Authorities brought 20 police cars, five SWAT officers, and drones to her house
https://www.twitch.tv/grammacrackers/clip/CharmingSolidNoodleKevinTurtle-CCpMMy7EX_W4v7_S
update: Found this video from local news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGeb3cuqLxE
you have to be one sick twisted individual to be swatting a person, let alone a freaking elderly woman
While she’s trying to raise money for her grandkid’s cancer treatment, no less.
Seriously, fuck whoever did this.
And fuck who ever supports a system that results in this…
Dark thought, what if a supporter did it, 'cuz that kid is definitely getting their treatment paid for now.
Damn, it did make the news after all.
She couldve died, they frequently shoot innocent people and animals during these raids
Swatting is fucked up
Grandma could have died…
Making the mother of all omelettes here, Jack! Can’t fret over every egg!
Why do you think that? Do they mention some kind of payout in the video? It sounds unlikely to me.
No, but the attention they’re getting is probably orders of magnitude bigger after this, and attention=money in this case
I’m afraid “Watch Streamer Get Swatted” is a saturated market. Likely breaking the age record may help though
This was objectively a bad decision, but regardless, none of us would be here talking about this streamer if it hadn’t happened. Most won’t donate, but the more people that see it, the more likely it is that someone will donate.
They didn’t say THAT HAPPENED FOR SURE, they said “dark thought”
You’re allowed to post random thoughts on the internet
We’re in Generation Duh where people think doing this kind of thing is funny. But it’s funny only to them, was thought up of in 2 minutes, then discarded once any attention has been brought to it before they think of the next stupid idea that they think is funny.
Stop being right about that!
Most american headline ever
Oh this absolutely happens here in europe too, just not with such a needlessly large amount of cops. Makes it no less dangerous though.
Do elderly women have to stream videos to pay for cancer treatments? My father has cancer, and all his bills this year add up to €0. Well, sometimes I leave the car in a paid parking lot; in the whole year it’s probably been around €20.
Oh no i meant the swatting part my bad.
I’ve never seen any european police respond to anonymous tips with 20 police cars, SWAT equivalent units or even guns drawn for that matter.
just not with such a needlessly large amount of cops
Hence this part of my comment… like … learn to read boiii
If the child didn’t need money for treatment, granny wouldn’t be on twitch.
sure, but if she streamed for her enjoyment and got swatted, it wouldn’t make a difference
America has “police by intimidation” as its default response. Most of Europe seems to have “police by consent” as the default.
It leads to a different mentality. They might still roll out the whole cavalry, but it will more likely be led by a polite knock at the door, and an initial attempt to de-escalate.
You’re being a little too optimistic, there. It might not be the same toxic culture, but ACAB.
The UK force has its problems, but it functions fairly well. It also has a lot of people in it who honestly want to do a good job.
The problem is the rules and mandates coming down from the government. (And the political upper management level of the police)
They mentioned in the video more cops came because they wanted to meet the gaming grandma, and they cleared the scene pretty quick.
I don’t think a grandma would have to raise money for cancer treatment in the EU…
It’s only be more American if the cops entered her home and shot her while claiming a controller was a gun
This happens frequently enough where you’d think there would be a system in place to prevent this type of abuse.
But then they wouldn’t get to cosplay as action heroes.
Genuinely hard to do. Even if we ignore the problem of guns in the US (this also happens in the europe, for example).
Emergency services kind of have to assume every call is real and act accordingly. In hostage and shooting situations there’s not really much time to debate the validity of the case, because if they delay and it was a real situation, they now are responsible for potentially more victims.
The only real solution is that the forces need to arrive with the potential that it’s a fake call. But that’s easier said than done
Oh, and prosecute the hell out of the callers. Which is not always possible, depending how energy they put into making the call anonymous
It’s the ol’ “boy who cried wolf” situation. You probably don’t want public services like police and firefighters deciding which calls seem real or not.
