‘Swatting’ is a sad sign of our times

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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It’s tempting to view “swatting” — the deceitful practice of calling out squads of heavily armed police to people’s homes under false pretenses — as a special kind of offense, something that only a deranged individual would do. And certainly, it is despicable. And dangerous. But it’s also part of a larger problem.

The most recent high-profile incident of swatting in Minnesota occurred last Saturday at the Delano residence of U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn. A caller to emergency services said that he’d killed a man in Emmer’s house, and that he had taken a hostage. Thankfully, neither assertion was true, but the Wright County Sheriff’s Department made the right call and responded as if a serious incident was underway.

No one was hurt. No one was even at home. Such incidents do not always end so well, however. An innocent person died when shot by police during a swatting episode in 2017; another died of a heart attack during an incident in 2020. Paradoxically, unless they actually intend to cause someone’s death, the callers who send law enforcement officers on these missions are relying on the professionalism and restraint of the very people whose time and resources they are wasting. Remember, officers responding to an emergency call must assume that they may be entering a dangerous environment — possibly even a trap.

Jim Stuart, executive director of the Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association and former Anoka County sheriff, told an editorial writer that “in a day and age when law enforcement is being ambushed, it makes it that much scarier to respond to events, not knowing what the true intent behind them is.”

“They’re going to be coming in with their head on a swivel, trying to take in everything: Is there a suspicious person in a car? Is there a tricky area? Is there anybody on the roofs? Is there anybody in the trees? It sounds kind of silly, but you really are scanning everything you can,” he said.

“It’s a very dangerous and irresponsible thing to do. It reallocates resources away from where they could be.”

In some respects, swatting is similar to the old-fashioned bomb threat. A few days into the new year, Minnesota’s was among more than a dozen state capitols that were temporarily shut down or evacuated due to an emailed bomb threat.

These local incidents are part of what the New York Times describes as a national “climate of intimidation.” Here and elsewhere, public people and figures of controversy see their private information published on the web. Groups of demonstrators target public officials in their homes. Swatting tactics are employed against people as diverse as Nikki Haley; U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who had ruled the 14th Amendment required that former President Donald Trump be kept off her state’s ballot.

And let’s not forget the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That was not an empty threat, as swatting is, but a significant contribution to the climate of intimidation all the same.

It is sort of comforting to note that the targets of these tactics are bipartisan. Perhaps we’ll be spared nonsensical claims that anonymous 911 callers are merely exercising their freedom of speech.

In Minnesota, swatting is treated as a gross misdemeanor and rises to a felony if someone is hurt or killed. Nationally, the FBI has begun tracking such incidents. We hope that initiative might lead to an effective strategy for thwarting the perpetrators.

Even more, we hope that the country will begin to lose its addiction to violent rhetoric in its public discourse. As long as our candidates for public office refer to their opponents as “vermin” or “deplorables,” some of their supporters will infer that they are being encouraged to do something they shouldn’t.