Congressional Rep Who Introduced Anti-Swatting Bill... Victim Of Attempted Swatting

from the what-is-that-accomplishing? dept

Back in November, Congresswoman Katherine Clark introduced an anti-swatting bill. As you probably already know, swatting is when someone calls in a fake report to police about an ongoing incident at someone's home -- usually something like an "active shooter" or hostage taking or something similar -- in the interest of having police departments overreact and send out a SWAT team to deal with the situation, such as by raiding the home. The bill looks to make it a felony to use the phone system to "transmit false information with the intent to cause an emergency law enforcement response." While I'm not aware of anyone (so far) getting killed by a swatting, it seems like it's only a matter of time.

Either way, given all this, it probably shouldn't come as a huge surprise that on Sunday night, Rep. Clark found herself swatted, leading the Melrose, Massachusetts police to show up at her home, though it sounds like they handled everything carefully and appropriately.

Melrose Police spokesman John Guilfoil said the department received a recorded telephone call with a computer-generated voice at 9:57 p.m. on the department’s business line. The call, Guilfoil said, referred to “shots fired and an active shooter” at Clark’s address.

He said Melrose police officers, but not a SWAT team, responded to the address, spoke with the homeowner, and determined the call was hoax and there was no danger.

Of course, in most cases, it's quite difficult for law enforcement to ever track down whoever called in the hoax report, and it's rare for the callers to ever be caught -- though it does sometimes happen. Of course, if swatters continue to target politicians looking to pass laws against them, expect the laws and the pressure to capture them and "set an example" to continue to ratchet up. I'm sure that whoever swatted Rep. Clark is assuming that it will be impossible to track down who did that, but the higher a target you aim at, the more likely that higher powered law enforcement gets involved -- meaning it gets increasingly likely that whoever did it will be tracked down.

In the meantime, it would also be nice if we started looking at the root causes of swatting, such as the militarization of police departments where that's not even remotely necessary.

Filed Under: felony, katherine clark, swatting