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Swatting is the act of contacting law enforcement anonymously and untraceably and reporting a major crime in progress or recently occurred, causing law enforcement to respond with SWAT teams in armored personnel carriers and with M-16 automatic rifles. Innocent people sometimes get killed.
It is now being publicly reported that late last month the head of the Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Jen Easterly, was swatted.
Police in Arlington, Virginia say that they received a 911 on December 30th around 9 PM claiming that a shooting had occurred inside a residence on the block where Easterly lives.
Easterly was in that residence at the time, alone.
Easterly is not exactly a high profile controversial politician, so we can rule of that she was targeted for her extreme political views on either side.
The good news is that the cops in Arlington are close enough to DC that they likely have been trained about the swatting epidemic, and knew the residence was Easterly’s and who she is.
As a result, she was not killed , accidentally, by the police.
Other swatting victims have not been so lucky.
On rare occasion the police are able to catch an prosecute the swatter. Most of the time the police don’t even have the resources to investigate. In one case, Andrew Finch was shot and killed by police outside his Kansas home when the SWAT team came to his house after a serial swatter called in a false crime. Turns out the swatter had the wrong address and now Finch is dead and the swatter got 20-25 years in federal prison in a plea deal.
In some cities police are setting up code words to use between targets and dispatch to avoid unnecessary SWAT responses and the resultant property damage, lawsuits and occasionally death.
Especially for small police departments that lack resources, experience, training and past events (I am sure that Arlington has had its share of false swatting in the past), they can react and over react. Even if no one gets hurt, it can be very traumatic. Small police departments often exist in the suburbs outside large cities, so don’t assume that because you like NEAR a large city your police agency has been trained on how to deal with events like this.
If you want to train your team and their support staff on this issue and how to prepare and respond, please contact us. If you feel comfortable doing it yourself, please do it. We are seeing numerous swatting events and often, it is low profile people who get swatted just for laughs. In the case of Finch, another gamer was angry at an opponent and got the wrong address, so Finch wasn’t even the target of the swatting; completely innocent, but dead none the less.
Credit: The Record