So many replies here are blaming the police but despite how screwed up the situation is there isn’t much they can do. Not responding to a swat call is not really an option with the way the system is setup.
We can all say “well, if you get many calls about one location, maybe you should stop showing up” but wtf are you supposed to do if a real crime is being committed? The same couple getting swatted one day could get criminals breaking in another, possibly for the same reason even. How can you make the call not to show up if your entire existence and role in society is to show up?
What real solutions are there?
Edit: a bunch of identical responses to this comment with "just don't show up". I know it's easy to sit and judge from the comfort of your keyboard, but do a little bit of thinking. What should the rule be? When is it okay for police to receive a distress call and not show up in actual reality with actual lives at stake? Who's responsible for the consequences of not showing up?
Edit2: now people switched to "show up, but softer, knock on the door". Now we can agree, because this comment is about showing up, not about specifics. Yeah, more considerate approach is warranted. To be clear, I agree that police should be punished for violating laws and conduct policies. Yet there is the other side of it, there's still an alert and it could still be real. Police still have to be mind-f'ed into figuring out every time if there's real danger or not.
Edit3: People who say "police can catch the callers" and suggest other triumphant movie-esque feats make me feel like we need an article "Falsehoods programmers believe about police".
After the first 40 false calls about that address they should probably perform at least 5 minutes of investigation to try to verify if there are actually any signs that a real crime being committed. That kind of "police work" where you figure out who is in the home and what is happening is pretty important.
At the very least if they want to keep violating the rights of the people in their home by breaking in, after seeing that there's no obvious signs of crime they should probably not immediately drag people outside naked and handcuffed.
I'll give these cops some credit though, at least they managed to raid the correct house 55 times in a row. I don't know who trained these SWAT officers to read house numbers, but they should probably pass that info along considering the countless stories of police raiding the wrong home.
This police work should be happening all the time, I agree, but it cannot happen during a swat call (there isn't enough time). And if it doesn't yield results, are you to stop showing up?
I mean, yes? After repeated swattings you should at the very least limit your response to driving by to have a look around. Maybe peak into some windows. Maybe see who is in the house and where they are (https://www.policemag.com/articles/first-look-seeing-through...). At most knock on the door politely, apologize profusely for the interruption, explain that you know about the swatting situation and ask if you can take a quick peak around to make sure that nobody is actually holding a bunch of hostages just for the report.
They can always reevaluate the practice if it suddenly becomes commonplace for normal people who have never been a problem before to swat themselves 40 times all so they can finally carry out a real kidnapping in peace.
For starters, in the general case, try having a larger threshold to go in guns blazing, like trying to verify with the residents first, or just knocking on their door normally to address whatever it was instead of a full on raid. The trauma of being subjected to a SWAT raid is obvious, so they should recognize that and more properly balance it with the harm of not doing one, rather than simply doing it.
Looking at the article's specifics for this specific situation, some options are:
- don't violate the constitutional rights of the victims as a court ruled retroactively happened in this case
- ensure that all officers are professional, as the article says that only some were
- add them to the swatting house list
- have basic dignity, like facilitating the person covering up instead of cuffing them naked on the curb; police and prisons seem especially happy to engage in forced nudity in a general case -- it's part of a concerningly high fraction of police abuse news
Oh, you’re right. The US has gun rights so the only sane thing to do is for law enforcement to smash through the same home weekly heavily armed with guns whenever there’s an anonymous tip with no corroborating evidence. There are no better ways to spend law enforcement budget in a city like Milwaukee.
All the commenters responding to you are so clueless that they can’t see there are no better systems from a cost benefit analysis. Law enforcement is barred by the laws of man and physics from taking prior history into account when assessing risks and every repeated tip of violent crime without any evidence must necessarily be responded to as legitimate at a level requiring military style intervention on the basis of anonymous testimony. There are just no better approaches
Iceland and Finland have only 4x fewer guns per capita and they don't have this problem. It's a big absolute number difference, but effectively means the availability is still really widespread.
