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Comment by gaff33 | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder what proportion of uncorroborated calls that trigger SWAT raids are actually genuine. I'd have thought that live hostage taking is extremely rare - even in the US. To the point where SWAT calls ought to require corroboration or be presumed to be fake (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that...).

Is there any data available?

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According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_in_the_United_Sta... (although the numbers are not super clear), the kidnapping is almost nonexistent outside of parents kidnapping their kids. It seems other cases are at ~100 a year.

I'm ignoring the kidnapping by parents in this case, because they don't seem swat-worthy. Children are likely kidnapped by parents that want them, rather than with intention to hurt them / get ransom. (Yes, it can be also an unstable person who lost rights for a good reason. I don't have stats on that though :-( )

The problem comes from a real situation potentially not getting acted upon.

EDIT: To clarify, there are potential short timeline concerns involved when people are in immediate danger. How do you corroborate that people are definitely being held inside a house without going to the house? How do you verify that without notifying a potentially armed suspect that you are on the way?

Just as an example, the recent tragedy in Florence, SC where 6 officers were shot and 2 died. That happened because the man at the house was notified that a search warrant was going to be served. He took the heads up and prepared an ambused for the officers he knew were coming.

There are a lot of complicating factors involved in corroborating a story before sending out the team immediately.

If a brain cancer test had a high false positive rate we wouldn’t irradiate people’s heads just in case it was a “real situation”. The same thinking should be applied here.

The choice isn't "send SWAT" or "don't respond". There are a range of actions that could be taken prior to SWAT being involved.

Neither am I suggesting that "don't respond" is the right thing to do here. However SWAT teams must know that uncorroborated calls are almost certainly fake, and they should act accordingly.

Arguably regular police could check the situation out first?

What corroborating phone calls would you expect from an armed hostage-taking inside a private residence? Can you imagine the public backlash had this been legitimate, the police did nothing, and the hostages were injured or executed?

The problem is that we can't help the extreme case. We need to be realistic. If we really wanted to prevent every hostage situation we could have a police car parked on every intersection in the country 24/7 so that they are never more than 15 seconds away from a call. Clearly this is ridiculous. We accept that sometimes police take a few minutes to reach an emergency.

Equally we as a society need to be grown up and accept that sending a specialist armed team to respond to an event that has been shown to happen less often that people win the lottery is clearly unrealistic. Claims like this can be handled by regular policing forces who can call upon backup if necessary.

Life is filled with situations like this. The proper thing to do is called a cost benefit analysis.

Are kansas city police regularly defusing hostage execution situations in private homes? Have they EVER done that?

Why are they optimizing for that situation? Arent prank phone calls the more frequent situation?

I wouldn't at all be surprised if it's far more common for police getting jumpy to result in physical harm to hostages than police being cautious and prudent does.

The whole point of taking hostages is to try and slow the cops down, and get yourself some leverage in negotiation. If the police are acting in a way that makes it seem like that's not going to work, then the hostage-taker will stop seeing those people as being useful as hostages, and start making decisions accordingly.

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