K but there has to be some happy medium between 20 swat cars and showing up 2 hours after the pizza driver.
It’s really easy to say that when you’re not the one calling the police because there’s an actual madman with a gun holding your loved one hostage. I think it’s a tough situation that, really, has more to do with the overall culture in America than how emergency services respond to particular calls. If the overall level of potential danger was lower due to cultural reasons, I think then we could talk.
Easy to say doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.
Showing up with 20 swat cars doesn’t mean that there’s 20 swat cars blindly shooting at the house.
There’s no harm on just showing up. As long as they verify the claims before acting on them, I don’t see the issue.
The only issue is that it is expensive and may break a door or something. Which is why the caller should be tracked, and made to pay for all of it.
deleted by creator
All cops are idiots.
Never ceases to amuse me how they send a ridiculous amount of deputies to one situation. They couldn’t agree on a team or maybe two qualified people, no, let’s send the whole fucking department and have extras just incase.
Meanwhile, when an actual credible threat is ongoing: “We’ll send our best confrontation avoider and check back in about 3 hours from now”
I will never forgive Uvalde police for that school shooting situation. Not only did they do nothing to stop the shooter, they actively held back parents who were going to do the cops jobs for them.
If I remember right, 23 kids, and 3 staff members died that day in an attack that took hours, but should have been stopped in minutes. They arrived on the scene 6 minutes after being called. Then they let it go on and on and on.
I will never forgive Uvalde police.
Yeah but like… Weren’t most of the kids brown-ish? /s
When seconds count, they’re an hour away
I was paid a dawn visit many years ago by an armed unit (UK). The way they ran it was two plainclothes (handguns only) officers knock on the door to assess the threat, with a van full of tooled up guys in balaclavas just outside, just in case. It was all very chill and no unnecessary stress/escalation for anyone. Seems like this would be a more sensible approach.
It would indeed be a more sensible approach.
I’m frequently amazed that despite your countries declining standard of living it is still light years ahead of that of my own. I’m actually jealous. Please rejoin the EU as soon as it’s convenient.
That sounds very nice. I’m honestly jealous. However, there were 408 mass shootings in the USA last year. That’s more than 110 people shot per day. While I in no way support the policies of the police in the USA, I do have to admit that given the likelihood that the residents of any particular home might be armed, I personally would not want to be a lightly armed and unarmored cop knocking on a door here. I mean, people here have literally been shot just for knocking or ringing a doorbell.
While all cops are indeed bastards, many of the other people in this country aren’t any better. The left end of the bell curve in this country is very heavily armed and doing their part to help police turn the nation into the war zone they think it already is. Until common sense gun laws are passed and the dumbest and most violent among us are disarmed, it’s not going to change for the better.
Yeah I get it, it’s a silly comparison as the potential threat landscape is completely different. It’s a sad situation over there.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see there is a episode of something where someone needs to do a crime in area so they pull this so all the cops are in other side of town.
I mean if they had been told there were gunshots, several dead in the street and hostages. That might be a fairly reasonable response.
Ok, so granny got swatted, why?
What was the police told about the situation?
Is there an article about this which explains the cause of this.
Those questions would only matter if this kind of police reaction wasn’t almost exclusive to the US. So American police are idiots.
In Europe there were a few cases in France, but they led to changes in police procedures to verify reports more thoroughly before busting through doors.
There are a lot of things that can be pointed at as to why this happens so much in the US. But I think most people forget that this is a problem that can literally be fixed using laws and technology.
Swatting can only happen because the US telecom system is so full of holes and because the US legal system isn’t doing its job.
The primary thing you have to do is fix it so that the emergency operators can know where a call actually originated. And all we need to do to make that happen is to change the law so that telecom companies are held criminally and civilly liable when a person uses their infrastructure to fake where an emergency call is coming from.
Calls that come from foreign sources or from internet sources would harbor great suspicion. Imagine that the operator gets a big flashing notice that the call is suspicious right from the start.
