you have to be one sick twisted individual to be swatting a person, let alone a freaking elderly woman

Most american headline ever

All cops are idiots.

This happens frequently enough where you'd think there would be a system in place to prevent this type of abuse.

Takes a special kind of asshole to swat a little old lady for trying to host a wholesome gaming stream for a good cause.

Reminder that SWAT was created in response to the black panthers. It's a Jim Crow tool for dealing with uppity blacks that know their rights.

Just here to point out that it's not normal for a military response to some rando calling in a hit on someone's house.

A normal response is a check by a single police car with two officers. One to knock on the door and ask questions. The other to remain with the vehicle to call in any issues.

This is a police state.

Confused european here - why?

Kudos to granny for being so positive about it and acknowledging that the cops have to follow up on the calls they receive, but if some anonymous tipster can bring down a SWAT team on some grandma's house without any kind of check being triggered, that might indicate that there are some problems about how these issues are being handled. Other people may get out of this with much worse than a funny story to tell when two dozen cops decide to visit their house at night.

How the fuck is swatting even a thing?

Can just anyone call the police, yell "BOMB AT X ADDRESS!" and they just show up, tear down doors and throw you to the ground????

All, without repercussions????

And these police organisations keep spouting “but we need more funds, to protect the community”

No, you fucking dont, you’re wasting your resources by attempting to uphold your strict quotas rather than actually serve and protect the community.

why a 82 y.o. grandma have to stream to pay for fucking cancer?

Why I quit MMOs and never looked back, because even more than 20 years ago toxic behavior was being normalized, and that included offline PK.

Fucking little assholes nearly killed a grandmother.

I'm still amazed that this keeps happening but somehow, no one is ever caught?

Pure evil, a truly irredeemable soul. Hope terrible things happen to the person that called the Gestapo on her.

Whoever did this needs to be charged with attempted murder. You can't expect that police get a report of a threat at a residence (like a bomb threat or a murder threat) and they show up without weapons. Shame police time and resources had to be wasted ruining this poor old woman's Minecraft night.

I guess on the up side, not many 82 year olds can tell their friends that they are important enough to have so many people show up to their house so late at night.

EDIT: Early news reports say that police received a call that said her grandson shot her (the 82 year old grandmother) and was threatening to kill himself. Completely reasonable response to that kind of a threat, if that is what the call was.

EDIT2: Apparently the police may have been able to catch it as SWATting early by confirming with the grandson himself? The way he seemed to talk, the police were cordial and weren't aggressive, as if their guard was down maybe? They cleared the home to make sure the threat was fake, but I guess they were apologetic to grammcrackers, and she seemed in good spirits about it at least.

ACAB

Another side benefit to The Drug War, the gift that keeps on giving.

Hundreds of thousands of people are sitting in jails and prisons right now for using. Over three hundred thousand on any given day.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/pie2026_drugs.html

This holdover from the Nixon era gets a little worse every year. Why do we have TWENTY cars available for any random prank caller?

Are we safe yet?