376 points

How is “someone called” enough evidence to enter peoples homes and arrest them?
These officers should lose their job,

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380 points
*

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.

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168 points

As an American, I read this, and it made me me want to cry

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102 points

As an American reading this, I kept wondering when the mayhem and death would occur.

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70 points

As an American, this line short circuited my brain:

Police there still carry guns on the regular

I live in a quiet but growing suburban town that’s closer to rural areas than the nearest city. When I walk my kid to elementary school (how European of us, lol) the police officer working as a crossing guard for the kids still has their gun, taser, bulletproof vest, and all their other gear on.

And it’s not a school-specific thing. You just never see cops without their weapons here. Armed and armored is just part of the uniform, essentially.

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66 points
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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.

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9 points

How often are police tipped off before hand that someone is anticipating being SWATed though?

That situation is practically unheard of so it’s impossible to know how police in the US would respond.

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22 points

How on earth are these psychos able to find streamers’ actual addresses?

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17 points

In the US, property records are public records. Easy to find someone’s address online if you know their full name and the county they own property in.

Go try it!

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2 points

Oh there’s several ways, especially if you have poor opsec. People used to raid people’s twitch accounts and bring down their internet connections by looking for their username on Skype which had a vulnerability which they could use to find a person’s IP.

For swatters on the otherhand, they tend to either know the streamer themselves or they tend to be groups like KiwiFarms who are a lot more organised and do a lot of research and detective work, like looking at the video, looking for usernames elsewhere, looking for emails, and looking for location clues. It’s really fucked up. They found Keffels’s Motel by the sheets in her room. It’s bad enough if you do not think about these things and just have sloppy OpSec, but even if you do, they can still find you.

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17 points

Regular riots in Northern Ireland. ?

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4 points

I mean, there were riots last month and then the last time I recall riots before then was 2019 when the journalist was shot. There might be more inbetween I’ve forgotten but a cadence of 5 years is more than the ~10 year cadence for mainland UK (which is culturally very similar). Sectarian tensions have died down in the past 20 years - my sister is currently in Belfast and loving it - but they still exist and have deep roots.

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1 point

A lot more regularly that they do in the rest of the UK.

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8 points

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.

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1 point

what’s underage for hrt? like… 12?

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105 points
*

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.

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64 points

If they enter his home, and there is no evidence of a crime, then what is the basis for the arrest?
One thing is to investigate the truth of a call, another is to act on it as if it’s verbatim truth.

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70 points

Usually swat teams break a lot of your shit, maybe kill a baby, and then leave without arresting you.

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33 points

Was he arrested? I don’t see follow up. It only says he was handcuffed which would be standard until they know what’s going on.

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13 points

It’s not technically an arrest. In a high-stakes call, the police will typically detain everybody until they can figure out what’s going on. That means potential victims as well as potential attackers. It’s a safety measure.

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0 points

There was no arrest.

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47 points

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.

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55 points

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” ?

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21 points

Lmao the cops take four hours to send someone then say she was just being dramatic in that scenario

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4 points

Pics or it didn’t happen, would be what I’d say…

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5 points

Well the cops might be taking pics of a dead body the next day. So then they could say “yeah we probably should’ve responded to that one last night, but we just couldn’t risk that it might’ve been one of the 0.01% of these calls where it turns out it’s an internet swatting thing.”

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-12 points

This is a bad faith straw-man argument that pretends there are no other options than what you’ve presented. Weak.

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12 points

That’s how swatting works though. They don’t just call 911 and say “send police to this place” lol.

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46 points

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”.

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34 points

In the comments the victim said that the police said it were two emails they got. Not even a call.

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10 points

I knew these Knowbe4 trainings would end badly! /s

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21 points

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.

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19 points
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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.

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20 points

How often does it end up saving peoples lives though?

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11 points
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I don’t know - but I’m willing to get the instances where people were saved weren’t calls from anonymous voip numbers.

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5 points
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Not sure why your intuition would go there, I can imagine situations where the caller would feel/be threatened if they didn’t remain anonymous. After hearing about people suing for helping them in emergency situations and police abusing people’s rights to get evidence then if I felt I had to report something I’d want to remain anonymous.

