
Man charged after US gamer is shot by SWAT following hoax terrorism call - neverminder
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/robert-mcdaid-charged-tyran-dobbs-swatting-hoax-call-swat-terrorism-maryland-shot-gun-explosives-a7677071.html
======
tomohawk
It's good they caught the callers, but whoever dispatched the SWAT team was
negligent, allowing the team to be used as a weapon. The SWAT team itself was
also negligent, not adequately assessing the situation on the ground.

Control of SWAT should really not be at the local police level, but at the
state level. The fact that SWATing is a thing shows just how broken the
current model is. The use of SWAT should be extremely rare.

~~~
hacker_9
> The fact that SWATing is a thing shows just how broken the current model is

Hard to think of a better model though; you never know what call is going to
be real. Additionally getting local police involved does make a lot of sense,
as they should have invaluable knowledge of the area and the people.

~~~
panic
Maybe we could try one of the many models used successfully in other
countries?

~~~
orbat
This sort of suggestion is usually countered by pointing out how
big/unique/different the US is, hence things that work everywhere else in the
world just won't cut it.

Which I understand to an extent, but often it sounds more like a cop-out than
an actual analysis of the situation.

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mtempleton
Police brutalize and bloody a man in process of ejecting him from plane:
outcome > corporation to blame

Police shoot, mutilate and nearly kill man sleeping at home during hoax:
outcome > citizen to blame

I'm sure I could go on for a while. The point is, are we not allowed to hold
government accountable for illegitimate use of violence? Isn't that... a
really big problem?

~~~
csomar
You can't really blame the "Police Offier" if he is doing his job correctly
(following orders). The one to be blamed should be the one giving the orders.

~~~
dsmithatx
Breaking the bones in a SLEEPING guy's face (over a prank call from another
country FFS) is the officers job????

I guess you don't believe police are there to protect and serve which they are
sworn to do. Not protect and serve random callers from other nations by the
way!

------
keithpeter
_" Taking the threat seriously, armed police then raided Mr Dobbs’ home and
shot the 20-year-old between the eyes and in the chest with rubber bullets,
breaking bones in his face and bruising his lungs. Images taken after the
incident show him with a heavily swollen, bruised and cut face."_

UK resident: my memories of seeing television reports of rubber bullets used
in Northern Ireland during the troubles suggest that the bullets were designed
to be bounced off ground or wall first. That they were primarily a riot
control round.

When did the police start using them as direct ammunition? Is that generally
regarded as OK?

~~~
4c2383f5c88e911
In france at least, they started to outfit many police departments with them,
as tit sounds better in the news to say they are "sub-lethal" weapons instead
of real guns. It is illegal for them to aim at the upper body or fire below
the 7 meters range, though they do it constantly (and even though people
already died due to them and lose eyes every year; a rubber bullet going at
360km/h can be quite lethal).

~~~
afarrell
If you are breaching a building rather than controlling a street, isn't your
training going to be to shoot someone directly? Since officers are acting on
training rather than reflection, isn't expecting them to bounce bullets rather
foolish?

~~~
simonh
Are you saying police are being trained to directly shoot people with
equipment designed to be used indirectly? Or are you saying they aren't being
trained to use their equipment as it's intended to be used at all? I'm not
clear what your point is.

~~~
afarrell
My point is that if someobe gets training on how to breach and secure
buildings, either in SWAT, or in their previous career in the military, then
they will have training which teaches them to aim for center-mass of anyone
they perceive as a threat.

Swapping out the type of ammunition isnt going to erase that training and so
they would fall back to it in a stressful situation.

------
raphael_l
This article [0] seems to be much more in-depth and explains the situation a
bit better (if factually correct).

I'm not so much baffled about actually showing up with a SWAT team before the
threat could be identified as a hoax, but rather how an allegedly sleeping man
could be shot twice. Once in the face.

The interesting parts are the following:

> Dobbs himself said when police woke him up with a call on his cellphone, he
> said he told them he would come outside. Dobbs said he walked around the
> apartment looking for something to put on because it was a cold February
> night. He said he walked out to the living room, saw the SWAT{ } team, and
> heard police yelling at him to come out. He said he turned around to go get
> his girlfriend but was shot. He said he doesn't remember anything after that
> rubber bullet him in the face.

And:

> Police say Dobbs was shot twice with two rubber rounds to prevent him from
> reentering the apartment. A Howard County Police Department spokesperson
> said Dobbs repeatedly refused to obey officer's commands, and also allegedly
> had his hand in his shirt, though police do not have video evidence of it.
> When asked, Dobbs denied having his hand in his shirt, and said he had
> nothing in his hands at all. The department said Dobbs was shot in the face
> as he was "falling forward," according to a written statement to 7 on Your
> Side.

[0] [http://wjla.com/features/7-on-your-side/fbi-says-swatting-
is...](http://wjla.com/features/7-on-your-side/fbi-says-swatting-is-a-growing-
crime-trend-both-locally-and-nationally--115595)

~~~
mfukar
I was scanning the article while, sure enough, I saw it:

> ...refused to obey...