Unfortunately this problem is pretty widespread. The typical solution is for the victim to establish a relationship with the PD which enables the PD to quickly confirm the report with the victim via an alternate channel prior to dispatch. I suspect this is what households with private security put in place. The ultra-wealthy and super-prominent politicians seem to avoid swatting despite drawing more public ire than Patrick Tomlinson.
This is an amazing top comment. Like maybe almost anything. So many better options. For one if I were the subject of this harassment I would prefer the cops to never come.
Attempting to target a person that is being harassed is a great way to end up under a tombstone. Swatters are scared ass punks that play games with other peoples lives and not their own.
All you're saying is that likelihood of swatters committing additional crime is low, but there is still likelihood. There can be others taking advantage of this situation (or also mad at the couple), who are in fact willing to commit more serious crimes.
Serious crimes are generally a low percentage stat in society overall, which is part of the reason why it's so hard to judge "oh, this isn't serious". Most police encounters aren't, except the ones that are.
Swatters are little bitches on the internet in some other state hiding behind proxies, not some hardened criminals.
Going to peoples houses and committing crimes is a risky proposition that could end up with you injured or dead. Hence why these types play games with law enforcement to put other peoples lives in danger rather than their own.
I can't understand why so many people are replying like this. This part of the public service is for quality of life and security. If someone has more of those without the "service", of course they'd want to call it off and assume the risk.
Who cares if police don't show up during the 1 in 100,000 lifetimes chance you need a swat team, when you're getting harassed weekly.
The dedication to being unreasonable is truly impressive. A history of dozens of false alarms changes nothing? The only response possible, forever, even if it happens every day, is full SWAT?
Police is not like most services, where you can hire and fire them at will. If you (or anyone else) called police to complain about a domestic situation, once they're involved, you are no longer in control of when they get uninvolved. I'm not saying "this is good" or "bad", but it is how it was setup, and there were good reasons for this.
Yeah when i need them, so they can show up two hours after the perp has fled and my shit is gone so they can write my name in a notepad and prosecute me for the weed on my table. How will i ever do without
If you actually need them, they wouldn't come. Or come and do nothing. As they've demonstrated when parents had to go inside a school to stop a shooter.
Personally, if I need them, I'll drive down to the cop store and let them know myself. Probably get there a lot quicker than the average cop-response time, too.
The fact that police shows up late doesn't change the fact that it's still a deterrent that they do show up, and you could be the unlucky one that had police show up in time.
But this seems like a good crime recipe:
1. Swat somebody for months.
2. Go into their house once police stops showing up.
Well before the 55th call they should have started investigating the origin of those calls and find the people making them. I'm not familiar with the US jurisdictions so maybe they are outside the one of Milwaukee police, but the people making those calls are toying with the Milwaukee police too, not only with the two victims. Then there are Federal investigations. Eventually that cost Milwaukee half a million.
Unfortunately, while this is a good story, police doesn't have the power to fish out and stop random internet trolls all around the country. I see a lot of this sentiment "why can't they just", but it's an unrealistic view of what's actually possible. I'm all for it in theory.
But almost every comment here is incredulously pointing out how inept police is to not be able to solve such an easy/obvious problem. There is nothing easy and obvious about it.
We need one of those "what every programmer should know about time zones" articles about common police and military misconceptions.
It's not easy, it's an investigation. I expect them to start with interviewing the victims, which will probably point them to some internet forums. Then it's about reading forums and identifying people and a zillion of other things that I can't think about because it's not my job (and so I already wrote too much.) Of course those investigators have other things to do but so do those SWAT teams. It's a DoS against the police.
If 911 can track calls, that would help, but I have no idea if they can, even in my own country.
