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.
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.
What do you think about my suggestion of holding the bill payer liable? Obviously this wouldn’t help with pay phones, but any service where someone pays through a traceable means could work. Do you think that would help reduce the number of fraudulent calls?
Since, like I said, most of these aren’t coming in through traceable means, I think it’s of pretty limited utility.
There’s also a lot of cases out there, where a lot of people are on the same phone plan who may not even live together, I’m still on my parents phone plan as a married man in my 30s who lives an hour away from them, the way the contracts and such have worked out it’s cheaper for us and there’s no sense of changing it if it’s working fine for all of us. But if I tried to swat someone, it’d be kind of a dick move to hold my parents responsible for it.
Another thought that just crossed my mind, for the most part, there’s already laws in place about false police reports, misuse of 911, etc. that this kind of thing could fall under. It’s probably a better use of legislative time and resources to improve the issues with how the police respond to these calls, and to make sure that the existing laws can be enforced fairly and efficiently than to try to introduce a new law that covers a pretty narrow set of circumstances that’s not even particularly common.
If we wanted to introduce new laws specifically to address this, I’d probably want tighter regulations on the VoIP apps, cellular providers, etc. to make it easier for us to identify who’s calling (although as someone who does value my privacy and mostly prefers anonymity when possible, I’m hesitant at best to actually support that kind of measure.)
I’ve worked here for almost 6 years, we’ve probably had about as many swatting calls (somewhat more if you count repeated calls to the same address, but after the first one we usually add a caution note to the address so that everyone from the calltakers to the officers responding are aware that it could be a false call) It’s not exactly the biggest issue we face. I’d personally prefer to see something done, maybe some kind of mental health reform, so we can actually do something about the 2 or 3 repeat callers I’ve probably spoken to, without exaggeration, almost 100 times each over the last month or so. They’re hallucinating or having delusions or something along those lines, so in their minds they’re reporting an actual emergency making it difficult to make false report or misuse of 911 charges stick because their intent factors into those charges, and they also don’t really present a danger to themselves or others, so we can’t really get them committed either, and on top of that, even if it were possible to use the current laws, no one really wants to deal with the necessary paperwork and court dates and such to pursue those kinds of things, in the grand scheme they’re still a fairly minor nuisance and we all have things we’d rather be doing than that, work-related or not.
Also general public education, and other kinds of conflict resolution solutions, or other sort of social programs (some of which fall under the
defendEDIT: defund the police banner) could go a long way. We get a lot of calls for things that are in no way shape or form police issues, and a lot of situations that probably could have been headed off before they became police issues if people had access to other sorts of of counseling, mediators, and safety nets to fall back on. If people had access to better ways to manage and express their anger at someone and to address whatever issues there may be, maybe they wouldn’t try to escalate things to SWATing. Maybe a guidance counselor took note of your anger issues in school and helped you learn to handle those feelings before you decided to SWAT the guy who beat you in fortnight (or whatever the big multiplayer game is these days, I’m out of the loop on that.) Maybe if we had UBI it wouldn’t be such a big deal that your ex kicked you out of their house and you wouldn’t feel a need to start a years-long vendetta against them. Or maybe if there was an easier way to get some sort of third party involved in your dispute to act as a mediator/arbiter, you wouldn’t have as much animosity towards the person you have beef with. Lots of other potential avenues to investigate to prevent these things from happening in the first place instead of trying to deal with them after the fact.