I’m not saying that police and gun nuts and police gun nuts and incompetent police and nazi assholes don’t have a lot of culpability, or that we shouldn’t have severe penalties for people who do the swatting but the core fault lies in our elected representatives being too corrupt to hold telecom companies to account.
I don’t think giving the police more surveillance options is the best option. The main problem is the extreme militarisation of the US police. This amount of force is a ridiculous response to almost any likely scenario they would have encountered.
That’s not surveillance. That’s basic service, allowing the recipient of a call to know who is actually calling them. The same thing would also stop a lot of scammers.
they also get alot of surplus equipment from the military that is outdated, which makes it even worst.
All cops are idiots.
“ACAI”???
Everyone blames swatting on the person who called in a fake report, but swatting only works because the are idiots. Someone actually decided to bring 20 cars to an house legally owned by an 85 year old with a single unverified repot as their only evidence.
In fairness, the police don’t have a list of who is in every house at all times. They don’t exactly have X-ray vision. All they know is that they got a call saying that someone is holding someone at gunpoint in this house.
Of course, 20 cars is comically overkill
This sort of overreaction isn’t rare though. People have died from it.
It’s also not exclusive to the U.S. We had a guy here in Sweden who got assaulted and practically kidnapped by masked men in the middle of the night. Guy thought he was going to die, and didn’t find out that they were police until they got him in the car and drove to the station.
What was his horrible crime? He’d shared images via Yahoo mail of him and his 30 year old boyfriend having sex. Some American organisation trawled through Yahoo mail, flagged these images and videos as possible CSAM, and forwarded it to Swedish authorities. Our authorities, instead of you know, doing any kind of investigation, or summoning the guy to the police station, or even just arresting him in a calm and peaceful manner, decided that sending masked goons to raid his home in the middle of the night was the way to go.
Oh yeah, I’m fully aware. My own city made national headlines in my country a few years back when bastard pig Justin Rapp shot and killed Andrew Finch. SWATting should be considered attempted murder, and if a pig murders someone during a SWATting, they should be charged as well.
Fun fact! Bastard pig Justin Rapp sued the city when they placed him on leave, and won. Now he’s a detective whose salary is paid by my tax dollars. Fuck the police
Kudos to granny for being so positive about it and acknowledging that the cops have to follow up on the calls they receive, but if some anonymous tipster can bring down a SWAT team on some grandma’s house without any kind of check being triggered, that might indicate that there are some problems about how these issues are being handled. Other people may get out of this with much worse than a funny story to tell when two dozen cops decide to visit their house at night.
People have already died from swatting. Faster and cheaper than hiring an assassin.
From the point of contact, or including time to find a good one? A good assassin can be very quick.
I’ll give ya cheaper though. Good work costs good money.
Takes a special kind of asshole to swat a little old lady for trying to host a wholesome gaming stream for a good cause.
The fact that swating still happens just proves how much of a joke policing is in general. The fact that you can get a bunch of gun-wielding adrenaline junkies to show up somewhere, frothing at the mouth for violence, in the most spurious of ways is a damning indictment for the whole institution.
Yet they won’t do a damn thing if someone is actually assaulting you.
Confused european here - why?
Since guns are handed out in America like chocolate at a Willy Wonka publicity and outreach campaign, every law enforcement agency has to be kitted out to potentially combat a barricaded suspect who can rain a small militia’s worth of lead on them and their surroundings. That’s why the response team often includes armored vehicles, snipers, and crayon munchers armed to the tits. And because abusing emergency services doesn’t cut into the profit of any big corporations, there are no effective means to seek justice against the offenders.
abusing emergency services
I don’t understand - someone called the swat team on her? Why would they go to a private house with a giant swat force based solely on some anonymous tip? That makes no sense in my head.
Because they have the equipment and are always looking for an excuse to use it to justify the cost and training. And because the more they use it, the sooner they can get more of it.
