aggregation error. That also isn't great either, especially since it means the problem is potentially even larger, but only affecting a specific group.

Either way, not good.

Nope.

https://snipboard.io/BCkmKf.jpg literally what it says on the tin. The only issue I can imagine is that the sample size is 550 respondents and study recruitment was biased ("hey wanna fill out a survey about online harassment?" imagine the odds you'll respond if you've been swatted vs. if you haven't had any negative experiences; and/or the link was shared among specific communities).

Online self-reporting is also prone to multiple responses from the same person, straight up prank entries, or honest misreadings of questions.

Edit: also, 13% says they "were exposed to" the topic of QAnon on the Internet in the past 12 months, 29% to anti-vax movement, etc. I guess the remaining three quarters just hasn't used the Internet outside of chatting with their family and looking up recipes? Interesting study on how not to run studies.

¹ PDF download (:/) https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2023-06/Online-... page 23

How much are we spending each year on this farce of an organization? The fact that they are only figuring this out now exemplifies how clueless they are.

[0] https://insidehook.com/article/crime/brief-history-swatting

They all appear similar because that's how the FBI operates and their MO.

EDIT: Maybe at first you are allowed to opt-out of registration if you are weird about privacy but they won't be able to tell so easily if you are getting swatted or not.

I think phones are better for that. Everyone is carrying one and I think there are already message protocols where some government alerts are sent to everyone? Like missile warnings or some emergency situation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

https://www.cato.org/blog/nearly-third-gen-z-favors-home-gov...

Yes I know, Cato institute, but scary poll results none the less.

Man is it hard to take such a survey in good faith when you read things like that…

Cash allows for anonymous, nearly untraceable financial transactions. CBDCs keep a record of all transactions and like cameras in our houses, they allow the government to spy into our personal lives for "the greater good", "stopping terrorists", or "think of the children".