Zero tolerance, zero patience.

~~~
simonh
That's according to the police on the scene who shot him. Also this is not the
first time I've seen police claim someone they shot 'had his hands in his
shirt'. Of course they can't claim he had something in his had if there's no
physical object on the scene, so 'in his shirt' now seems to be the standard
go-to phrase.

------
peterkelly
The most disturbing part about this is that it demonstrates the police will
essentially act as hitmen for you, for free. All you have to do is call them
up anonymously and tell them your target is a terrorist, and they'll believe
it, shooting first and asking questions later.

It's those responsible for ordering and carrying out the raid that deserve the
harshest penalty.

------
xroche
The main problem is per se not the hoax call, it is the grotesque accumulation
of incompetence from the authorities, and the inability to handle a situation
from the SWAT team, due ot a probable lack of proper training. And, also, the
impunity security personnel tend to have - shooting someone without reason
should be prosecuted as for any regular citizen. What is happening in your so-
called free country, dear Americans ?

~~~
vidarh
Exactly - a hoax call should be a nuisance, not potentially lead to violence.
As it stands, it's almost surprising that no terrorist group has tried to
exploit it, e.g. by calling in large numbers of fake reports to different
police departments and sit back and wait for the mayhem.

------
tibarun
This episode shows just how dangerous it is to have a militarized police
force, behaving as if they were in a war zone. And it's also terrible that the
Independent didn't focus it's reporting on the whole militarized police issue.

~~~
Chathamization
Yeah. I remember once looking into the military reserves in the U.S. They had
a list of occupations, and the civilian jobs the occupation would prepare you
for. So, if you're a military base electrician, it prepares you for being a
civilian electrician, etc. For infantry, they said that it prepared you well
to be a police officer.

So the U.S. government is taking up a large chunk of young people's prime
years and teaching them few transferable skills. But they need to pretend like
they're not just wasting they're lives, so they tell them that now that they
know how to fight a war they know how to be a police officer. Then,
unsurprisingly, we get police officers who think they're soldiers.

------
ballenf
The local new channel has a much better summary of the situation from before
the caller was identified:

[http://wjla.com/features/7-on-your-side/fbi-says-swatting-
is...](http://wjla.com/features/7-on-your-side/fbi-says-swatting-is-a-growing-
crime-trend-both-locally-and-nationally--115595)

The police statement on the issue has additional detail that, if true, puts
the victim in a slightly different light.

[https://www.scribd.com/document/271698829/Howard-County-
Poli...](https://www.scribd.com/document/271698829/Howard-County-Police-
Statement-on-Swatting-t)

My conclusion is that the guy had a small stash of pot and was panicking
thinking they were there for that. So he was going around his apartment trying
to hide it instead of coming out when directed. Police interpreted that as
hostility and shot him. They claim the shot to the face was because the guy
"fell into" a shot intended for the torso. I really don't know how they said
that with a straight face.

The advice in the first link to call your local police if you think someone
might try to SWAT you sounds very helpful.

~~~
misnome
So, he deserved death because he panicked?

~~~
rkangel
No. That's why he was shot with non-lethal rounds. He suffered serious
injuries certainly, and the whole case is deplorable, but it was a fairly
reasonable response to his actions at that moment.

~~~
caf
They're not "non-lethal", they're "less lethal". People can and do die from
rubber bullets.

------
tici_88
Yes, hoaxes especially like this one that end badly should be punished
accordingly. At the same time the SWAT team is also responsible. After all, it
was them who fired the bullets.

Note that in this case it was multiple bullets not just one as SWAT shot the
innocent guy multiple times. It is not just a 'oopsie, we pulled the trigger
by mistake, our bad' kind of a situation on their part either.

------
izacus
At least here in EU the SWAT member and whole chain would go through a
rigourous disciplinary action to determine why the police was shooting at
someone innocent and how to prevent it.

Is this going to be the case in UK as well?

~~~
manarth
The SWAT event was by an American SWAT team, in the USA.

The UK angle is that the guy who made the false report lives in the UK and
made the call from the UK.

