Easy to say but if you’re actually being held hostage or someone is threatening to murder you you won’t want a couple of cops with billy clubs and mental health assessments to show up. Swat teams need to be better at assessing which events are swatting attempts vs the real thing. We also need to do a better job of finding the swatters and sending them to jail.
Ah yes, that thing that is super duper common in normal countries. Hostage situations. Can't order a coffee without someone being taken hostage.
If only there was some way to make sure people didn't just have access to the weapons they need to successfully perpetrate a hostage situation... almost as if the glorification of weapons and the military is at the core of this eh?
If only there was one step further that this could be taken. Like making economic conditions for people so that they wouldn't even want to do hostage situations or robberies in the first place. If only there was such a model where we could see that happening...
Why? Not even the US calls SWAT for robberies, that would be truly idiotic. You call your insurance office so the you can try to fight your way through the people that are trying to prevent you from filling out all the paperwork necessary to get your coverage. Very different fight.
I've abstracted the problem a bit and traveled up the causal chain so I think this confused people. I'm getting at something more fundamental. Ask yourself why there are more violent crimes and theft in poorer neighborhoods/poorer countries than in rich neighborhoods/rich countries. Is it because the genetic makeup of people (often referring to skin pigmentation, but not exclusively) or is it because opportunity costs? If you're even lower middle class it usually is a high risk low reward situation to steal or perform violent actions. That's why the best thing you can do for public safety is actually to create a wealth/living standard floor.
It helps to play the "why" game and physically draw your connections (especially since you want to travel down certain paths after you have have gotten to them and there's going to be a lot to keep track of). Certainly removing guns can be one part of the solution, but it clearly isn't the only factor contributing to "people getting shot" and is really a lazy way of trying to solve the problem by presenting this as the one and only way to resolve it. Complex problems require understanding the whole chain (or a good portion of) to resolve and the over simplification just causes us to fight and continue our 30 years of debate that has not deviated or grown despite the problem having.
Do hostage takers usually murder their only leverage as soon as a cop car pulls up? Certainly if someone has broken into my house trying to murder me, I'd be thrilled with two armed regular old officers showing up at my door to investigate the situation.
I'm sure there are situations where a swat team is genuinely needed, but I'm also sure those cases make up an extremely small percentage of the times they're actually used. In any case, if police are called out to an innocent person's house and they kill the innocent people there it shows pure incompetence on the part of the officers involved. A little restraint and a lot more training would probably go a long way to preventing tragedy.
The specific thing that makes swatting a useful harassment tactic is that SWAT teams don't handle situations with subtlety and deftness. The sort of police who someone could use to harass me with a false report are the exact sort of police I wouldn't want around if I was being held hostage.
