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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

These actions are emergency response teams, the goal is to stamp down the situation as quickly as possible then assess.

You can't exactly have a bloke ringing in at the door and asking if there's really an active shooter/hostage situation, that would render the concept worthless.

Though at this point one can easily wonder whether SWAT rapid response is such a good idea, it would be interesting to compile SWAT emergency response actions, see if the emergency response was actually necessary (versus sending a beat cop ringing the door or whatever) and weigh that against swatting abuse.

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I understand and agree with this, although I'd like to add a bit of context.

SWAT teams were initially designed to de-escalate already violent situations, not bring overwhelming violence to a peaceful situation. Sure, overwhelming violence may in many times be needed. In many times, however, it is not.

This is why we recon before we act. Unless it's an active shooter situation (the responding officers can hear gunfire and/or explosions), then it's not evidently clear that there is a violent situation that needs de-escalating.

We've seriously lost our way with SWAT. I used to say we need better training, but I'm not so sure that dismantling the moniker "SWAT" and establishing some new brand name and certification system isn't required. SWAT just means "Rambo" to too many people, laymen and LE alike.

> SWAT teams were initially designed to de-escalate already violent situations

No, SWAT teams were initially designed to end already violent situations (armed robberies, riots, hostage situations, …), however they were designed to be called in after threat assessment and tentative deescalation (by regular police units or negotiators)

> We've seriously lost our way with SWAT.

I couldn't agree more.

SWAT teams were never designed for "first response" but for "overwhelming response", they're police's special ops/SMU, but nowadays they're just a cowboy unit being sent on any trouble without any sort of situational awareness or threat assessment, better training of the SWAT units would be unlikely to help. Not to mention with the militarisation of US police (hands-me-down army and the like) having a "SWAT team" and using it for any and every thing has become a mark of rank/pride for every fucking podunk town sheriff or police office.

Back in 2014 there were ~80000 SWAT actions per year in the US, and only about 7% even remotely had anything to do with the original purpose of SWAT teams (hostage situations, barricades, significant armed robbery, …): https://www.aclu.org/blog/another-day-another-124-violent-sw...

I hate to quibble with somebody I'm agreeing with so much, and perhaps I'm just mincing words, but I don't think you're right with your statement that SWAT teams were formed solely to "end already violent situations"

Yes, that's part of their job. But surveillance is also part of their job -- which doesn't involve violence at all. They should be adept at performing normal policing activities in unusual environments, like hanging from the side of a building, or in an NBC environment. The point is that there just isn't a "weapons" part of SWAT; there's also a "Tactics" side. And tactics is a lot more than no-knock raids.

SWAT teams are not supposed to be shock troops, some half-assed version of Delta or DEVGRU. They're supposed to be expert in various policing activities that require unusual weapons or tactics.

As an aside, there are a lot of soldiers returning from overseas with tons of counter-insurgency training. A vast majority of this training is not applicable to domestic police work. But I'll bet you twenty bucks it ends up being part of it anyway, whether we need it or not.

That's a really bad thing for all involved.

The response to this cannot in good conscience be "oh well, that's how it's supposed to work and there isn't any other way". It's only a matter of time before people get killed this way, and if you're one of the people who say that's an acceptable risk, you're just wrong.

> You can't exactly have a bloke ringing in at the door and asking if there's really an active shooter/hostage

In the context of having just a random phone call to go on, with no other sign that anything may be wrong, yes: you absolutely need to have a bloke ringing the door and asking. If you don't want to send a bloke to check on the situation, there are plenty of equivalent measures available - especially if you're a militarized police force. You can send probes, you can use thermal imaging, you can ring the phones in the house, you can even use a megaphone.

It's clear that storming in and shooting anything that moves without even so much as a thought wasted on assessing whether the individual is a danger shows a blatant disregard for human life, even the lives of hostages.

What's more disturbing is that there reportedly was contact/a conversation between the SWAT team and the residents, which the team then ignored:

  Officers reportedly ignored his father, Tom, and his cousin telling
  them there was no hostage situation and that the so-called hostage taker
  was actually asleep.

Of course police ignored that; if they'd listened they'd have lost their chance to play 007 or soldier or whatever else they like to think of themselves as.

This has happened enough times that there really needs to be some kind of process in place to verify what the fuck is actually going on at the 'swatted' address. It is pathetically stupid and laughable that the same police force can be hoaxed so many times without setting up some kind of response to future hoaxes. If it was a new phenomenon, I could understand, but this has been happening since streaming became a thing around 2004/5 (or earlier, but that's going back as far as I know).

>These actions are emergency response teams,

And was there an actual emergency? The fire department also has emergency response teams, but if there's no fire, the water cannon doesn't come out.

> You can't exactly have a bloke ringing in at the door and asking if there's really an active shooter/hostage situation, that would render the concept worthless.

"can't" by virtue of "didn't"? That's not sound logic. It makes no sense to even send in a SWAT team when a situation is not first assessed. And for that, you have to communicate.

> "can't" by virtue of "didn't"?

No can't by the virtue of can't, the entire idea is a rapid response to a possible threat.

What you can do is scrap the entire concept, but don't pretend to keep it and make it completely useless by removing the one idea at the root of it.

I see you're not exactly clear on the reason a SWAT team would be deemed necessary, so I guess we can stop here.

This is pretty exploitable though. Someone could just spam the police with fake reports to waste their resources. I remember that once someone reported a bomb on a railway station - but he didn't say which railway station, so they closed and search all of them (in a 10 mil country), lol.

Millions of innocent people are at risk of having their home invaded, being beaten, shot, even killed by this small private army after a prank phone call and you talk about wasting resources?

In various other countries half of the swat company would be in prison after this.

I remember that happened not too long ago, lots of schools getting fake bomb threats. The problem is that you can't ignore the threat, just in case one of them is correct.

That's why I think terrorism isn't nearly as big a problem as people claim it to be. It's relatively simple to create bombs; a malicious actor could first bomb a lot of places already, but also send bomb threats for weeks on end until nobody believes them anymore, then do the real thing.

So IMO, either terrorism isn't that big a deal, OR, all of the security measures and secret services are actually working and defusing (ha) the situations before they can act; the only recent terrorist attacks were ad-hoc things (grabbing a truck and driving through people) or from unexpected angles (the occasional school shooting).

Frankly, terrorism both isn't that big a deal and they're clearly not particularly smart. If it was a big deal and they were smart, there'd be a lot of escalating fear by combining lots of fake threats with a certain, low, proportion of actual attacks: Enough attacks that every threat causes fear and contributes to a siege mentality, and exploiting fake threats as a threat multiplier.

I think part of the reason we're not seeing that is that a large proportion of the attacks we see are not the work of terrorist "masterminds" pulling strings, but mentally unhinged people who decide tying their murder-suicide to a political cause makes it "mean something". Because it'd be easy to multiply the fear in various ways if they were planning this out properly.

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