Swatting games

In another case, a Nebraska man who was part of a swatting ring was sentenced to five years in prison. There's a lot of evidence that police are way too quick to deploy their militarized units.

Some law enforcement agencies have also taken on the issue by themselves. After an increase in swatting cases, several California police agencies told the AP they're taking more steps to gauge which calls are real and holding back a bit before deploying their full resources, like a SWAT team.

If any good comes out of swatting, it could be these types of changes. A Washington Post investigation found , for example, that police in Washington, DC, frequently raid the wrong homes on bad, little, or no evidence, terrorizing innocent people. Radley Balko, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop , has documented many, many situations in which police use SWAT teams on completely nonviolent offenders, from marijuana growers to poker players.

In fact, some have argued that swatters merely take advantage of a system that's way too quick to use force. Fagone explained for the New York Times Magazine:.

The Georgia tactical commander, a veteran of the Marines, says that for planned raids, when he and his team are considering whether to deploy, they use a "matrix" of risk factors to decide if a SWAT response is justified: Does the suspect have a history of violence? Does the suspect have weapons? Has the suspect made threats to law enforcement?

For a situation in progress, though — an emergency call — there is no time to go through all of that, and from a police point of view, it's better to "respond high and then downgrade" than it is to show up unprepared. So when a situation arises with a possible active shooter, especially one who says he is heavily armed and will kill officers, dispatch sends a text to team members' cellphones to respond to a certain address, and the police are ready for confrontation.

And when the police "respond high," residents can become disoriented. Maybe they assume they are being robbed. Maybe they pick up a gun. In , a former Marine and Iraq war veteran named Jose Guerena was awakened by his wife, who thought she saw intruders outside their home in Arizona.

Guerena picked up his AR rifle, with the safety on, to protect his wife and family. SWAT officers entered the house, saw the gun and shot Guerena dozens of times, killing him. They were conducting a drug investigation. Given these stories, it's a fair question: Should one phone call really cause the police to deploy a militarized unit into someone's home?

Part of the problem may be that society just doesn't take it seriously enough. Police agencies may see swatting as a one-off prank, not as part of a pattern of harassment and abuse that can happen on the internet.

Internet services may not stop harassment until it spirals out of control — something companies like Twitter have been heavily criticized for. And friends and family may blame the swatting victim, by questioning how he or she got into so much trouble that someone called a SWAT team on them. But even if all of this changed, stopping swatting is really hard. Sometimes police just can't tell if a call is real, and law enforcement agents need to respond to emergency calls in some fashion.

And deterring swatters with tough criminal sanctions might not mean much if people think they can get away with the crime — and they often can by, for example, simply using hard-to-trace internet phone services or prepaid phones. The ultimate solution, then, may be for people to stop being jerks on the internet.

But since that's not likely to happen anytime soon, swatting will continue, putting people's lives at risk, sometimes for no reason other than some laughs. Correction: This article originally misstated the status of anti-swatting legislation in Congress.

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Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. But you're not being robbed or attacked by terrorists. You're being swatted. What is swatting? But swatting has also become a part of broader internet trolling culture. What are some examples of swatting? So here's one example from , in which someone playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gets swatted: As the Huffington Post reported , the victim in this video, Jordan Mathewson, was in his office, streaming himself playing Counter-Strike , when he began hearing noises in the background.

There are many others, with some instances captured in compilation videos like this one: A recent high-profile person to fall victim to swatting was Joshua Holz, the creator of the hilarious "Damn, Daniel" video. But these are just a few examples of swatting.

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The Latest. Earth is running low on wildlife. Plants will be next. By Benji Jones. Texas shows the dangers of indifference to omicron By Nicole Narea. Is Covax finally going to vaccinate the world? By Muizz Akhtar. Here's what you should know about swatting. Police made to think a crime has occurred. Swatting is not new -- it was on the FBI's radar as early as -- but its origins are murky.

At the most basic level, swatting is similar to the prank calls you and your friends might have made growing up. The difference is, swatting is a prank call made to authorities with the express purpose of luring them to a location -- usually a home -- where they are led to believe a horrific crime has been committed or is in progress. This results in a forceful response from local police or SWAT teams, who have no way to know the call is a hoax. Perpetrators sometimes use technology to mask their true location.

It's often carried out by the internet-savvy , such as members of online message boards, or, in Finch's case, gamers who are competing and interacting with each other in online games such as "Call of Duty. The perpetrator might be swatting their target as part of what they believe to be a harmless prank, according to the FBI, or as an act of revenge.

Callers sometimes use "spoofing" technology to make it look as though the call is coming from inside the victim's home, or at least nearby. Finch did not play video games, his family has said. He was an innocent bystander in the swatting, and had no contact with the other individuals involved. Barriss, who was in California, made the call that led to Finch's death after being contacted by another gamer who asked him to swat a player he'd been arguing with while playing "Call of Duty.

The gamer gave Barriss an address where the target player had once lived, but was then Finch's home.