Basically, 9-1-1 Dispatch relies on the fact that it's a grievous crime and very unglamorous to make a fake report or troll the operator. 9-1-1 needs to remain as credulous as possible, and err on the side of false positives, lest they gain a negative public image.
At the same time, it costs nothing to pick up the phone and prank them. Any actor from anywhere could do it, and outside their jurisdiction, what can they do? The dispatcher is not empowered or equipped to discern truth from lies over a mere voice line from a stranger. The dispatcher can't even run a CAPTCHA to trap AIs. The public absolutely relies on being believed when they sincerely call that same voice line.
I do, perversely, see the merit in repeated response that simply turns out to be a drill. The merit is both training and public image, if the militarized police want to instill fear and shock and awe in that neighborhood, or on the evening news, then they get it by responding, not by dismissing obvious fakes. How often do you get to test your flash-bang rifle, fire up your bomb-siege-robots, and put a few miles on your urban tanks? It's like a parade on your wedding day, but you've already paid.
Only thing is, there seems to be no financial incentive or reward for the SWATter. Unless SWATting could be used to tie up and distract law enforcement resources as part of a bigger conspiracy, the only endgame of SWATting seems to be a drain on resources.
See what is the reaction to the 3rd SWAT call for the local police dept's boss' home. Then apply that to everyone. I'm absolutely sure they can figure that one out.
Just for context, many urban police departments won't show up for a myriad of calls they deem "non-emergency". The fact they always respond to swat calls is suspect and probably has to do with padding their numbers so they can justify more spending and overtime.
You have the phone numbers of the residents on hand. When getting a report of a house that's known to be swatted frequently, call both numbers and verify.
> Patrick and Nikki believe calling known swatting victims before responding would avoid dangerous encounters like this - some of which have resulted in costly settlements paid by Milwaukee taxpayers.
Are you kidding me the real solution is not breaking down someone's door after the fourth call in one day from anonymous reports. How many legitimate hostage situations have taken place in Milwaukee in that four year period? Even one? I think there's been maybe one in the same time period here in Chicago, a city five times the size. How is it even remotely reasonable to think that these are legitimate reports after the first handful of fakes, let alone FIFTY??
When there's a known pattern and you've talked to the people being targeted and you have a totally reasonable suspicion there's no real threat (which the police admitted) then it is reasonable not to respond.
> What should the rule be? When is it okay for police to receive a distress call and not show up in actual reality with actual lives at stake? Who's responsible for the consequences of not showing up?
Currently there is no legal responsibility to “protect and serve” any single member or group of the public.
Just a moral one, due to it being their tax money used.
I've been thinking a lot about this. Many technical barriers that could justify businesses are much lower now, so we are left with other kinds of barriers: red tape, regulatory, legal, etc. If you have access to go past those barriers, you are worth something. If all you do is provide a technical solution, you are probably going to stop making sense.
Paseo allows you to start a daemon from command line, thereby passing your ENV credentials to the daemon from, say, your 1Password-based env. Then both local Mac GUI and their native iPhone app (through Tailscale) can connect to this daemon. This is the most ergonomic local and remote setup where I can start a session on my Mac and continue on my phone or vice versa, with any agent: Pi, Claude, Codex, OMP, all natively supported.
No affiliation, just arrived at Paseo after a bunch of research.
Those who claim LLM-generated software is good enough:
Haven’t written code in ages
Cannot spot if their code figuratively had 6 fingers!
Have a low bar for what good looks like
Don’t care about quality or NFR
Have difficulty understanding an S-curve
There are exceptions like antirez, but I think this does hold for many loud optimists out there.
LLMs consistently produce better quality code and miss less edge cases imo. I think its ridiculous to assume people don't care about quality. Its also really hard to measure quality so subjective debates around it never end. In the dnd, if LLM produces an output I can understand, I'd rather delegate and move on.