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-4 points

If there is a serious situation like human trafficking then it makes more sense. Also if they might blow down the door in a drug bust

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@possiblylinux127 @tabular , well, regarding a married couple I know, the wife was away taking care of her granddaughter for a bit, came back to her husband having sketchy people in their home while she was gone. The wife wanted the police to sweep the house for drugs and alleged these people probably brought drugs in their home. The police said there was nothing they can do. Lovely double standards.
Edit: Also, you could smell the pot off the people easily. They were definitely stoned.

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10 points

The legal standard in the U.S. is if there’s exigent circumstances. Detailed 911 calls are typically sufficient to meet that standard. Not always.

Right now, we cannot tell if the officers did anything unlawful. Need the call recording or call logs, plus the body cameras.

(I think the exigent circumstances standard is BS, easily abused, but that is the current law of the land.)

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12 points

This happened in germany though

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4 points

I know. And many of the comments are coming from the US, so I’m trying to help American readers see what US law would dictate in a similar situation, because they might have instincts that are inconsistent with US law.

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6 points
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Removed by mod
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38 points

“check it out” does not involve handcuffs.

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-20 points
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Removed by mod
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2 points

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.

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21 points

Ofcourse the cops need to respond

Yes, but then there’s the matter of HOW they respond.

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5 points

Which is what i adressed in the comment…

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-1 points

If you have reason to believe someone is in mortal danger, your response shouldn’t be to mail a letter giving them 30 days to respond.

You send police to the scene where they secure the potential suspect and make sure there’s nothing going on.

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2 points

Did he state he was arrested? Title just says cuffed.

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2 points

I thought it was the same. Maybe just a language barrier.

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4 points

Cuffed would be more like detained. Not free to leave, because they’re actively investigating, but no charges are being presented. Literally just placed in cuffs while the police do their snooping.

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-5 points
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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.

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-28 points

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.

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18 points

Maybe this was done properly, but I was thrown off by the handcuff bit, here it’s not normal to handcuff somebody who cooperates.

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-24 points

To be clear, handcuffing does not mean you’re being arrested, it means you’re being detained. It’s not about them getting you ready to take you away. It’s about them verifying that you’re not a threat.

Whatever the claim was, whatever the claim was. Being bogus obviously, but it was bad enough that the police felt they had the need to break in and clear before proceeding any further, which means they were probably told he was a threat.

I always felt like people put too much stock into being handcuffed or not, yet it sucks. I’ve been handcuffed before, In a similar but not nearly as severe circumstance.

It’s not meant as a punishment. It is just protecting the officers who arrive on scene because yes, people do cooperate and then they pull out of knife or gun and try to kill the first responders.

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3 points
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If someone starting swatting the extended family of local police chiefs I’d be willing to bet that even the police unions would be calling for an end to these types of raids, regardless of how they were handled.

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2 points

What do estimate the percentage of these calls are some internet loser swatting someone rather than it being a legitimate report of domestic violence? You may be underestimating the number of actual domestic violence situations where the police need to intervene be a few orders of magnitude.

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-1 points

That’s quite possible, probably even quite likely. It doesn’t make it right.

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332 points

Some people take tabs vs spaces too seriously.

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55 points

If your front door gets kicked in, this is why.

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24 points

That’s right kids. To avoid this situation be sure to use tabs for indentation.

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2 points

The only indentation method that the viewer has control on how big they want it.

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-16 points

please just use spaces, it makes everything easier

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18 points

How?

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2 points

same width for all setups

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189 points

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.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

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24 points

Buy 'em out, boys!

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3 points

You don’t think I got this rich by writing checks, do you?

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96 points

Microsoft really is getting worse.

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86 points

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.

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18 points

Narrator voice: they didn’t

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15 points
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Removed by mod
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3 points

Swatting in Europe isn’t really virulent as police agencies have safeguards against false calls. There was a case of high-profile swatting in the UK, cops softly banged the door and didn’t brandish the guns so fast unlike in America.

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