~~~
izacus
Oh, I misunderstood the article then. Still, does USA (or the relevant state)
have such mechanisms?

~~~
Chathamization
What often happens is that if there is sufficient negative attention, the
officer will be placed on paid leave pending an administrative review. Then
after the public moves on to something else, the administrative review finds
that the officer did nothing wrong and that it was the unarmed victim's fault
for being shot.

------
abalashov
The problem I see is that anyone can just "call" a SWAT team on anyone. Should
there not be at least a cursory effort to ascertain whether the threat is
genuine before sending people in to do shooting?

------
coldtea
The SWAT team should be charged too.

Prank calls are a fact of life (and people doing them can be charged, provided
they can even be tracked).

Sending a whole SWAT team for a prank call, and having it get to the point to
shoot people without any actual threatening situation is unacceptable.

------
tener
How come there is no protocol to ensure authenticity of such claims?

~~~
masklinn
These actions are _emergency_ response teams, the goal is to stamp down the
situation as quickly as possible then assess.

You can't exactly have a bloke ringing in at the door and asking if there's
really an active shooter/hostage situation, that would render the concept
worthless.

Though at this point one can easily wonder whether SWAT rapid response is such
a good idea, it would be interesting to compile SWAT emergency response
actions, see if the emergency response was actually necessary (versus sending
a beat cop ringing the door or whatever) and weigh that against swatting
abuse.

~~~
RivieraKid
This is pretty exploitable though. Someone could just spam the police with
fake reports to waste their resources. I remember that once someone reported a
bomb on a railway station - but he didn't say which railway station, so they
closed and search all of them (in a 10 mil country), lol.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I remember that happened not too long ago, lots of schools getting fake bomb
threats. The problem is that you can't ignore the threat, just in case one of
them is correct.

That's why I think terrorism isn't nearly as big a problem as people claim it
to be. It's relatively simple to create bombs; a malicious actor could first
bomb a lot of places already, but also send bomb threats for weeks on end
until nobody believes them anymore, then do the real thing.

So IMO, either terrorism isn't that big a deal, OR, all of the security
measures and secret services are actually working and defusing (ha) the
situations before they can act; the only recent terrorist attacks were ad-hoc
things (grabbing a truck and driving through people) or from unexpected angles
(the occasional school shooting).

~~~
vidarh
Frankly, terrorism both isn't that big a deal _and_ they're clearly not
particularly smart. If it was a big deal and they were smart, there'd be a lot
of escalating fear by combining lots of fake threats with a certain, low,
proportion of actual attacks: Enough attacks that every threat causes fear and
contributes to a siege mentality, and exploiting fake threats as a threat
multiplier.

I think part of the reason we're not seeing that is that a large proportion of
the attacks we see are not the work of terrorist "masterminds" pulling
strings, but mentally unhinged people who decide tying their murder-suicide to
a political cause makes it "mean something". Because it'd be easy to multiply
the fear in various ways if they were planning this out properly.

------
im3w1l
Illustrates why presumption of innocence is so important: Not just to prevent
honest accidents, but also to prevent the justice system from being used as a
weapon.

------
callesgg
These fake incidents are from a certain perspective quite good as they
highlight the issue of making dangerous decisions based on non grounded fear.

------
makecheck
In a society that can sometimes have absurd levels of red tape, it’s amazing
to me that something like an armed raid is apparently as easy as flipping a
switch.

There should be an _unbelievable_ number of forms for these people to fill out
before they can issue a raid. They should have to conduct prior investigations
and find corroborating evidence of the original claim that requested the raid,
etc. They should need multiple signatures from different levels of command.
And heck, they should probably require a video recording of an officer walking
up and knocking on the door at least once before moving in any troops.

------
anentropic
USA: failed state

------
pvaldes
This guy had a crazy good luck. Seriously.

Unfortunately this woman walking on the streets of Barcelona and passing by
chance next to a manifestation didn't had the same luck. Policemen were found
not guilty in 2016.

[http://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/Absueltos-acusados-
reventar...](http://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/Absueltos-acusados-reventar-
Ester-Quintana_0_520398071.html)

Somebody that try to shoot you a rubber ball in the face 'by error' is not
different to somebody that try to stab you in the face 'by error'.

------
sundvor
I for one am hoping the caller gets locked away for a _very_ long time.

~~~
GordonS
I'm hoping the shooter gets locked away. Little chance.

------
mtgx
Welcome to America - we shoot first, ask questions later.

There really needs to be a complete overhaul of law enforcement training in
the US, and the government needs to actually enforce the law against its own
agents, too.

~~~
krapp
America has the police culture it has because the American people wanted it.
We wanted aggression in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Drugs. We wanted
police to come in, guns blazing, with zero tolerance and take down the
evildoers. We voted for prisons and hard time and three strikes and zero
tolerance policies in schools. Lawyers and judges run for office touting the
number of people they sent to the death chamber, promise _more death if
elected_ and get elected.

We can't overhaul law enforcement without overhauling American culture first.

~~~
thatcat
>zero tolerence in schools, acceptable police aggression, war on drugs,
expansion of post 911 power...

These all seem like things that were lobbied for by police unions rather than
the people electing the representatives enacting these policies.