Unfortunately, not well suited for stealth use cases for personal automation. Here's a comparison to an mcp tool that allows driving your live safari via osascript:
I wonder how would this work in terms of fairness to the team that's likely to win. If a match is abandoned, what does it mean for progressing in a tournament, etc. Could there be a perverse incentive to cause a black card to abort a lost game? I'm sure this has all been thought through, but the article doesn't seem to say anything about it.
The new procedure targets inappropriate behavior by parents and spectators directed at children, coaching staff members, referees, match officials, or other parents and spectators. This includes, but is not limited to:
Verbal abuse (insults or profanity), as well as physical assault or shoving of one’s own children;
Verbal abuse, physical assault, or shoving of staff members of one’s own team;
Verbal abuse, physical assault, or shoving of players or staff members of the opposing team;
Continuous challenging, verbal abuse, physical assault, or shoving of referees and match officials;
Verbal or physical altercations with other parents or spectators.
<<<<<<
If that's the situation in, and it can't be stressed enough, a children soccer game, then yes, abandoning the match is probably the right choice. I assume they are only defining a formal procedure for practices that already exist.
>If that's the situation in, and it can't be stressed enough, a children soccer game
It's not extremely common in my area, but it is more common than you would think. Parents treat their children like lottery tickets when it comes to athletics. And God help you if you're the unfortunate umpire at a travel league game that makes a questionable call.
The youth sports industry is fucking gross and nobody seems to notice.
Source: we will not let our children participate in travel leagues and they do not want to participate in them either, for this specific reason.
I umpired baseball in my early teens and even 30 years ago it was bad.
Grown men getting into the face of 14 years old umpires over calls, at games for kids barely out of tee-ball. It just doesn’t matter that much.
I remember a coach who would flip over 20 gallon coolers and send ice and drinks flying in the dugout.. in front of his team of 10 years old umpires olds.
In Texas, there's an association, TASO, that is in charge of referees for all sports. There is no requirement about having experience in officiating at all. You attend a few meetings, pay the fees, and start officiating. The crazy thing is that once a TASO member, you can move from sport to sport. It's easy to see officials that are definitely out of their depth. As a player, it is insulting that they can't play their sport because the one in charge of the match is not very good. As parent, it's aggravating because their kid and teammates are getting boned. After personally experiencing the literal "inside baseball" of Texas high school officiating, they bring some of the flak on their officials in their attitude on who can be an official. I knew people that just slid from one sport to the next based on season as a source of a fairly decent income. Volleyball refs just sit in a chair, so physical fitness doesn't really limit how good of an official they can be. Soccer refs on the other hand...
That's the association's problem, not the referees. When I refereed basketball in Australia, referee grading was done according to FIBA standards and you had to be evaluated before any promotion in your referee grade and that could be (at the lowest levels) 3 games on 3 occasions through to 10 games or more. And when we got to a certain (albeit relatively high) level, we'd have every game recorded and reviewed.
No disagreement, which is why I said that the association is to blame. If a ref isn't good enough yet they still continue to be assigned games, then the org allowing that to happen is at fault. The immediate response is that they don't have enough officials to to start sitting officials based on performance/ability. That's just further indictment to me, but "it's just a kid's game" blah blah.
Baseball in particular has a problem with anger is the arguments. Like there is no argument without a hostile tone. Players/managers never seem to merely appeal a call -- they jump straight to harsh yelling.
Compare it to soccer where there is also a lot of whininess in the complaining about calls.
It's become accepted that vulgar, angry, disagreement is acceptable until it goes "too far".
Tantrums are just socially accepted in baseball, and some other sports.
Probably being born from public schools, and teachers being the referees, they don't have to take any nonsense from players and can take the ball away from you, lose you ground you have gained, or card you if are abusive to the referee.
Abusive parents on the sidelines can result in sanctions on clubs.
Even if you think the referee made a bad call, it is never acceptable to be abusive to match officials.
It blows my mind the things I see in football they allow people to get away with.