It makes zero sense to a normal person, nor does their justification for needing the equipment in the first place, but once they have it they’ll use it any chance they get.
someone called the swat team on her?
some anonymous tip
That’s not what happened. Someone called 911 and described a situation that involved a shooter who has already shot someone. The 911 operator then had to relay that to the responders (in this case, LE). The responding officers might have only received an address, that there was a barricaded active shooter, and that there was at least one shooting victim.
It’s not up to the police to debate the veracity of a report. Imagine being in a hostage situation, you manage to call 911, and they respond with “sounds fake, not coming”.
Okay, but surely upon arriving to said address with a huge swat team and discovering nothing amiss, no panicked people, no gunfire, no anything, their first reaction is to raid the house? The US sure is a strange place.
You know that shooters have the ability to stay quiet, right? A calm atmosphere doesn’t mean there isn’t someone who is in imminent danger. Back to the thought exercise: you’re a hostage, you call 911, police arrive. Then they wait five minutes and fuck off because nobody’s firing at them or shouting threats. Do you think that’s reasonable? Wouldn’t you want them to breach the house and get you out of the situation?
It’s fucked up that this happened in the first place, but “well, the police should have…” is not how you fix it. Misuse of emergency resources needs to be a federal crime, and doing it to harm another person needs to be investigated and penalized as attempted murder with prison sentence for first time offenders, both as punishment and as a deterrent. But I’ve seen enough court cases to understand that the US justice system has neither the motivation nor the competence to implement or enforce a law like that.
Gunfire would not necessarily panic people in the vicinity. If you are in a suburban setting, surrounded by 6 foot fences separating 2 story houses, a few shots could be mistaken for hammering, some kind of construction project. If I did think there was gunfire, I would go inside, and take shelter, not hang around to talk to cops.
I would never run toward cops period. They might shoot me.
I have fired guns and been around guns as they were fired, and I am not confident I would know the difference easily. Plenty of Americans have less experience with firearms than I do.
What do you think it would look like from the outside if someone had you at gunpoint in your bedroom?
Ever seen Stripes, the '80s action comedy film with Bill Murray and other notables?
There’s a scene in it that I think of every time this kind of story crops up, where you have over-equipped and under-educated people who are trained to think that everyone’s the enemy, and so prioritise their blood thirst and fear over everything else:
“All I know is I finally get to kill somebody!”
Their actions aren’t about right/wrong or just/unjust, but that they were let off the leash to do what they have been conditioned to do.
So you get people calling in hoaxes to police forces who send militarised forces to raid grannies, young children, whomever. It’s about the drama and lulz. Objectively horrifying.
The US has lived in a state where any measure to squash terrorism would never be enough, for a long time. All you have to know is an address and say to the police that you heard a group of Arab looking middle aged men speaking of blowing up a place and a small army would be raised ready raze that domicile to the ground if necessary.
That’s what happens when a group of people is armed beyond reason and in constant paranoia.
It’s America, just say a black man has a gun and they send a batallion.
Swatting also happens in Europe. I get that were the punching bag right now, but it’s not a problem that only happens here.
There is an enormous difference between the conduct of police officers between the US and Europe. Again, it mostly comes down to the public’s access to firearms, but the quality of training, institutionalized prejudices, and corrective actions (or the absence of those things) are also significant factors.
The US is not a punching bag. It’s receiving fair criticism and experiencing repercussions for decades of failure to improve public safety, and using both legal mechanisms and populist rhetoric to sanctify gun violence and the persecution of vulnerable groups, leading to a deeply divided, damn near tribal society (Us against Them), and the rise of the American Gestapo under the false banner of immigration control. Be patriotic, absolutely. But patriotism without awareness and due criticism is nothing more than zealotry.
Its called swatting. You call police and say someone is dangerous and they come running with all the gear to justify the bloated budgets. Kids were doing this pretty often in the news a decade ago. Especially to streamers.
