How is "someone called" enough evidence to enter peoples homes and arrest them?
These officers should lose their job,So (not so) fun fact: Keffals, who was targeted by KiwiFarms for being trans (yes that's all) and got Swatted. She then went to stay with another streamer (EllenFromNowOn) in Northern Ireland. Just for information sake, Northern Ireland is still a bit rocky security wise, Police there still carry guns on the regular. So when she went there, Ellen called up the police and explained the situation to them (they had never heard of Swatting weirdly enough).
Sure enough, someone found her flat, posted her address (with a message referencing a Unionist Slogan, Ellen was from the Catholic Community), and sure enough, the police came. Instead of raiding her all guns blasing (which they normally would) they saw the warning, knocked on the door, saw nothing was wrong, called off the squaddies, and came in to basically make sure everything was okay.
Bare in mind, this was in Northern Ireland, a place where the Police still drive Armored cars and have regular riots, and they handled this better than the Police in London, Ontario.
Yeah the cops on this side of the pond are crazy, and their leadership staff tend to fall a lot further into the “complete psycho” side of the human spectrum.
Thanks for sharing that story though - the dichotomy is absolutely fucking wild, especially considering we’re talking about Northern Ireland.
Keffals has a bit of a bad stink around her online presence. I think she claimed to be posting sex hormones to underage people at one point, without any kind of medical license. One of the ecelebs on the weirder side of the terminally online subculture.
Obviously no one should ever be swatted. Wanted to mention that she is somewhat controversial though as opposed to a regular activist.
Well, I guess if someone calls and says you have kidnapped a little girl and that they have seen you with a gun, the police can't take a chance that it's hoax. All phone numbers that call the police should be logged and if it turns out to be a hoax, traced, so people who make hoax calls can be arrested and prosecuted.
They are logged, but swatting people get around it. They are suspicious “looking” calls, but so are bomb threats.
Swatting is pretty much always a blocked number to a non-emergency line. If they are traced it is typically one of those free online voip services. It takes work and access to really get from A to B, which is why it only happens when there are awful results.
In the US at least, 911 gets special access and calling it will always get you to your local dispatch (unless you have voip with the wrong account address). Non-emergency is just a normal phone number. If someone wants to call from out of the area or hide their number, non-emergency is how they have to do it. This is suspicious because in a real situation like “I just shot my dad” or whatever they say, nobody is taking time to look up non-emergency.
Someone calls an emergency number and says "My husband has a knife and he's threatening to kill me!"
Should the operator say "nothing we can do until you provide provide me with some evidence, ma'am" ?
If this is legal then it's a giant gaping loophole in the system. Not just because it's easy to harass someone but because it sounds incredibly easy for a cop to call in an "anonymous tip" on someone they suspected of wrongdoing but had no evidence to support it. I'm almost positive the Supreme Court has even held that evidence that was gathered in the course of raiding the wrong building is legal as it's an "honest mistake".
In the comments the victim said that the police said it were two emails they got. Not even a call.
I knew these Knowbe4 trainings would end badly! /s
How often does it end up saving peoples lives though?
He probably wasn't arrested. It sounds like the police handcuffed him while checking whether he was indeed alone and then asked about what he was doing at his computer. After he explained, they asked him to turn off the stream, at which point I would assume he was freed again.
I assume they went on to explain the situation and then questioned him. If there is no evidence of any crime, they will just take his personals so they can contact him on any development. He is the victim of a crime after all.
Man the audacity of that though, they came into his house, interrupted his evening and then asked him to turn off the stream that he's doing. All while he didn't actually do anything wrong.
The entitlement is insane.
This is such an obviously dumb take its unbelievabe anyone would come up with it. Ofcourse the cops need to respond to a call of someone claiming to be assaulted/abused/murdered. There is no issue with this at all. The issue that CAN arise is that bad police training might lead to someone getting actually hurt in a raid like this. But thats an entirely different issue.
To make more money for the weapons manufacturers.