I love how in rugby if two guys are going a little two hard at each other the referee will call them over along with their captains, and address the captains while these gigantic players stand there like children.
One other offshoot of rugby officiating is they will admit wrongs and they'll say things like "I didn't see that." Compare that to the NFL where the refs make a bad call and the league will back them up to the point of being ridiculous by reinterpreting the rules to make the officials right (see "not a catch").
Absolutely - I used to referee basketball in Australia, including at a high level.
Extremely high level junior, was generally not an issue. As was true local league.
It was the intermediates, the travel leagues. Where "your kid is good but is still not going to be a pro" (the NBA sends a letter to all new D1 college players congratulating them on the effort they've put in to get this far - and to focus on their education, as the NBA drafts <1% of D1 college players, let alone anybody else). Those were the ones where the parents were convinced that their kid was going to be a pro and the only thing holding him back was "that fucking referee".
We had the power to eject those parents from the venue. Which was usually a conversation that went something like this:
Ref: You need to leave the venue until the end of the game.
Parent: It's my fucking kid's game and I'm not leaving and you can't fucking make me.
Ref: You're right, I can't remove you from the venue. I can however forfeit the game on your child's behalf.
Kid: Daaaad. [usually weary as this tends not to happen just the once]. Go and wait in the car. Pleaseeeee.
Parent: I will go and wait in the car, and we're going to wait and when you come out, you and I are going to fucking get into it, ref.
Cue security, if not police, walking refs to their cars.
I spent several years as a soccer ref including high school matches. It never failed that every time I hit my whistle, the side of the stadium opposite of the direction of me signaling the foul would always erupt in jeers. You could always tell the helicopter parents complaining about non-calls not appreciating that soccer is a contact sport. There was only one game where the officiating crew was escorted by police, but I really felt that was over blowing the situation. There was the one game were we had to temporarily suspend the match because of gunfire in the area not aimed at the pitch, but uncomfortably close.
The funny thing is, I became a ref because I was giving the ref of one of the games I was on the touchline coaching wasn't abusive, but definitely a constant barrage of second guessing. At the end of the match, one of the association members suggest that if I didn't like the level of refereeing that I should become a ref myself. I accepted the Pepsi challenge that rest of history. My favorite experience was a coach that was getting a bit grating. I remembered a line an old timer mentioned that I decided to give a try, "hey coach! you got an assistant? you better get 'em warmed up!"
As a coach, the absolute worst part of the 10 year experience absolutely was the parents. Luckily, I never had abusive parts. It was always over excited cheering for the dumbest things from people that had no clue about tactics and thinking that blindly booting the ball up the pitch was awesome. We had no player with the speed or skill of going over the top route one, so it was just a dumb play. Usually, by the end of the season some of the other parents could usually get them calmed down. It also helped to remind some of the over the top parents that this was recreational play, and everyone got the same t-shirt at the end of the season. Nobody was getting scholarships. It was basically bragging rights for the kids back at school.
As teens my brother and I both refed youth soccer. The parents were the absolute worst part of the experience. One of them actually followed my brother back to his car after a game to yell at him more. It was so bad that the ref association took the guy to what I've always called "soccer court" (not sure what it actually was) to have him banned from coming back for the rest of the season. That was a U-12 girls rec game by the way.
That's the perfect age for shitty parents as that's the age where the "good" players have left rec and moved to club teams so that the ones that are left are the ones with bent out of shape parents for their kid not making a club team.
Not all parents are assholes, and as a solo coach, there's no way I could have survived without some of the parent's support with various aspects of managing a team. By the third or fourth season, the parents that had started with me would help wrangle some of the other parents.
> By the third or fourth season, the parents that had started with me would help wrangle some of the other parents
This is where we were with one of my kids' teams. Once they got older and split into the elite-national/regional club level (about U12), the parents were not healthy. Over time, the parents started to realize that their kid wasn't likely to play D1 college soccer, so there wasn't a point in being "those parents".
