Authorities brought 20 police cars, five SWAT officers, and drones to her house
https://www.twitch.tv/grammacrackers/clip/CharmingSolidNoodleKevinTurtle-CCpMMy7EX_W4v7_S
update: Found this video from local news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGeb3cuqLxE
you have to be one sick twisted individual to be swatting a person, let alone a freaking elderly woman
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Stop being right about that!
Perhaps the problem is the swat teams doing this shit with zero verification.
they share the blame for sure
Most american headline ever
Oh this absolutely happens here in europe too, just not with such a needlessly large amount of cops. Makes it no less dangerous though.
Do elderly women have to stream videos to pay for cancer treatments? My father has cancer, and all his bills this year add up to €0. Well, sometimes I leave the car in a paid parking lot; in the whole year it’s probably been around €20.
Oh no i meant the swatting part my bad.
If the child didn’t need money for treatment, granny wouldn’t be on twitch.
sure, but if she streamed for her enjoyment and got swatted, it wouldn’t make a difference
America has “police by intimidation” as its default response. Most of Europe seems to have “police by consent” as the default.
It leads to a different mentality. They might still roll out the whole cavalry, but it will more likely be led by a polite knock at the door, and an initial attempt to de-escalate.
You’re being a little too optimistic, there. It might not be the same toxic culture, but ACAB.
The UK force has its problems, but it functions fairly well. It also has a lot of people in it who honestly want to do a good job.
The problem is the rules and mandates coming down from the government. (And the political upper management level of the police)
Yes it’s less dangerous (not dangerless obviously), in Europe the swat teams tend to be better trained and way less trigger happy than in USA. Had they busted in there they likely would not have shot an elderly woman found inside, whereas in USA that’s more likely to happen. They don’t just go in and start shooting, otherwise we would have “random kids and women accidentally murdered in a police bust” headlines all the time as well
They mentioned in the video more cops came because they wanted to meet the gaming grandma, and they cleared the scene pretty quick.
I don’t think a grandma would have to raise money for cancer treatment in the EU…
It’s only be more American if the cops entered her home and shot her while claiming a controller was a gun
This happens frequently enough where you’d think there would be a system in place to prevent this type of abuse.
But then they wouldn’t get to cosplay as action heroes.
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It’s the ol’ “boy who cried wolf” situation. You probably don’t want public services like police and firefighters deciding which calls seem real or not.
K but there has to be some happy medium between 20 swat cars and showing up 2 hours after the pizza driver.
It’s really easy to say that when you’re not the one calling the police because there’s an actual madman with a gun holding your loved one hostage. I think it’s a tough situation that, really, has more to do with the overall culture in America than how emergency services respond to particular calls. If the overall level of potential danger was lower due to cultural reasons, I think then we could talk.
Easy to say doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.
Showing up with 20 swat cars doesn’t mean that there’s 20 swat cars blindly shooting at the house.
There’s no harm on just showing up. As long as they verify the claims before acting on them, I don’t see the issue.
The only issue is that it is expensive and may break a door or something. Which is why the caller should be tracked, and made to pay for all of it.
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All cops are idiots.
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Meanwhile, when an actual credible threat is ongoing: “We’ll send our best confrontation avoider and check back in about 3 hours from now”
I will never forgive Uvalde police for that school shooting situation. Not only did they do nothing to stop the shooter, they actively held back parents who were going to do the cops jobs for them.
If I remember right, 23 kids, and 3 staff members died that day in an attack that took hours, but should have been stopped in minutes. They arrived on the scene 6 minutes after being called. Then they let it go on and on and on.
I will never forgive Uvalde police.
Yeah but like… Weren’t most of the kids brown-ish? /s
When seconds count, they’re an hour away
I was paid a dawn visit many years ago by an armed unit (UK). The way they ran it was two plainclothes (handguns only) officers knock on the door to assess the threat, with a van full of tooled up guys in balaclavas just outside, just in case. It was all very chill and no unnecessary stress/escalation for anyone. Seems like this would be a more sensible approach.
It would indeed be a more sensible approach.
I’m frequently amazed that despite your countries declining standard of living it is still light years ahead of that of my own. I’m actually jealous. Please rejoin the EU as soon as it’s convenient.
