Your Humble Radio Host Becomes A Victim Of "Swatting"

It would appear as though I have made it to the big leagues. Well, not really. But someone has been listening to my radio show and did not like what they were hearing. So they decided to briefly make my life miserable.

While I was on the air doing my broadcast this past Saturday which I do from my home studio, someone called into the local police department claiming to be me, and saying that I had just murdered my entire family. When I got off the air, my home phone rang. The caller ID identified it as the police department. The person on the other end of the line informed me that an incident had been reported at my home. They believed I was being set up, but they asked me to go outside with my hands up. There were several squad cars outside my home. I walked outside with my hands up, was tackled to the ground by the police and handcuffed. The police entered my home, did a search, found nothing. I was immediately uncuffed, and was told I had been the victim of "swatting", where someone calls a false report into the police which sends out the swat team, taking precious resources away from them to handle other real problems.

The detective in charge asked me some questions, told me that it was probably someone who didn't like my radio show, and that a criminal investigation is underway.

Apparently swatting has been around for quite some time. By definition, swatting is the act of tricking an emergency service (via such means as hoaxing a 9-1-1 dispatcher) into dispatching an emergency response based on the false report of an ongoing critical incident. Episodes range from large to small — from the deployment of bomb squads, SWAT units and other police units and the concurrent evacuations of schools and businesses, to a single fabricated police report meant to discredit an individual as a prank or personal vendetta. While it is a misdemeanor or a felony in the U.S. in and of itself to report any untruth to law enforcement, swatting can cause massive disruption to the civil order and the public peace by the hoaxed deployment of police and other civic resources such as ambulances and fire departments. The term derives from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), a highly specialized type of police unit. 


Caller ID spoofing, social engineering, TTY, prank calls and phone phreaking techniques may be variously combined. 911 systems (including telephony and human operators) have been tricked by calls placed from cities hundreds of miles away or even from other countries. The caller typically places a 911 call using a spoofed phone number with the goal of tricking emergency authorities into responding to an address with a SWAT team to an emergency that doesn't exist.


It is not just famous people who become victims of these swatting incidents, but many prominent individuals have been subjected to this tactic, including Tom Cruise, Miley Cyrus and Clint Eastwood.
CNN interviewed political commentator Erick Erickson to discuss an incident in which he had been the victim of swatting. A caller to 911 gave Erickson's address as his own and claimed:

I just shot my wife, so.... I don't think I could come down there.... She's dead, now.... I'm looking at her.... I'm going to shoot someone else, soon.

—911 caller

That incident prompted Florida's 24th congressional district Representative Sandy Adams to push for a Justice Department investigation.

I have since learned that these types of incidents occur daily in America, and several innocent people's lives and police departments are disrupted because of it.

In any case, I can now cross off being thrown to the ground and handcuffed from my bucket list.

As an aside, my wife thinks it may be someone local, who knew that they would not be home at the time this went down, because if they had and had answered the phone, the police would have known that the report was false.

Parents Rights To Spank And The Police State

We are living in a police state.

No better evidence of this exists than one rather minor news story which cropped up in the past week. It did not concern some law enforcement official threatening a citizen, violating their fourth amendment rights. It did not involve detaining a citizen and taking them away to some sort of FEMA camp. It was not even the horrific account of a Connecticut teenager being forced to undergo chemotherapy against her parent's objections.

We've all heard of these stories of the violation of the constitutional rights of people to live (or die) for their own sake. The freedoms and liberties guaranteed us under the Constitution are being trampled upon increasingly day by day.

No, this one was a little more insidious and involved parental rights.

There has been an increasing attack on the rights of parents to raise their children the way they see fit and according to their beliefs. On of those rights coming under attack is the right to discipline with the time honored tradition of spanking.

A Florida father had to call in a sheriff's deputy to witness him spanking his 12 year old daughter after she had gotten into a fight with her sister. He did this for fear of being charged with child abuse for administering the discipline that the Bible commands Christian parents to do.

It is a fact that despite the tremendous outcry (at least publicly) against spanking by parents and legal guardians, parents still spank their kids when they need it, and rightly so.

Spanking, or corporal punishment is legal in all 50 states in America. Courts have ruled that parents do have the right to raise their children as they see fit, including the use of spanking. Individual states allow parents to spank as long as it is done in moderation and without any long term injury to the child or teen.

Let me be clear. Genuine cases of child abuse do exist. And states, through the use of agencies known as Child Protective Services or the Department of Children and families, have stepped in an in some cases have used their clout to have parents and guardians prosecuted for abusing their children. In many cases, the children were abused. But in many (and i would dare to say most) cases, parents were simply exercising their parental rights and responsibilities to discipline their children.

For his part, Noel Sheriff, the under sheriff for Okeechobee county said: 'There is a big difference between beating your child and disciplining your child. 

'Parents are seeking guidance on how to deal with their child. You are entitled to paddle your child, whether you use your hand, you use your belt or a paddle within reason as long as your paddling the buttocks.'

In this case, the 'whooping' was not considered to be a crime, so the deputy wrote up his police report and left the house.

Amazingly, this was not the first time that a parent has called the Okeechobee County sheriff's office to supervise a well deserved spanking. 

But the sheriff's office stated that while it is not 'advertising this type of service' they will come to your house if they're not busy on other calls.

Stephen added: 'It's definitely not something we advertise to do, and even though law enforcement has been willing to help out in this situation, watching a parent discipline their child is something that's done only when a deputy has no other calls to handle.'

The sheriff's office said it had received several similar requests in the past and Under sheriff Noel Stephen said he had personally supervised 12 spankings.

While it is a shame that it has come to this, it is comforting to know that if and when needed, local law enforcement will make themselves available to parents to ensure their rights are not violated.