It also helped that a few of us that either coached, played, or ref'd would "help guide" the other parents. It is now to the point where I wouldn't want my kid to change teams because our parents are so awesome.
Happened last week in the Netherlands. The home team (FC Utrecht) played terrible. They were down 3-1. Hooligans threw fireworks on the pitch and the match got suspended. The match was resumed three days later. Utrecht played much better en got a 3-3 draw.
The ref is impartial and their only job is to manage the game according to law. If a team's fans are misbehaving to the point the game must be abandoned, it doesn't matter one iota to the ref if those fans are tanking on purpose. The league can deal with that.
That's placing a lot of faith in the maturity and tactical awareness of a teenager. I don't know about the games in Romania, but here in the US, the youth soccer referees are mostly older youths.
In the US, only the youngest games have teenage refs (U10 and younger). And even then, it is only common in the lower competitive tiers. Competitive travel/select league games generally have adult refs (national and regional leagues).
The money is pretty decent for two hours of work (and you can work games back to back to back).
Your comment implies the youth refs are the exception, but the VAST majority of play are at these lower competitive levels, and it is FAR more common to have youth or inexperienced refs than otherwise.
I’m saying that when you get to have games involving kids older than 10, that having teenage refs is more uncommon.
In my area, there are a number of leagues. Only one has a large number of teenagers in the ref pool and they only are center refs for the youngest players. For the more competitive leagues, you almost never have a ref crew made up of only teenagers. Here, young refs are generally protected by having older refs as part of the crew. There is a whole system behind referee scheduling that most people don’t know about.
(Also, this about soccer in the US, I have no idea how other sports schedule their officials)
When you say “teenage” refs I assume you are meaning kids 16or younger. A lot of adult-sized college-age teenagers ref games and you probably don’t realize it.
You’re right about the scheduling aspect. If you’re in a healthy area and the leagues are playing according to US Soccer rules (using the IFAB bible plus approved grassroots modifications), the scheduling system is good and makes sure to keep refs assigned to appropriate matches (pro-tip: they keep track of the worst teams for abuse and only schedule the most grizzled refs. If none are available, then “sorry no refs are available for your match”).
Also, I don’t know if it’s US-only thing or a worldwide FIFA thing, but for the past few years refs with less than 2 or 3 years of experience are supposed to be wearing a special armband that coaches are supposed to recognize - if the ref gets abuse from fans they tell the coaches and the coaches have to go deal with it. If it’s not dealt with, the match is abandoned.
When a ref abandons a match it is up to the board to decide what to do with the result. In senior games often the offenders get a lost. Plus this is youth games so results matter less.
In which case, abusive parents can use the rule to retaliate against their children. Never define a rule that gives bad actors power to dictate policy. (Note: this criticism doesn't seem to apply to the actual rule.)
We can all say “well, if you get many calls about one location, maybe you should stop showing up” but wtf are you supposed to do if a real crime is being committed? The same couple getting swatted one day could get criminals breaking in another, possibly for the same reason even. How can you make the call not to show up if your entire existence and role in society is to show up?
What real solutions are there?
Edit: a bunch of identical responses to this comment with "just don't show up". I know it's easy to sit and judge from the comfort of your keyboard, but do a little bit of thinking. What should the rule be? When is it okay for police to receive a distress call and not show up in actual reality with actual lives at stake? Who's responsible for the consequences of not showing up?
Edit2: now people switched to "show up, but softer, knock on the door". Now we can agree, because this comment is about showing up, not about specifics. Yeah, more considerate approach is warranted. To be clear, I agree that police should be punished for violating laws and conduct policies. Yet there is the other side of it, there's still an alert and it could still be real. Police still have to be mind-f'ed into figuring out every time if there's real danger or not.
Edit3: People who say "police can catch the callers" and suggest other triumphant movie-esque feats make me feel like we need an article "Falsehoods programmers believe about police".
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