Schumer gets tough on ‘swatting’

New legislation increases penalties for crime hoaxes

Posted

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer announced legislation to crackdown on an "alarming" nationwide trend known as “swatting” — which involves making fake 911 calls to draw out police SWAT teams to unsuspecting residences or businesses — that has become increasingly prevalent on Long Island.

There have already been nine instances of swatting in Nassau County this year, and more than 50 cases on Long Island in the past year, including one in Long Beach.

At a press conference on Monday with County Executive Ed Mangano outside a Garden City office building, the scene of a swatting incident last week, Schumer said his bill would increase jail time for swatting perpetrators to a maximum of eight years in prison from the current five years, force the prank-callers to pay restitution to police and make it illegal to disguise their caller ID on Internet platforms such as Skype.

Because law enforcement agencies have a duty to respond and take the threats seriously, Schumer said the hoaxes are an inexcusable waste of police resources and taxpayer money.

“These dangerous pranks are, in fact, not ‘pranks’ at all — these swatting attacks are serious incidents in which our emergency responders use up their time, energy and resources responding to false threats when they could have been elsewhere protecting the community from real ones,” Schumer said. “We need to make sure that every time a 911-dispatcher answers a call that it is a real emergency and we need to swat down this disturbing trend before it is too late and someone is seriously hurt.”

Most episodes of swatting are meant as pranks or personal vendettas, and aimed at drawing out bomb squads and SWAT teams, though some are the result of criminals attempting to create a diversion while they commit a crime elsewhere, Schumer said.

He said that most incidents stem from disagreements over online video games where one party obtains the IP address of another player and places the false emergency call, often from a remote part of the country.

Schumer added that such attacks also pose a terrifying threat to innocent victims and bystanders.

Page 1 / 3