[gibusen]

With respect, I find your perspective hard to believe because I don't buy that you would not yourself call that very same number if something truly drastic happened to you. I have a difficult time believing any detractors of 911, for that matter, would truly actually abide by that standard.

Implying first responders are thugs irks me too, I'm unsure if you've considered the true proportion of cases they respond to that are time sensitive (during which, information parity is low). You could, of course, assert that this means they ought to not respond in the first place - but I think you would find there are a wide range of scenarios that strictly require a rapid and forceful response due to the potential for many victims to be involved (bolstered by gun ownership) with little time to actually validate the circumstances without incurring casualties.

Accidents are unacceptable but our world is complicated and sometimes requires we meet lack of information with immediate action. That is not to say accidents are permissible, but the men putting their lives in harms way to respond to these incidents don't actually know what's occurring either.

You seem to be fairly opinionated about what the system should or should not do, what have you personally done to help improve the conversion ratio between false calls and accidents? I understand this is theoretically ad hominem but I'm personally using it as a heuristic as to the likelihood that your perspective is a luxury belief. We agree that close calls should not be that close, but it's not very different from shaking your fist at the sky unless you actually happen to work in this space (in which case I'm actually very interested in hearing your thoughts). I don't mean to be rude, I'm just being blunt because I believe you're washing over some extremely difficult problems and have little to bring to the table - which is by definition unproductive.

[potato3732842]

Local swat teams should not be a thing. They're the human resources equivilent of extraneous MRAPs.

The idea that we dispatch a bunch of thugs larping as infantry (because let's be real that's what swat teams are) based on a single piece of un-corroborated intelligence from a source of unknown quality (i.e. no preexisting reason to believe they're legit) would not pass muster in any situation with "real stakes" therefore it's not ok for local police departments to act that way. There needs to be some check.

Swat teams weren't even a common thing until the 80s. Society isn't gonna collapse without them. And their response times aren't that great anyway. Send a normal officer. Any situation demanding a real swat team probably needs to be triaged anyway.

[tptacek]

You're fixating on the name "Swatting". The technique works whether or not you get an according-to-Hoyle SWAT team called.

[ryandrake]

Whatever word you use for it, a single, often anonymous, phone call should not directly and immediately result in an armed assault on an address.

[JumpCrisscross]

> a single, often anonymous, phone call should not directly and immediately result in an armed assault on an address

It wasn’t anonymous. The teenager impersonated an officer.

[ryandrake]

> With respect, I find your perspective hard to believe because I don't buy that you would not yourself call that very same number if something truly drastic happened to you. I have a difficult time believing any detractors of 911, for that matter, would truly actually abide by that standard.

I don't know if I would dare call the police, for any reason. Inviting poorly-trained, on-edge, armed brutes into your home who have legal immunity from anything they do, who do not have to justify escalation to violence, are not held accountable for inappropriate escalation... I don't know if I like the odds. I might just roll the dice with the home invader and hope he just wants my TV.

[tptacek]

As someone deeply involved in local politics and in close touch with a large number of neighbors across one of the bluest, police-skeptical municipalities in the United States: this is a message board trope. Everybody expects to be able to call the police. You might, if someone is being their best self, get some hesitation before a call about someone playing at the park who doesn't look like they belong there. Someone trying car doors? 911. You'd be excoriated for seeing something like that and not calling.

This is just not a real thing, this idea that normal people will never call the police under any circumstances. It's even less the case as you go into majority-black neighborhoods, where one of their big complaints is that the police don't come when they call, only when they're walking down the street. They're being actively victimized police, and they're still upset that it's not easier to summon them.

I am speaking positively here, not normatively.

[butter999]

People claiming on HN they won't call the cops might be all talk, I can't possibly know, but if you don't know anyone who won't call the police, you don't know people low on the socioeconomic ladder. And that's fine, there's no shame in that. But people who are frequent harassed by police - yeah, they don't call the police.

Ask a homeless person how they're treated by police and whether they would call 911.

[tptacek]

Yes, I do. Not only that, but those people organize and write position statements, and those statements are: "we can't get the police to come fast enough when we call".

If I have to go all the way to "unhoused person" on the SES spectrum to see the evidence for your argument, I'll consider my point made.

[butter999]

Consider that the people who feel most disenfranchised might not be coming to the meetings and such you're drawing from.

I don't really understand your second statement, it would only make sense to me if you didn't consider the homeless to exist as people. But I take the impression that you don't feel that way. So I don't really see why you feel you can discard them and conclude not calling the police is a "message board phenomenon" rather than a "very low on the ladder" phenomenon.

I've met people offline who tell me they don't call the police in a way I find credible, I don't know what else to tell you. I suppose the reason I responded to your comment was because it felt like a "message board phenomenon" to me, it didn't match my experience interacting with people offline.

[potato3732842]

>this is a message board trope

Speaking of message board tropes: <screeches in samplin bias>

You're not hearing about all the cases where people didn't call the police. You're doubly so not hearing about all the cases where somebody pulled a gun on a package thief (or whatever) because the kind of people who are not calling the police know very well that there's nothing the police hate more than peasants DIYing what they think is their job.

>Everybody expects to be able to call the police. You might, if someone is being their best self, get some hesitation before a call about someone playing at the park who doesn't look like they belong there. Someone trying car doors? 911. You'd be excoriated for seeing something like that and not calling.

Thank god I do not live in your municipality. Sounds like the most unholy fermented cesspit of Karens.

Nobody calls the cops on such trivial "I have no problems so I'll create some out of thin air" problems as "a man in the park who doesn't look right". People have better crap to be doing. I don't even live somewhere particularly poor either.

[c22]

Last time I saw a guy trying car doors I said "Hey, leave my car alone. Get the fuck out of here!" and he immediately left the area. This seems identical to the best result the police could of provided and probably was much quicker.

[tptacek]

He immediately left the area to go try car doors a block down.

[c22]

Probably, but this is what he does after the police talk to him as well.

And really, we want it this way, because the alternative is that the police rough him up or arrest him on basically random hearsay.

The only other thing the police could do is connect multiple calls to one area and increase the presence of random cruisers there for a while in which case the perp will just move to an entirely different area.

This same result can be achieved if each of those concerned citizen callers simply approached the guy and said "Hey, get the fuck out of here!"

Some level of policing is probably necessary for crimes more serious than car-prowling but at a certain point we need to accept what we can and can't change about the world and try to implement policies that reduce the overall societal harm.

I think we could probably save a lot of police resources by adopting a societal focus on civil interpersonal conflict resolution and working to build a society where fewer and fewer individuals consider car-prowling to be a reasonable pursuit.

[tptacek]

(man standing up in the town hall meeting meme)

I am fine with the idea of people stealing stuff from cars spending the night in lockup.

This is what I mean by how message-boardy this logic is. Ordinary people call the police when this kind of thing happens.

[tptacek]

I mostly agree with this, and also think the "magic telephone number" is a very message-boardy kind of argument, sort of like when software developers are aghast at the idea that the criminal justice system adjudicates "intent" ("you can't read people's minds!"). I think outside of message boards, people generally do want a phone number they can call during an armed robbery.