Early on the morning of April 3, Randi Harper (aka freebsdgirl), architect of the ggautoblocker, reported police had shown up at her door due to a call about a hostage situation. Harper details the events both on Twitter and on her blog, and says because she filed a report in January about threats that mentioned the possibility of swatting, the police knocked and asked her questions instead of barreling in, as seen happening more often in the video she links in her post:
But though we can see how affected some of these people are in the moment, and how they are treated when under suspicion — cuffed at times, forced to the floor and held — this video doesn’t show the full possibilities of a SWAT unit situation. In recent years, children have been seriously injured or even killed during SWAT raids in Georgia, Michigan, and Florida, and those are the high profile cases, the ones we hear about. Harper acknowledges that her status as a white woman in a more upscale neighborhood fed into her treatment in the moment. Someone else might not have been so lucky.
Since her reports, armchair detectives have been working overtime to determine the reliability of documents Harper posted, speculating she digitally altered a tow slip or parking violation, but a person claiming to work as a police clerk posted to the GamerGate reddit hub Kotaku in Action and indicated the report numbers might have been from January because they were filed as related to her earlier report, which was documented, and that traffic tickets don’t receive such numbers. At the time of this writing, the user was not verified, but seemed to have some solid, if general, information.
False SWAT reports have become much more common, and the phenomenon has been reported on recently by the mainstream media, as swatting incidents occur with some frequency both in and out of the gaming community, and while perpetrators have been hit with major sentences, the trend shows little sign of slowing. Harper has been outspoken on the importance of filing pre-emptive reports with the police for anyone who is concerned after receiving threats or having their personal information compromised, indicating it might make the difference between being thrown to the ground and having a friendly chat with the local police.
The cost of a SWAT response can range in the thousands, another reason this particular “prank” can be so harmful.
UPDATE, April 7: As reported by Game Politics, a representative of the Oakland Police Department confirmed officer response to Harper’s home at the time she indicated.
2 thoughts on “On SWAT calls and Randi Harper [UPDATE]”
What is it going to take for this madness to stop? Harper does well to point out her privilege being, White, female, living in an affluent area, and having a golden retriever. But this could have gone down so much differently if her identity markers were different (or God forbid she had had a Black male visitor at the time).
In addition to the possibility of harm coming to the intended target of the SWATting, stories of raids on the wrong house ending in dead or maimed animals or children abound. What happens if a child or dog runs out to protect said target, or a flash bang grenade lands in a crib. We’ve seen this shit happen. These people really need to just grow the fuck up and recognize that there is so much more at stake here than getting someone back for a simple bit of programming that robs folks of their bully pulpit.
I’m just saying.
That’s what scares me most about this trend — that someone might someday just decide, for shiggles, to do this, and what happens to my children? My dog? My home? I think she raises good points on Twitter in follow-ups to this about repeated calls, too, and the possible impact that could have.