America is a dystopian capitalist nightmare lol
It never stopped btw. This has been a constant and consistent issue for well over a decade, it rarely ever makes “the news”.
It’s an American thing. The goal is to hopefully use the police to kill the streamer since police often are skittish and tend to shoot first before verifying what is going on.
Especially when they’re led to believe the person in the home is unstable and well armed.
Why don’t people send police to the white house and houses of CEOs on a cooldown?
Because America worships pedophilia and psychopathy.
Because the police are mercenaries, not wild animals. They generally don’t bite the hand that feeds. Besides, they still have 99% of the population to target.
This happens in europe too https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-dev-swatted-live-during-a-development-video-stream this happened in Germany, but no SEK was involved (german equivalent of SWAT). His wife was so shocked, he mentioned they moved out of the country.
I don’t think the goal is to get them killed most of the time. It’s mostly kids thinking they’re “pranking” them, and just want to scare them.
This has been my feeling latley as well with so many things going on in the US…
Becusse in america nothing is better than being an edgelord
Publicity to increase donations.
And these police organisations keep spouting “but we need more funds, to protect the community”
No, you fucking dont, you’re wasting your resources by attempting to uphold your strict quotas rather than actually serve and protect the community.
Why I quit MMOs and never looked back, because even more than 20 years ago toxic behavior was being normalized, and that included offline PK.
Fucking little assholes nearly killed a grandmother.
Is Minecraft really even a MMO? My understanding is that it’s usually smaller servers. This was probably more just some asshole using her streaming to attack, rather than a toxic player.
There are massive Minecraft servers handling hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously, but most are small of course.
That’s if you play one of those. Seems like she was in a single player world. I wouldn’t consider Minecraft an MMO in the typical sense.
Social media, however and in a way, acts so much like an MMO. A fucking PK server, really.
I’m still amazed that this keeps happening but somehow, no one is ever caught?
Considering our telecons can’t (won’t) even enforce basic fucking origin checking, it’s not surprising.
These companies have ways of validating calls, it just takes money to setup and enforce, and we can’t waste money on silly things like basic safety when the shareholder value is at stake.
Assuming this was in the US, most 911 dispatchers are E911, so the approximate location is automatically included with the call. Smart phones are able to provide a more accurate location, and dispatchers still ask location because they don’t know what floor you’re on if it’s a multi story building.
The E911 location information is not verified. It’s just a field you fill out when you sign up with a voip service. Smart phone location data can also be spoofed, but that’s not quite as easy.
Unfortunately, I’m fairly certain e911 isn’t super helpful against people already spoofing their number and location.
I’m vaguely aware of possible feature rfc to add another layer to prevent spoofing, but given how lazy telecoms are about doing validations MUCH more basic than extending a protocol/schema, I’m not holding my breath.
Pure evil, a truly irredeemable soul. Hope terrible things happen to the person that called the Gestapo on her.
ACAB
For life!
Whoever did this needs to be charged with attempted murder. You can’t expect that police get a report of a threat at a residence (like a bomb threat or a murder threat) and they show up without weapons. Shame police time and resources had to be wasted ruining this poor old woman’s Minecraft night.
I guess on the up side, not many 82 year olds can tell their friends that they are important enough to have so many people show up to their house so late at night.
EDIT: Early news reports say that police received a call that said her grandson shot her (the 82 year old grandmother) and was threatening to kill himself. Completely reasonable response to that kind of a threat, if that is what the call was.
EDIT2: Apparently the police may have been able to catch it as SWATting early by confirming with the grandson himself? The way he seemed to talk, the police were cordial and weren’t aggressive, as if their guard was down maybe? They cleared the home to make sure the threat was fake, but I guess they were apologetic to grammcrackers, and she seemed in good spirits about it at least.
Completely reasonable response to that kind of a threat, if that is what the call was.
I think twenty cars is still too many
It is. Cops are bored that time of night so anything like this gets blown outta proportion
If someone was shooting people, I would definitely want every officer in the local area to show up. The police can’t possibly know if its real or not until they show up, and even if they talked with the home owner before they arrive they still have to check to make sure.
