[dragonwriter]

> I think the initial presumption, was that no one would be such a douchebag as to make such crank calls. In today's world, this is obviously a bad assumption.

It's always been a bad assumption; deliberate harm up to and including murder by deliberate false report to legal authorities is probably as old as legal authorities, and if your jurisdiction has a crime of false reporting (and it's pretty much guaranteed that it does) it's because the government is very much aware that this is a thing.

If police response procedures don't account for that, it's not because they've assumed it doesn't happen, it's because they've assumed that that when it happens they will have someone else ready at hand to blame for ant adverse effects, so that they have no need to mitigate them.

[siruncledrew]

Since phones and swat have been around for a while, how frequent of an occurrence was swatting prior to 2010s?

Do we only hear about it more now due to more reporting, or is it actually a recent trend?