Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

I have been following swatting incidents of content creators for years and I have learned that police jurisdictions where this happens frequently in are becoming wiser and spreading information around, so the threat of getting killed from a swatting incident has gone down. Places with pockets of content creators like Austin Texas have become very aware of these types of things.

If you are a content creator, or someone who might be at risk for swatting you can call your local PD and explain the situation. You can let them know that you understand they must respond to those types of calls, but just wanted to call in and let them know it could happen. Most are happy to hear from you and take note.

Before swattings became popular, people used to send pizzas (popularized by old 4chan) and you would have to call all the pizza places in your area and get your address blacklisted. That was a pain.

And yet your country may have an NYPD office.

> You could argue that consistency and having a common operating model with accountability is a good thing.

Why would that require that a "captain" has several subordinates ranked "Lieutenant" and "Sergeant"? Why do the highest ranked police have caps with brocade, and gold braid on their shoulders? Is that part of the consistency? Why does the NYPD have dress uniforms? Why do they give military style funerals for those who die, or x-gun salutes? We're often told they're out there fighting "wars", though everyone is always vague about who the other side is.

I'm not making the claim that they've been militarized recently. It seems to have been the case no matter how far you go back.

> I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate.

I don't think this is a training problem. When they shoot some grandma or shake down travelers for the cash in their wallets, I don't think this could ever be corrected no matter how much or what sort of training they are required to undergo. This is some baseline ethics problem, that could only be corrected with initial selection, and then only if the selection process itself were relatively uncorrupted (and it's not).

Your comment doesn't just suggest you are mistaken about this or that, but that you aren't in a frame of mind where you could recognize or appreciate that there is a problem.

> The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because

What if the task were something absolutely morally abhorrent? What if the task was to efficiently and artfully carve the hearts out of newborn babies and toddlers, and to terrorize the parents with the mutilated remains of their children? But you've been doing this task for so long, that you and everyone else just assumes that it's something that needs to be done. You're sitting around arguing "ok, maybe we need to do only have as many satanic baby sacrifices, and I won't listen to the people who say we need to have more not less". And there's another guy sitting next to you saying "I don't know why we need the terror... we could kill just as many babies without being cruel, they could get anesthesia, and we could do grief counseling for the mom and dad".

And you endlessly yammer about this stuff, for decades, never noticing that you're all lunatics. The concept that this just shouldn't be done at all, in any manner, it's something you can't possibly hear. Even those who can understand this like to whine that they're powerless to stop it, that they don't have the tools to put a stop to it, etc. The truth is we all have the power to stop, none of you want to.

It is, because cops never shoot someone just for being armed. They just don't. It's a combination of being armed plus (believed) criminal status, or behavior during the encounter.

(And it's exceedingly rare that cops will believe an upstanding citizen who's legally armed and behaving civilly is a criminal. It happens, for instance in the two cases I cited, but it's rare. They're a rounding error in the police killing stats.)