The Heart of the Issue

Thursday 11 April 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Jesse Walker at Reason addressing the heart of the issue concerning the new trend of “Swatting,” or making an emergency call so tense that a SWAT team is called out:

One thing missing from the article is an awareness that there’s a long history of wrong-door paramilitary police raids caused by errors rather than pranksters, with victims nowhere near as rich or famous as Selena Gomez or Tom Cruise. I say this not to downplay how terrible the Hollywood raids are, but to point out that there’s a larger mess here. As California lawmakers ponder ways to penalize the people who make these calls, they should also look into the possiblity that a large, frequently deployed, and easily misled militarized police apparatus is itself a part of the problem.

Yep. Part of the problem of SWAT teams being deployed to the homes of celebrities based on a prank call is the existence of SWAT teams that are deployed to the homes of low level drug users on a daily basis as part of routine police work. The willingness to use heavily armed and militarized SWAT units so readily is the problem, not the result of some other problem.

2013-04-11  »  madlibertarianguy