OPINION:
Some pranks just aren’t funny, especially those driven by ideological anger.
“Swatting” is an increasingly common mode of harassment involving prank 911 calls that send heavily armed police SWAT teams to the home of an unsuspecting target. The tactic has been embraced by political guerrillas determined to subject their opponents to trauma, or worse. Effective legislative and law enforcement remedies are urgently needed to stop the subterfuge.
Swatting snowballed from an occasional annoyance to a relentless hazard over the just-concluded holiday season. On Christmas Day, an anonymous caller to a suicide hotline reported a false shooting at the home of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, subjecting the firebrand Georgia Republican to a surprise police raid.
“I was just swatted. This is like the eighth time. On Christmas with my family here,” she wrote on X.
Subjected to the same unholy treatment that day were Republicans Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Rep. Brandon Williams of New York, as well as Democratic Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.
In short order, bogus emergency calls sent armed police to the home of Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and the domicile of Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who had just ordered Republican Donald Trump’s name stricken from the state’s presidential primary ballot.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, was swatted on New Year’s Day, while Mr. Tuberville was subjected to a second police raid.
The swatting of political figures, including quite a few Republicans despised by the left, represents an alarming assault on free speech that the First Amendment was meant to shield. To be sure, politics is itself a form of combat, but it should be one of words rather than weapons. Partisans unwilling to confine themselves to the art of persuasion have seized upon the practice as a treacherous method of terrorizing those they oppose.
Suddenly bringing a political opponent face-to-muzzle with law enforcement has already produced tragic consequences. A Kansas man was shot and killed by police sent to his home in 2017 by video gamers aiming to livestream their prank, and a Tennessee man suffered a fatal heart attack in 2020 after a bogus call sent police to his home to halt a fictitious killing. In 2015, an Oklahoma police officer entering a house in response to a false report of a bomb was shot and wounded by the homeowner.
The only source of data on the problem has been the Anti-Defamation League, which put the number of swatting incidents at more than 1,000 in 2019. Fortunately, the FBI just set up a database to track the bogus 911 calls, which are illegal in most states.
In 2018, Seattle proactively created an anti-swatting registry where vulnerable residents can list their contact information with which police can compare emergency calls. A national version would be risky, though: If the Trump era has taught us anything, it’s that political operatives inside government can wreak as much havoc by leaking sensitive information as their fellow ideologues in the streets.
Prison sentences and financial penalties are appropriate deterrents against swatting subterfuge. Barring punishment, more lives will be lost, and these political guerrillas will succeed in their un-American methods of intimidation.
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