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…
Systems - both our healthcare and policing
With cancer even with places that do have socialized medical care you might still need a lot of money.
Cancer sucks.
I agree cancer sucks, but how do you need money? There is no fee to access healthcare here.
You get care that is covered, there might still be some drugs and experimental treatments that isn’t. This is because there’s still no actual cure for cancer.
This is why you still can see people collecting money for treatments even when they have socialized medical care.
When your cancer can be treated with already approved treatments then you are golden otherwise you do suffer similarly.
This is not attack on socialized medical care, you are still better than no care, you might still get radiation, chemotherapy etc, it is more attack on situation cancer can create.
There would only be extra costs if you want to go for private treatment
Perhaps the problem is the swat teams doing this shit with zero verification.
they share the blame for sure
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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
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.
Probably shoot you and the aggressor since keeping themselves safe is the priority in their training.
I still believe that “defund the police”, is the correct choice. The whole damn thing has to go.
If you don’t have someone authorized by the state to enforce laws, you’re still going to get people enforcing “laws”, it’s just going to be vigilantes, people with grudges, etc. Just look how frequently you see incidents of road rage. Cops basically exist to prevent people from taking revenge into their own hands.
Take all those incidents of people calling the cops on black men having a picnic or taking their dogs for a walk. If there were no cops, do you think these white “Karens” would just leave the black men alone? Or do you think they’d get together and lynch them?
I think the US needs to scale its policing way back. It needs mental health specialists to respond to certain kinds of calls. The person who responds to a report of a stolen bike probably shouldn’t have a gun. But, at some point you are going to need people who will use physical force to enforce the law. Those people should be heavily supervised by a truly independent body. But, they still need to exist in some form.
Cops basically exist to prevent people from taking revenge into their own hands.
No, cops exist to protect capital.
This is just one example too, they’ve issued multiple similar rulings. Also, uh, see: Uvalde.
If there were no cops, do you think these white “Karens” would just leave the black men alone? Or do you think they’d get together and lynch them?
…you think cops keep black people safe? Are you being remotely serious here?
Yeah, this is what a lot of people fail to take into account when it comes to the purpose of policing in society. There’s obviously a lot of inherent problems with the way the police are structured in many countries as a whole, but to believe that we can just make do without something like them altogether is pretty shortsighted to say the least. I think that prevents a lot of otherwise sympathetic people from taking the backlash against police institutions seriously.
Yea it’s funny how they just angry downvote, and if they reply at all, they don’t really respond to the points. Who will do the fucking policing if there’s no police??? There will always be people who need to be forcefully stopped from what they’re doing.
I think the idea generally is to replace the police with social welfare programs and unarmed crisis responders, but that’s jumping through so many hoops that it just sounds way too simplistic tbh. It sounds practical, but it treats the problem like it’s something that can be improved with just a few institutions reforming/being abolished.
There’s never been a society without some form of justice system since cruelty is a part of human nature, and at this point these systems are far too intertwined and embedded in our societies for them to change dramatically without some form of societal collapse or retraction.
Idealism is well and good but the things many want in place of police institutions seem like they’re ignoring how complex and non-specific the issues are as a whole. It’s definitely not a one size fits all situation, especially with how many factors there are. People can disagree with me but I’d prefer to hear why at least, there are probably things I’m not considering here.
You don’t know what she did in Minecraft.
(/s)
I heard she made a mob farm of babies
Reminder that SWAT was created in response to the black panthers. It’s a Jim Crow tool for dealing with uppity blacks that know their rights.
After reading this, and then checking the video, I was surprised that the victim was white.
Just here to point out that it’s not normal for a military response to some rando calling in a hit on someone’s house.
A normal response is a check by a single police car with two officers. One to knock on the door and ask questions. The other to remain with the vehicle to call in any issues.
This is a police state.
They probably reported to the operator an excess of melanin at the residence.
It really depends on what the call in was.
If someone says there’s an active threat and their life is in danger, sending 1 car would would be gross negligence and a danger to the officers.