That sounds very nice. I’m honestly jealous. However, there were 408 mass shootings in the USA last year. That’s more than 110 people shot per day. While I in no way support the policies of the police in the USA, I do have to admit that given the likelihood that the residents of any particular home might be armed, I personally would not want to be a lightly armed and unarmored cop knocking on a door here. I mean, people here have literally been shot just for knocking or ringing a doorbell.
While all cops are indeed bastards, many of the other people in this country aren’t any better. The left end of the bell curve in this country is very heavily armed and doing their part to help police turn the nation into the war zone they think it already is. Until common sense gun laws are passed and the dumbest and most violent among us are disarmed, it’s not going to change for the better.
Yeah I get it, it’s a silly comparison as the potential threat landscape is completely different. It’s a sad situation over there.
I mean if they had been told there were gunshots, several dead in the street and hostages. That might be a fairly reasonable response.
If they’ve been told that there are several dead in the street, and they get there, and there’s nobody dead in the street, it’s time to not go in going pow pow pow.
Well yes, but its an example of a call you can make that probably results in extreme responses. Would be interested in knowing what they thought they were going to for that kind of response though.
I can’t think of any call where they need to go in guns blazing unless they can actually see that someone’s shooting, or in the process of being killed.
Anything else and there’s time to peek in windows, send a drone up to upper floor windows, and so-on.
Even if it is an actual situation where someone is in mortal danger, doing that will mean they’re not walking into a dangerous situation blind.
If they do that and can’t see anybody in any kind of distress or danger, then the logical thing is to calmly knock on the door and ask some questions.
I can’t really think of one either which is why I would be curious what they were told
SWATting happens all the time and it works, the police kick down doors.
So, it’s not like you need some special magic incantation to get them to do it. It’s more that that’s how they operate and all they need is an excuse to do it. If there were real accountability for being used as someone else’s weapon, they wouldn’t be so willing / eager.
Ok, so granny got swatted, why?
What was the police told about the situation?
Is there an article about this which explains the cause of this.
Those questions would only matter if this kind of police reaction wasn’t almost exclusive to the US. So American police are idiots.
In Europe there were a few cases in France, but they led to changes in police procedures to verify reports more thoroughly before busting through doors.
There are a lot of things that can be pointed at as to why this happens so much in the US. But I think most people forget that this is a problem that can literally be fixed using laws and technology.
Swatting can only happen because the US telecom system is so full of holes and because the US legal system isn’t doing its job.
The primary thing you have to do is fix it so that the emergency operators can know where a call actually originated. And all we need to do to make that happen is to change the law so that telecom companies are held criminally and civilly liable when a person uses their infrastructure to fake where an emergency call is coming from.
Calls that come from foreign sources or from internet sources would harbor great suspicion. Imagine that the operator gets a big flashing notice that the call is suspicious right from the start.
I’m not saying that police and gun nuts and police gun nuts and incompetent police and nazi assholes don’t have a lot of culpability, or that we shouldn’t have severe penalties for people who do the swatting but the core fault lies in our elected representatives being too corrupt to hold telecom companies to account.
I don’t think giving the police more surveillance options is the best option. The main problem is the extreme militarisation of the US police. This amount of force is a ridiculous response to almost any likely scenario they would have encountered.
That’s not surveillance. That’s basic service, allowing the recipient of a call to know who is actually calling them. The same thing would also stop a lot of scammers.
they also get alot of surplus equipment from the military that is outdated, which makes it even worst.
Your argument is almost exactly the same as the ones being used to rationalize things like age-verification, surveillance, deanonymizing platforms, etc.
The people supporting these measures are going after operating systems, VPNs, web browsers, everything but targeting the actual people committing the crimes that they’re pretending to be trying to prevent.
Holding telecom companies primarily responsible for how their platforms are misused is a very large step towards the dystopian future that we’re already sliding towards.
When you call emergency services, they need to know your location. You know, because you’ve got an emergency, which is almost always where you are, and you might not know exactly where you are.
And, this is information that the telecom companies should already know. And it’s information that the caller might not know.
