> if the person has no prior criminal record what are you doing bringing the SWAT team out?
I believe the usual technique is to say you say two armed people enter the house followed by a scream/shout. You want to convince the police there are heavily armed hostage takers - hence the SWAT response.
Do you know what SWAT responses entail? It's kick down the door, assault rifles and body armor, shoot if you perceive a threat level response. Police shoot swatting targets sometimes because they have itchy trigger fingers.
You can start by imagining how traumatic is it to have a huge team of armed men break into your home and violently restrain you or a loved one. If you've been SWATted you don't know why these people are there. Heck even if you recognize they're SWAT, you're not going to have any clue if they really are or of they're people posing as SWAT to kidnap you for ransom or worse.
Also that SWAT team isn't just going to come in, realize you're not armed, and laugh at the situation before letting you go. For all they know, you are as dangerous as the person who called in said and were just putting on an act when you saw the SWAT team roll up. So now you're at least going to deal with questioning which is going to be extremely difficult to deal with in a state of panic and confusion.
And no, it's very unlikely that the SWAT team would be held responsible for anything. Police have too much protection against that. To spin it for them, they were operating in good faith on the assumption that they needed to raid the house in the manner they did otherwise people would die.
SWAT makes a courtesy knock then they ram the door open and throw flashbangs before they burst in with their fingers on the trigger and take you down by force.
If this is the police response you think is appropriate for the vast majority of police calls then I think you should reevaluate your country of residence.
I was a victim of a swatting in July 2019. Someone called 911 and said a man was threatening a woman with a gun at my address. Police showed up, told me to put my hands up at gunpoint, cuffed me, searched my house and then left like nothing happened.
There needs to be a better process for handling these calls. Just call the person at the address, or approach and use a loudspeaker or something. Walking out my front door to a bunch of guns pointed at me was the worst experience of my life.
For the moment, replace "swatting" with bona fide criminals behind the door. If the swat teams ended up killing some of those criminals that wouldn't be evidence of over-aggression on the part of law enforcement.
Since you posit that "gun drawn" is the reasonable response to swatting, then the same logic applies. You're obligated to continue wearing your devil mask for that sentence, so you have to explicitly argue why that isn't the case. :)
>call 911 immediately and negotiate compliance over the phone
I'm with you until that part. For one thing, many SWATings result in no-knock entries - even if you're prostate and facing away, holding and manipulating a phone, and/or continuing to talk through a phone instead of responding to the verbal commands of the assault officers are both Bad Ideas imo.
In this case the man left his house with a firearm and the police did not shoot him — he had a heart attack. The harassment in this case was not just SWAT-ing, but also ordering pizzas, harassing relatives, etc.
Unfortunately, harsh sentencing and tougher enforcement/legal action against the perpetrators is probably the only way to stop the issue.
This is the correct response. Yeah, sure, tactics could change to “analysis before action” but then you lose responsiveness when you need it most. Maybe there’s a balance, but I don’t think it’s worth it. The real answer is to litigate the fuck out of any dipshit who commits the act of “swatting.” It really is like starting a fire, the potential damage is immense.
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