Now, this call, seems excessive. I dont know what would warrant that response even if it was an active threat.
That’s an argument to be made, but I don’t believe that is true at all. Sending one car to check on the safety/welfare of one active threat seems an entirely reasonable balance of risk. An unverified active threat is not at all the same as a confirmed active threat. That should be obvious simply by the existence of “swatting” as a common term and act these days.
It is not the duty of police to protect people from eminent harm, they have argued this themselves in court. Their job is strictly punitive, again an argument they have made in court many times. They only pretend to “protect and serve” when it suits their agenda of justification for their over inflated budgets. This isn’t a public safety issue. It’s a class warfare issue.
Yeah, you send one car first and have the other ready. It’s insane to send 20 cars instantly for an unverified anonymous tip. Idc if the caller said there’s an army of cannibals killing dozens of people, it’s still an unverified anonymous tip. If it’s real you’ll get more phone calls or the first car will radio it in.
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.
Once I read they threw a flashbang through the window and it landed in a baby bed with a baby inside, and went off.
Things we don’t want to know…
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.
They need to respond, but they need to end the whole “Killology” mindset that American cops are trained into.
Yah, send a car around first to at least glance, maybe try calling them too.
How the fuck is swatting even a thing?
Can just anyone call the police, yell “BOMB AT X ADDRESS!” and they just show up, tear down doors and throw you to the ground???
All, without repercussions???
Not only without repercussions, but without reparations. Anything destroyed or damaged is on the owner to replace/fix, including the pile of splinters formerly known as your front door
What else are they going to do with all of that excessive money and time…and desire to shoot people?
Pretty cool way of collecting OT too… kitting up with the boys, kicking doors down, shouting at grandmas…
Gotta test this bearcat somehow!
In my state there is a law that makes false call to 911 a criminal offense. If someone says “there is a bomb” on such call, that makes it more serious offence because this will cause public alarm. If the person making such call is stupid enough to do it from their phone, they will likely be identified and prosecuted. And people doing stupid things tend to be that stupid.
I’m not sure about damages caused by the raid, though. SWAT doesn’t know if the threat is real or not, so they can’t be held liable. Probably the victim can sue the caller, if they’ve been found…
How about the police do, idk, like 5 min of police work to verify literally any part of the story first?
Exactly, like asking “is the caller even in the same area? Who lives there? Is this place usually agitated?” Which seems like they would need to know before going in anyway…
That’s crazy talk!
They did, by asking chatgpt.
Exactly. They treat this like a bomb threat when the perpetrator gets arrested, but completely gloss over the fact that the police are “the bomb” in this scenario and as human beings, they have full agency over their own actions. They should most definitely spend 5 minutes to determine the real situation but they dont because they never face accountability and just go off of whatever some random caller told them, especially when it means playing soldier.
Yeah, exactly, that’s exactly how it happens. It’s so fucking dumb.
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 a 82 y.o. grandma have to stream to pay for fucking cancer?
This whole story is a series of failures.
Murica!
#Freedom
The greatest nation on earth ladies and gentlemen.
America just cosplaying as a first world country
Most people get cancer free of charge. Is there an opt-out in the US or do you just have to pay for cancer whether you want it or not, like taxes?
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.
True. Minecraft is not like any other game in several ways. It can be a lot of different things. But one of those is both massive multiplayer and online.
offline PK
That is certainly a way of phrasing it.
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.
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.
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.
ACAB
For life!
1312 161
Assigned Cop At Birth
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.
Completely reasonable response to that kind of a threat, if that is what the call was.
This sounds like complete absurdity, even as a Canadian.
“There’s nothing we can do about it!” -says only country in the world where it regularly happens
Another side benefit to The Drug War, the gift that keeps on giving.
Hundreds of thousands of people are sitting in jails and prisons right now for using. Over three hundred thousand on any given day.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/pie2026_drugs.html
This holdover from the Nixon era gets a little worse every year. Why do we have TWENTY cars available for any random prank caller?
Are we safe yet?
Just a few days ago there was a meme of her going around. Guess some asshole saw it.