This isn’t a “very large step towards [a] dystopian future.” It’s your vision that is dystopian here. In your vision, people can have emergencies and die because the emergency services don’t know where to go. In your vision, people can easily fake emergencies and swat innocent people. You have a choice between a good thing and a bad thing, and you’re actually choosing the bad thing. It’s hard to fathom.
You gotta love people who would create a dysfunctional government just because they don’t realize that similar things can be good or bad depending on context, and that emergencies are exceptional circumstances.
Except you didn’t say “Emergency services need to know the location of the caller, so telecom services should provide this information automatically.”
You said this:
And all we need to do to make that happen is to change the law so that telecom companies are held criminally and civilly liable when a person uses their infrastructure to fake where an emergency call is coming from.
So everything in your most recent comment is a strawman because it completely misrepresents that discussion that came before. You’re placing words in my mouth as if I was responding to something other than what you actually said, when in fact I was responding to the thing that you did say.
No, holding telecom companies criminally liable for how their customers use their infrastructure is the path towards a dystopia, because it forces them to implement mass surveillance, censorship, predictive policing, and anticipating the will of the authorities (which often leads to even stricter enforcement).
If people are blocking geolocation on their device, and it’s that important to you that the emergency services know where they’re calling from, then give them a pop-up banner that says “to complete this call, please enable location services” with a button to do it in one click.
If someone makes fake emergency calls and swats people, identify the person who did the thing and hold them criminally liable. What you’re proposing is to basically let that person off the hook while punishing the company, and forcing the company to comply with an order to treat all of their customers as potential abusers of their services. That’s dystopian.
Except you didn’t say “Emergency services need to know the location of the caller, so telecom services should provide this information automatically.”
That thing “I didn’t say” is basically the first thing I said:
The primary thing you have to do is fix it so that the emergency operators can know where a call actually originated.
You misread my comment and then blamed me for your mistake. You downvoted my comment and called a common-sense obvious solution “dystopian,” when a decent person would have reread the first comment they responded to, and considered whether they might have actually misunderstood something.
I don’t have the time to have a discussion with you if I also have to explain my comments to you multiple times because you don’t read them properly. Since I’m not going to spend the time necessary to communicate with you, I am blocking you directly after posting this comment, and won’t see any future comments from you.
All cops are idiots.
“ACAI”???
Everyone blames swatting on the person who called in a fake report, but swatting only works because the are idiots. Someone actually decided to bring 20 cars to an house legally owned by an 85 year old with a single unverified report as their only evidence.
It’s not that they’re idiots, though many cops are. It’s that they don’t get punished for falling for a SWATting attempt.
If you could lose your career if you fell for it, they’d try a lot harder not to fall for it. But, instead, they never face punishment for being overly aggressive, and might face punishment for not being aggressive enough in the case of a real emergency.
In fairness, the police don’t have a list of who is in every house at all times. They don’t exactly have X-ray vision. All they know is that they got a call saying that someone is holding someone at gunpoint in this house.
Of course, 20 cars is comically overkill
This sort of overreaction isn’t rare though. People have died from it.
It’s also not exclusive to the U.S. We had a guy here in Sweden who got assaulted and practically kidnapped by masked men in the middle of the night. Guy thought he was going to die, and didn’t find out that they were police until they got him in the car and drove to the station.
What was his horrible crime? He’d shared images via Yahoo mail of him and his 30 year old boyfriend having sex. Some American organisation trawled through Yahoo mail, flagged these images and videos as possible CSAM, and forwarded it to Swedish authorities. Our authorities, instead of you know, doing any kind of investigation, or summoning the guy to the police station, or even just arresting him in a calm and peaceful manner, decided that sending masked goons to raid his home in the middle of the night was the way to go.
Oh yeah, I’m fully aware. My own city made national headlines in my country a few years back when bastard pig Justin Rapp shot and killed Andrew Finch. SWATting should be considered attempted murder, and if a pig murders someone during a SWATting, they should be charged as well.
Fun fact! Bastard pig Justin Rapp sued the city when they placed him on leave, and won. Now he’s a detective whose salary is paid by my tax dollars. Fuck the police
Takes a special kind of asshole to swat a little old lady for trying to host a wholesome gaming stream for a good cause.
The fact that swating still happens just proves how much of a joke policing is in general. The fact that you can get a bunch of gun-wielding adrenaline junkies to show up somewhere, frothing at the mouth for violence, in the most spurious of ways is a damning indictment for the whole institution.