SWAT teams didn't always exist. Many would argued they should not exist. But if they no longer exited, police would spend less money in military style equipment.
Police don't care if SWATing is harming people. They just need to keep their expenses high, and SWAT teams are great for that.
I strongly disagree with this. Police should be given permission to do these things. Very rapidly with little evidence so long as they're handled right.
In fact, this is one of those cases where it looks like it was handled right. He went to the door, came in, and it sounds like they were invited in. He was not arrested immediately and thrown to the ground. Yes it sucks, But there are very much very many cases where it is absolutely necessary.
Rather than them not being able to do it, I absolutely believe they should be allowed to do it. Just be more strict on how it's handled.
I guess Microsoft is stepping up their campaign against OSS.
/s I know it's a bad joke. MS contributes a lot to OSS. It would have worked better in the Ballmer era.
Buy 'em out, boys!
You don't think I got this rich by writing checks, do you?
Microsoft really is getting worse.
Really hope they find the caller and bring him to court. I mean both streamer and police are the victims here.
At least it hasn't been a actual SEK unit (SWAT in Germany) they look more like normal patrol officers. But nevertheless it's unacceptable.
Fucking hell
Google en peasant
En passant you mean? Also what does that have to do with anything?
Well, I at least chuckled.
No :)
I think this is more than just two pawns flirting, this is the queen torpedoing in from an angle to take down a castle, bulldozing any innocent pawns she hits along the way.
PIPI brick 🪱🧱
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fmhall | github
rust Vs c drama getting out of hand
Isn't it amazing how you can "SWAT" (from the looks of it that weren't special forces btw.) someone by knocking on the door, instead of blasting through it and charging in, ready to shoot anything that moves?
That's something you can do if you don't have to be afraid of shotguns and full-auto rifles when going into random people's houses.
If they don't have to worry about guns, then why do they have guns drawn?
Because they worry about any other weapon? Or the extremely rare case that someone actually has a highly dangerous fire arm? My point is that they can have much less drastic standard procedures (and equipment), because the standard scenario of operation is significantly less threatening.
There are special forces that get involved with the real shit. But the bar for real shit here is someone has any gun.
Guns aren't the only thing that can cause bodily harm.
Probably helps add a certain gravitas.
Ah yes the solution is more guns
It works for me
Well he did say it wasn't a good website. You really think they're just going to take the criticism?
Microsoft CodeCop does not mess about but in fairness he was using identical names for local and global variables.
This was truly a wtf moment of the month.
Last time I spent time watching him was when he freaking fixed the kexec syscall for IBM PowerPCs. for free
Only because he had no windows
Developing Linux is so punk rock 🤘
This entire thread is just memes instead of discussion. This feels like peak reddit shittery.
Acab
How the fuck can Swatting be such a common thing in America. I have never heard about it in any other country.
(This is, of course, a rhetorical question. I know the answer is that American police is beyond incompetent.)
Edit: Oops, read comments below
Did you even try to watch the clip? It's not even in the US! This is the scary part.
This is always felt really weird to me in general because on one hand you do have a lot of over aggressive police officers in the States but on the other hand you also have a lot of police officers who are like been through the drill and are just calm as fuck about it.
I feel like the immediate pucker factor would be nine times higher if you're in the States, but then it either goes to shit real fast or settles down real fast.
This would be a great comment if this was America...
As others mentioned, this isn't America. Also, fraudulent calls to emergency services is a criminal offense, people who do this are usually charged and fined, or even given jail time. It's not like it's accepted or mainstream behavior, people just do stupid things and when combined with stupid cops it has led to tragic outcomes. In this video they seem to show up, which they HAVE to do, place the occupant in precautionary detainment, verify there is no crime underway, and release him. They would probably then take a statement, then the next thing would be to get a warrant for the call records and charge the dipshit that started the incident.
Its not incompetence. Its by design. The more SWAT goes out, the more they're justified. SWAT teams exist to increase the spending of police. Those expenditures go to military contractors.
Its the same reason the US is ceaselessly involved in war since WW2. For money.
