The justice’s wife allegedly spat at her neighbors’ car and traded insults, prompting the young couple to call the police
After reports that an upside-down American flag had flown outside the Virginia residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito during the period surrounding Jan. 6, 2021, the conservative justice blamed the flag’s placement on his wife, Martha-Ann — claiming her actions were a result of a clash over a neighbor’s anti-Trump yard sign and a verbal insult.
Now, the Alitos’ neighbors — Emily Baden and her then-boyfriend, now husband — are disputing the Alitos’ version of events, according to the The New York Times, which reviewed text messages and a police call to corroborate the claims. According to the Badens, Martha-Ann instigated the weekslong conflict and, at one point, spat at their car as they drove by the Alito’s home.
Per the Times, the couple had placed signs on their yard that read “Trump Is a Fascist” and “You Are Complicit” shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Emily told the publication that the second sign was not directed at the justice and his wife, but at Republicans in general. The signs were soon taken down by Emily’s mother out of safety concerns.
The lack of accountability of the police in the US is astounding. People talk about swatting like and avalanche or something. Yeah, it’s just going to kill you, nothing you can do about it.
Even if we had accountability, accountability happens after the fact. It’s a small consolation that a swat team got charged after they killed your wife or kids. Your loved ones are still dead.
Not that we don’t need it, don’t get me wrong, but we need procedural overhauls even more, to stop people from getting killed in the first place.
After 10 swat teams end up in jail, they are going to be careful entering people’s homes.
They also need to address the false calls. I think the phone bill payer should automatically be liable for the deployment costs of a false call, unless they point the finger at the person who actually made the call. That wouldn’t quite be justice, as it wouldn’t necessarily make them liable for the false report, but it would go a long way to stopping them.
I’d even go a step further and charge them with something criminal. Reckless endangerment if nothing else. The cost of the call itself is only a small part of it; the intent is to cause fear or harm to the individual being targeted, and they should be liable for that.
Absolutely, but proving all of that is a tall order. Turning it into a civil offense where the bill payer is automatically liable sets a much lower bar, where successful prosecution is far more likely.
I work in 911 dispatch, the area I work in has gotten a few attempted swatting calls, and they usually tend to come from various free calling apps, or burner phones, and I think even a handful of times from payphones (yes, there’s still a few out there) which can make it really damn hard to tie them back to an actual person the way we can with most regular phone numbers. They also tend to call our 10-digit non-emergency numbers instead of 911, so we don’t get an address or location info for the caller like we would on a 911 line.
For what it’s worth, the cops in my area have done a really good job of not going nuts when they respond to these calls, and not to toot my own horn too hard, but I think a lot of that has to do with the quality of the dispatchers at my center, every time we’ve gotten one, whoever took the call pretty much immediately caught on that something was fucky and notated the hell out of every strange thing about the call to make sure the cops knew something may be up. One of the first swatting calls I remember seeing back when they started taking off a few years ago was answered by a somewhat older dude who had never even heard of swatting at that point, and he still caught on pretty quick that something was fishy. There’s other dispatch centers I’ve dealt with where I absolutely would not trust them to catch on or handle it well.
It’s even more egregious that SWAT is sent out on some anonymous VoIP shit originating from a VPN. That is not probable cause. In a just society everyone breaking and entering on zero evidence would be civilly and criminally liable.
The problem is that we do get a lot of actual legitimate calls through these VoIP apps, or from people calling from out of the area, on our 10 digit lines, etc.
I don’t know the actual demographics, but it seems like a lot of people use these apps as their primary phones, especially in lower income communities, homeless people, etc. and of course those people have have actual emergencies too, and we wouldn’t want withhold or delay appropriate resources from them in an emergency just because we don’t like their phone number.
We also get people from across the country or occasionally even other countries calling our 10 digit lines because they spoke with their friend or relative either on the phone or over discord or facebook or whatever, they disclosed that they’re having an emergency but are unable or unwilling to call for themselves, so their friend looks up our number and calls for them.
And a lot of these swatting type calls aren’t too far-fetched, we do get murders and shootings, barricaded subjects, etc. with some regularity (not an every day occurrence by any means, but if you work here for a year or two you’ll probably at least see a couple happen if not answer the call yourself.)
When it might be called for, we do send swat, they can take a while to mobilize thanks to how it’s organized in our county with the SWAT teams being made up of officers from multiple different departments, so it’s better to have them stage nearby and not need them than to wait until shit hits the fan and potentially take 20-30 minutes or even longer for them to make it there.
But again, they’re staging, they might go as far surrounding the house, evacuating neighbors, drones in the air, etc. but unless there’s a clear immediate threat they exhaust all possible options before breaking in, and so far that’s paid off. YMMV, I absolutely do not trust all departments to show that much restraint.
Thank you for the perspective on this. Maybe the ones I hear of are the more egregious departments that do not behave with restraint. If there are legitimate calls coming in that way, it does make sense to respond.
Yeah, we’ve had calls come to us in all sorts of crazy ways called in by all sorts of different people for all sorts of wild situations. We kind of have to treat all calls as if they might be real no matter how outlandish, and just make sure we notate anything weird about them. I could probably write several books about all of the crazy 3rd and 4th party calls, people calling from the emergency phone in an elevator, suicide threats called in from a bank because the person decided to bare their soul to Wells Fargo customer service, calling from deactivated phones on VoIP apps because it’s the only way they could call, etc.
Of course there’s a lot of room for new regulations, training, etc. on how police can/should act on the info from our calls. The cops in my area mostly seem to have a good idea how to handle it, but not all departments are created equal. And it’s an ever-evolving situation with new stuff always coming up. We hd to recently explain to one of our cops about crash detection from iphones because he’d never heard of it before.
Except that isn’t going to happen unless there is drastic change.
Sounds like change we can believe in.