Yet they won’t do a damn thing if someone is actually assaulting you.
Probably shoot you and the aggressor since keeping themselves safe is the priority in their training.
I still believe that “defund the police”, is the correct choice. The whole damn thing has to go.
If you don’t have someone authorized by the state to enforce laws, you’re still going to get people enforcing “laws”, it’s just going to be vigilantes, people with grudges, etc. Just look how frequently you see incidents of road rage. Cops basically exist to prevent people from taking revenge into their own hands.
Take all those incidents of people calling the cops on black men having a picnic or taking their dogs for a walk. If there were no cops, do you think these white “Karens” would just leave the black men alone? Or do you think they’d get together and lynch them?
I think the US needs to scale its policing way back. It needs mental health specialists to respond to certain kinds of calls. The person who responds to a report of a stolen bike probably shouldn’t have a gun. But, at some point you are going to need people who will use physical force to enforce the law. Those people should be heavily supervised by a truly independent body. But, they still need to exist in some form.
Cops basically exist to prevent people from taking revenge into their own hands.
No, cops exist to protect capital.
This is just one example too, they’ve issued multiple similar rulings. Also, uh, see: Uvalde.
If there were no cops, do you think these white “Karens” would just leave the black men alone? Or do you think they’d get together and lynch them?
…you think cops keep black people safe? Are you being remotely serious here?
The cops were (and still are) the ones doing the lynching, whether off-duty in white hoods or on duty lol
Yeah for people downvoting this, cops being a problem is largely an American thing. In many other places around the world they are actually beneficial.
Yeah, Thunberg was definitely arrested in America. Just, uh, don’t google it.
Cops can be amenable with enough controls, sure, but they ultimately serve capital, man.
Weird how many videos I’ve seen of German police beating anti-genocide protestors and British police arresting seniors for expressing anti-genocide opinions. Maybe that was just an American psyop.
White supremacy is the problem, and America may have the worst case of that, but certainly not the only case.
Yeah, this is what a lot of people fail to take into account when it comes to the purpose of policing in society. There’s obviously a lot of inherent problems with the way the police are structured in many countries as a whole, but to believe that we can just make do without something like them altogether is pretty shortsighted to say the least. I think that prevents a lot of otherwise sympathetic people from taking the backlash against police institutions seriously.
Yea it’s funny how they just angry downvote, and if they reply at all, they don’t really respond to the points. Who will do the fucking policing if there’s no police??? There will always be people who need to be forcefully stopped from what they’re doing.
I think the idea generally is to replace the police with social welfare programs and unarmed crisis responders, but that’s jumping through so many hoops that it just sounds way too simplistic tbh. It sounds practical, but it treats the problem like it’s something that can be improved with just a few institutions reforming/being abolished.
There’s never been a society without some form of justice system since cruelty is a part of human nature, and at this point these systems are far too intertwined and embedded in our societies for them to change dramatically without some form of societal collapse or retraction.
Idealism is well and good but the things many want in place of police institutions seem like they’re ignoring how complex and non-specific the issues are as a whole. It’s definitely not a one size fits all situation, especially with how many factors there are. People can disagree with me but I’d prefer to hear why at least, there are probably things I’m not considering here.
You don’t know what she did in Minecraft.
(/s)
I heard she made a mob farm of babies
Just here to point out that it’s not normal for a military response to some rando calling in a hit on someone’s house.
A normal response is a check by a single police car with two officers. One to knock on the door and ask questions. The other to remain with the vehicle to call in any issues.
This is a police state.
They probably reported to the operator an excess of melanin at the residence.
It really depends on what the call in was.
If someone says there’s an active threat and their life is in danger, sending 1 car would would be gross negligence and a danger to the officers.
Now, this call, seems excessive. I dont know what would warrant that response even if it was an active threat.
That’s an argument to be made, but I don’t believe that is true at all. Sending one car to check on the safety/welfare of one active threat seems an entirely reasonable balance of risk. An unverified active threat is not at all the same as a confirmed active threat. That should be obvious simply by the existence of “swatting” as a common term and act these days.