While I sure wish they could just believe you if you said you weren’t a criminal or something, that’s exactly what a criminal would say. So they gotta treat it as real even if its fake. Truly a shame so many awful people have led to this, but it will only get worse as time goes on.
Yeah I don’t disagree that they should go check it out with enough people but that’s, what, 40+ officers? To an incident supposedly involving two people? What are they all supposed to do? It’s just chaos and I don’t think they are helping the situation.
Police get a call about a person who has a gun, who already shot someone, and is threatening to kill himself. Logically speaking, a person that is erratic enough to report themselves like that isn’t likely far from the idea of deciding to shoot their neighbors or others in view too.
A person with a gun shooting even in the general direction of people, even if they don’t hit anything, is enough for me to say every officer in the area should be responding. If the first officers get there and become targets that are killed, more are showing up or are on the way. In a shooting situation it should be the goal of police to become the target being shot at instead of innocent civilians.
They can’t know if this kind of call is real or not, so they have to treat it like it is real. I would rather there be a few hours of chaos on a residential street for a false alarm by treating every report this seriously compared to something like the Ulvade school shooting happening again because police didn’t want to show up or were too scared to do their job.
My point is not about it maybe being false, I just don’t think that many people are helpful even if it is real, I think they will make the situation worse, they will not be able to make sensible decisions. I’m not talking about chaos in the street, but in coordination of law enforcement. At Uvalde, many police officers did show up, and they simply didn’t do their jobs. Among many issues with the response, they couldn’t make up their minds about who was in charge, that’s a problem with many people from many departments all showing up to an incident at once.
With 20 cars + swat you’ve just created a target rich environment.
So they send every operative to one call and let the rest of the area without support if something happens. Haven’t they seen Die Hard 3?
Whoever did this needs to be charged with attempted murder.
Doing that would raise certain implications, and validate a lot of concerns people have with police in the USA. I don’t think that’s likely to happen.
They should be charged with something, but I’m sure that won’t become a legal case which confirms that the police is basically a blunt weapon that can be swung with a phone call.
Just a few days ago there was a meme of her going around. Guess some asshole saw it.
Just curious about why she was raided. What did the warrant say?
Turns out, it’s relatively easy to convince the police to bring in a swat team to someone’s house, and the police are so chomping at the bit to get out the big boy toys that they don’t even question the validity of the call.
They might say it’s a hostage situation, or gunplay, whatever it takes to make action happen without any real question.
I didn’t watch the video (I never do, I want to read). So I assumed there was a warrant, when in fact there does not appear to have been time for that.
Police received a report of an active shooter with one shooting casualty. That is what prompted the response and that’s all I wanted to know.
The fact that the response happened isn’t something I personally think should be left up to the police (they shouldn’t be allowed to decide which calls are valid). The fact that this was obviously an overreaction on the part of the police (that so many cops showed up) is still ridiculous in my view.
What I really want is for there to be an investigation into who made the report and preferably for the book to be thrown at them.
I don’t disagree with you that this was a ridiculous display of force. But your answer didn’t answer my question.
For exigent circumstances like an active shooter or hostage situation they do not need a warrant to roll up. That is what makes these kind of issues so concerning. SWATTING has been going on since streaming became more main stay for any reason or no reason at all. Anyone can do it and repercussions on the caller are almost none existent so it is seen as a “fun” way to cause mayhem.
Well, if they send someone to look, and it is an actual bad situation, then response time is delayed…
Of course, as soon as it is seen to be a false call, the person who did the call should be arrested as that’s illegal
it’s too easy to make an anonymous call, telecoms are shit
You ever watch Police academy? You remember Tackleberry? That’s basically the United States police.
This also does nothing to answer my question. I share your opinion up to a point, but I think you missed something here. I was simply looking for factual information about the event.
