OPINION - Editorial

Others say: The case against swatting

All 2017 had to do was go away quietly, but no. It left us a nasty New Year's gift: Swatting is now officially a thing, with an innocent Wichita man shot dead by police recently for opening his front door, and an apparently callous Los Angeles gamer in jail pending his transfer to Kansas in the next month.

The term describes the practice of calling 911 with a phony story of violence in order to mobilize an armed police SWAT team. The prankster can then watch the mayhem unfold online or on TV. Some hoaxers have used swatting to harass celebrities, among them Rihanna, P. Diddy, Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher and others. But it has also become a practice in a very narrow slice of the gaming community, where players target each other or random, innocent people.

The attack is also on police. And police sometimes become the attackers.

In the case at hand, Tyler Raj Barriss, 25, is accused of making the fake emergency call that named an address in Wichita. Online news reports include the audio recording in which a man tells a dispatcher that he had killed his father, was holding his mother and brother or sister at gunpoint, and was threatening to burn the house down. In response, police surrounded the home of 28-year-old Andrew Finch. When Finch answered the door, an officer shot him, apparently because he thought Finch was reaching for a weapon.

There are laws against making false police calls. U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) introduced the Online Safety Modernization Act, which would impose up to 20 years for a hoax call that results in serious bodily injury, up to life in prison for one that results in death.

It is common for lawmakers and the public to respond to high-profile crimes with demands for new laws or tougher sentences, the belief being that some sociopath for whom law, right and wrong have no meaning will suddenly pay attention when the penalty is upped.

But if criminal pranksters are like other criminals, studies show they are more likely to be deterred by the would-be offender's knowledge that he will be caught swiftly than by any lengthening of the sentence.

Editorial on 01/07/2018

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