It is not the duty of police to protect people from eminent harm, they have argued this themselves in court. Their job is strictly punitive, again an argument they have made in court many times. They only pretend to “protect and serve” when it suits their agenda of justification for their over inflated budgets. This isn’t a public safety issue. It’s a class warfare issue.
Yeah, you send one car first and have the other ready. It’s insane to send 20 cars instantly for an unverified anonymous tip. Idc if the caller said there’s an army of cannibals killing dozens of people, it’s still an unverified anonymous tip. If it’s real you’ll get more phone calls or the first car will radio it in.
Kudos to granny for being so positive about it and acknowledging that the cops have to follow up on the calls they receive, but if some anonymous tipster can bring down a SWAT team on some grandma’s house without any kind of check being triggered, that might indicate that there are some problems about how these issues are being handled. Other people may get out of this with much worse than a funny story to tell when two dozen cops decide to visit their house at night.
People have already died from swatting. Faster and cheaper than hiring an assassin.
Once I read they threw a flashbang through the window and it landed in a baby bed with a baby inside, and went off.
Things we don’t want to know…
From the point of contact, or including time to find a good one? A good assassin can be very quick.
I’ll give ya cheaper though. Good work costs good money.
They need to respond, but they need to end the whole “Killology” mindset that American cops are trained into.
Yah, send a car around first to at least glance, maybe try calling them too.
How the fuck is swatting even a thing?
Can just anyone call the police, yell “BOMB AT X ADDRESS!” and they just show up, tear down doors and throw you to the ground???
All, without repercussions???
What else are they going to do with all of that excessive money and time…and desire to shoot people?
Pretty cool way of collecting OT too… kitting up with the boys, kicking doors down, shouting at grandmas…
Police? Work? Nah
Gotta test this bearcat somehow!
Yeah, exactly, that’s exactly how it happens. It’s so fucking dumb.
Cops live for that shit dude. They do it themselves for fun every once in a while, this just makes the excuses easier for them.
why a 82 y.o. grandma have to stream to pay for fucking cancer?
#Freedom
Because orphans need to be ground and you gotta pay to stop that.
The greatest nation on earth ladies and gentlemen.
America just cosplaying as a first world country
Most people get cancer free of charge. Is there an opt-out in the US or do you just have to pay for cancer whether you want it or not, like taxes?
And these police organisations keep spouting “but we need more funds, to protect the community”
No, you fucking dont, you’re wasting your resources by attempting to uphold your strict quotas rather than actually serve and protect the community.
Why I quit MMOs and never looked back, because even more than 20 years ago toxic behavior was being normalized, and that included offline PK.
Fucking little assholes nearly killed a grandmother.
I’m still amazed that this keeps happening but somehow, no one is ever caught?
Considering our telecons can’t (won’t) even enforce basic fucking origin checking, it’s not surprising.
These companies have ways of validating calls, it just takes money to setup and enforce, and we can’t waste money on silly things like basic safety when the shareholder value is at stake.
Assuming this was in the US, most 911 dispatchers are E911, so the approximate location is automatically included with the call. Smart phones are able to provide a more accurate location, and dispatchers still ask location because they don’t know what floor you’re on if it’s a multi story building.
Unfortunately, I’m fairly certain e911 isn’t super helpful against people already spoofing their number and location.
I’m vaguely aware of possible feature rfc to add another layer to prevent spoofing, but given how lazy telecoms are about doing validations MUCH more basic than extending a protocol/schema, I’m not holding my breath.
The E911 location information is not verified. It’s just a field you fill out when you sign up with a voip service. Smart phone location data can also be spoofed, but that’s not quite as easy.
ACAB
For life!
1312 161
Pure evil, a truly irredeemable soul. Hope terrible things happen to the person that called the Gestapo on her.
Another side benefit to The Drug War, the gift that keeps on giving.
Hundreds of thousands of people are sitting in jails and prisons right now for using. Over three hundred thousand on any given day.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/pie2026_drugs.html
This holdover from the Nixon era gets a little worse every year. Why do we have TWENTY cars available for any random prank caller?
Are we safe yet?
Don’t you feel fine having what is essentially a para military forced within the USA whose intention is to protect property and not people at all? I know I sure as shit don’t.
I mean… police has always been about protecting the rich…
