Political blogging is becoming dangerous – at least for the partisans. It appears that conservative bloggers are being targeted by some on the left for “SWATting,” a despicable tactic where someone spoofs a phone call to 911, posing as the blogger and claiming they just killed someone at their house in an attempt to draw a SWAT team (or at least policemen) with guns blazing.
Patterico lit up the conservative Interwebz on Friday with his detailed account of his experience that almost got him killed. Now a RedState blogger is claiming to have been attacked in the same way, although he had a much calmer encounter with his local law enforcement, perhaps due to precautions he had taken to alert the sheriffs about this very tactic.
What’s funny to me is that Patterico and most of the commenters have a (generally right-wing) perspective where the people who built the hoax are the “evil” and “demented” bad guys that need to be brought to justice, and the police are good guys that just happened to get caught up in this and almost accidentally kill an innocent man. “I don’t blame the police for any of their actions,” the blogger says. “But I blame the person who made the call.”
The right’s reaction reminded me of what how the left ignores government mistakes in other sectors. Take the recent hullabaloo about the J.P. Morgan trade that lost $2 billion and how that allegedly justifies the Volcker Rule or other forms of complex financial regulation. Democrats imagine a static world where there are specific problems with rules or people that the government can isolate and fix. Add a new law on top of the old one. Replace the corrupt or incompetent regulator with someone nobler or smarter.
I see a dynamic world that will always try to get around new rules, perhaps with unintended consequences. I see positions of power that will always corrupt humans or that no humans are smart enough to fulfill. The problem does not lie in specific trees, but in the forest that lets those trees grow, and thus I’m fundamentally skeptical that increasing the scope of government regarding X will make things better than they are now.
In the same way, Republicans imagine a static world where there are specific problems with rules or people and if we can just catch them and punish them and forbid certain activities we will have all the bad guys locked up and deter everyone else from doing what they did. Now it’s healthy for me to be reminded of the right-wing passion for justice from time to time; there seems to have been a number of warning signs regarding the SWATters in the Patterico story, and there is some understandable outrage at the authorities that failed to apprehend them before the incident or have failed to apprehend them since.
But I see a dynamic world where people will always come up with reasons to hate other people and find new ways to terrorize them. Even if we could pass some draconian law that completely prevented anonymous/spoofed phone calls, or could place competent prosecutors in every jurisdiction, people would just mold their technology and techniques and find some other way to send SWAT teams to their enemies’ doors.
Just as Democrats have a blind eye to government making mistakes about regulation and business, Republicans have a blind eye when it comes to government making mistakes about criminal justice and civil liberties.
Now this doesn’t mean that we don’t still try to get these criminals, or think about ways to stop their criminal activities without drastically interfering with everybody else’s private lives. And heaven forbid I’m suggesting, on Memorial Day of all days, that government employees with weapons are bad guys or something.
I just want us to think about whether we really want to give those employees the authority to barge into private homes and risk killing innocent people solely on the basis of an anonymous phone call.
There’s room for debate here… What if the police had a legitimate report that someone was killing people inside a house? How should they respond? My gut reaction is to say I really doubt someone is going to call the police to tell them he killed someone and wait around for them to show up before he kills more, but I’m sure you could find some news story where that actually happened. It’s hard to simultaneously remember all the horrible things law enforcement officers do combined with all the good things they do and all the dangerous situations they find themselves in.
But regardless, I’m pretty sure I agree with Eric that “an anonymous, untraceable phone call is anything but probable cause,” and “allowing anyone to sic SWAT teams on anyone is… despicably tyrannical…” It’s a brazen example of someone taking advantage of a government oops cost to try to harm another human being. It sounds like the government didn’t make any costly mistakes in these two recent incidents (they even rang the doorbell), but we know that it can happen. Looking for the swatters is good, but looking for safe ways to make swatting harder or even impossible would be even better.
Thanks!
It’s easy to look at the swatting, where we now know, after the fact, that it was a hoax, and say cops shouldn’t do that. But before the fact, the cops don’t know it’s a hoax. They could take some actions to verify a call, but that’s going to take time in a situation where, as far as they know, time means lives lost.
Considering what they thought they were walking into, the cops handled themselves well in Patterico’s case. They didn’t storm into his house, they didn’t break in, they weren’t raiding his home. They knocked on the door and rang the doorbell. Now once Patterico answered the door, they could’ve been, well, nicer. But considering the tragedy that could have happened, what actually happened wasn’t that bad.
If there’s an argument to be made against the police, it’d be more effective to focus on cases like Robert Dziekanski or Kelly Thomas. Those are real tragedies, innocent men who were needlessly killed by bad cops. Those cases highlight where the cops went wrong and abused their power. But in Patterico’s case, the cops got it right, and defused a dangerous situation without any lasting harm despite being deliberately manipulated themselves by the spoofer.
You may be more right than I. I’m inherently skeptical because of past abuses like the ones you mention, but I also have to admit that nothing too terrible happened here. I’m more worried about the potential for worse; and I still don’t the police should be handcuffing you and your wife because someone else pranked you. Of course, I’m not the one held responsible if the police don’t do enough in a real situation, but I still think I wish they were erring less on the side of “security.”
It’s easy to look at the swatting, where we now know, after the fact, that it was a hoax, and say cops shouldn’t do that. But before the fact, the cops don’t know it’s a hoax. They could take some actions to verify a call, but that’s going to take time in a situation where, as far as they know, time means lives lost.
Considering what they thought they were walking into, the cops handled themselves well in Patterico’s case. They didn’t storm into his house, they didn’t break in, they weren’t raiding his home. They knocked on the door and rang the doorbell. Now once Patterico answered the door, they could’ve been, well, nicer. But considering the tragedy that could have happened, what actually happened wasn’t that bad.
If there’s an argument to be made against the police, it’d be more effective to focus on cases like Robert Dziekanski or Kelly Thomas. Those are real tragedies, innocent men who were needlessly killed by bad cops. Those cases highlight where the cops went wrong and abused their power. But in Patterico’s case, the cops got it right, and defused a dangerous situation without any lasting harm despite being deliberately manipulated themselves by the spoofer.
You may be more right than I. I’m inherently skeptical because of past abuses like the ones you mention, but I also have to admit that nothing too terrible happened here. I’m more worried about the potential for worse; and I still don’t the police should be handcuffing you and your wife because someone else pranked you. Of course, I’m not the one held responsible if the police don’t do enough in a real situation, but I still think I wish they were erring less on the side of “security.”
Thanks!