tdylan said:
Forgive me, my knowledge of SWAT tactics comes solely from Hollywood movies. That said, how is barging into an unknown situation "option A?" What I'm saying is, these SWAT teams obviously don't know what they're getting into, because if they did, they would know it was a hoax, and not barge in to begin with. So they clearly don't know what's happening on the other side of the door. Let's assume that there is a legit threat on the other side. Shouldn't they investigate it before barging in? You know, to make sure the door isn't booby trapped with a homemade pipebomb, or something? I don't fault them responding to the call, but do they even bother to investigate the room that they are breaching before doing so? And if so, do they say something like:
"single target. sitting at some kind of console. probably controlling some UAV about to strike on a civilian population. We've gotta breach, NOW!"
If there were hostages previously not known about, wouldn't it be prudent to figure that out before barging in, startling the hostage taker, and potentially causing lives to be lost? If this "kick down the door before investigating what's on the other side" based on nothing more than a phone call is their go to tactic, I'm surprised we don't hear about innocent people getting shot to death more often by a SWAT team barging in on them while they were cooking, and being killed because "he's got a knife!"
The thing is that your never going to have perfect information, and unlike TV and such speed and simplicity is the usual key to success, both when it comes to crimes and crime prevention. SWAT teams are special units because they take on these high risk situations, because yes, they are going through a door where there would be a trap rigged, or hostages, or an ambush already in place. Stuff like this is why people should have more respect for the cops, and understand that in potentially dangerous situations sometimes mistakes happen.... and that's a big part of why SWATTING is so dangerous, because if these people doing the stream had fake guns or something to show off for their video, the SWAT team might have just dropped them out of hand, it would have been tragic, but when your responding to a high threat incident that has been called in, you don't give the other guys the benefit of the doubt, by the time you pause to say "drop your weapon" the guy could have already started firing.... high threat response being a little different than a normal response or dealing with a situation developing naturally, your already going in heavy because of a report of
a clear and present danger.
That said, I was never law enforcement, but I did have to do entry training (not that I was ever called upon to use it). One of those weird things the Casinos I worked for thought would look good on paper, so they had the police train some of us security mooks to do hard entry, using some of the hotel rooms as the example. Kind of useless for our job description given that we'd probably just send the real police in if we had serious doubts, but it was interesting at least. I know a bit about the tactics used, but that's not really relevant to the basic situation.
The part about this that actually has me wondering is what kinds of incidents are being called in that has a SWAT team going in heavy right from the beginning. I'll also mention that given that people doing these kinds of streams for thousand of people are attention junkies anyway, that I've also been quite suspicious that some of those "SWATTED" might have called the police on themselves, they are already probably computer savvy and would have planned to hide the call, the motive for doing it being the show and the E-fame of having had it happen.
In this particular incident it should be noted that SWAT teams tend to try and catch people by surprised, these guys seem to have "heard them coming" and "correctly guessed what was about to happen", and honestly that does make me a little suspicious, since for the most part the whole idea of going in heavy to begin with is to act quickly and take the guys by surprised, so if they say have hostages (as you mentioned) you can drop the people involved/take control quickly before they can threaten them. That speed is also why they are so dangerous, and why they might shoot someone believed to have a gun out of hand, making them a very dangerous "phrank". Basically hardened criminals, terrorists, etc... get taken down by surprised by SWAT teams and first responders all the time, that's kind of the point, and they work is why most places have them, yet these guys are detected by a bunch of dudes allegedly focused on their gameplay, streaming, and putting on a show and if I'm right their mics just happen to catch some of the noise?. I mean it could be dumb luck, or an unusually bad SWAT team, but honestly I confess to being a little suspicious. I'm surprised more people haven't thought of it (of course I might be missing something that clears them... not that anything is proven mind you, I just think it's a little odd).
