Authorities brought 20 police cars, five SWAT officers, and drones to her house
you have to be one sick twisted individual to be swatting a person, let alone a freaking elderly woman
An 82-year-old YouTuber grandma was raided by police and SWATs during her live stream last night where she plays Minecraft to raise money for her grandsons cancer. Authorities brought 20 police cars
Submitted 1 day ago by Puddinghelmet@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeHxr14qStY
Comments
capnminus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
While she’s trying to raise money for her grandkid’s cancer treatment, no less.
Seriously, fuck whoever did this.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
And fuck who ever supports a system that results in this…
knightly@pawb.social 1 day ago
Dark thought, what if a supporter did it 'cuz that kid is definitely getting their treatment paid for now.
Soulifix@piefed.world 1 day ago
We’re in Generation Duh where people think doing this kind of thing is funny. But it’s funny only to them, was thought up of in 2 minutes, then discarded once any attention has been brought to it before they think of the next stupid idea that they think is funny.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Stop being right about that!
knobbysideup@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
Perhaps the problem is the swat teams doing this shit with zero verification.
kandoh@reddthat.com 15 hours ago
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.
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 11 hours ago
I did not know that, so thank you for sharing. I’m disappointed, but not surprised to learn this
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 14 hours ago
After reading this, and then checking the video, I was surprised that the victim was white.
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
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.
modus@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
They probably reported to the operator an excess of melanin at the residence.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
It really depends on what the call in was.
If someone says there’s an active threat and their life is in danger, sending 1 car would would be gross negligence.
Now, this call, seems excessive.
87Six@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
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???
FUCKING_CUNO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
Not only without repercussions, but without reparations. Anything destroyed or damaged is on the owner to replace/fix, including the pile of splinters formerly known as “door”.
III@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
What else are they going to do with all of that excessive money and time…and desire to shoot people?
BanaramaClamcrotch@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
Pretty cool way of collecting OT too… kitting up with the boys, kicking doors down, shouting at grandmas…
SupremeDonut@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
Gotta test this bearcat somehow!
pound_heap@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
In my state there is a law that makes false call to 911 a criminal offense. If someone says “there is a bomb” on such call, that makes it more serious offence because this will cause public alarm. If the person making such call is stupid enough to do it from their phone, they will likely be identified and prosecuted. And people doing stupid things tend to be that stupid.
I’m not sure about damages caused by the raid, though. SWAT doesn’t know if the threat is real or not, so they can’t be held liable. Probably the victim can sue the caller, if they’ve been found…
HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
How about the police do, idk, like 5 min of police work to verify literally any part of the story first?
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
Yeah, exactly, that’s exactly how it happens. It’s so fucking dumb.
fargeol@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Most american headline ever
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Oh this absolutely happens in europe too, just not with such a needlessly large amount of cops. Makes it no less dangerous though.
Tonava@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
Yes it’s less dangerous (not dangerless obviously), in Europe the swat teams tend to be better trained and way less trigger happy than in USA. Had they busted in there they likely would not have shot an elderly woman found inside, whereas in USA that’s more likely to happen. They don’t just go in and start shooting, otherwise we would have “random kids and women accidentally murdered in a police bust” headlines all the time as well
Foni@piefed.zip 1 day ago
Do elderly women have to stream videos to pay for cancer treatments? My father has cancer, and all his bills this year add up to €0. Well, sometimes I leave the car in a paid parking lot; in the whole year it’s probably been around €20.
cynar@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
America has “police by intimidation” as its default response. Most of Europe seems to have “police by consent” as the default.
It leads to a different mentality. They might still roll out the whole cavalry, but it will more likely be led by a polite knock at the door, and an initial attempt to de-escalate.
Bazoogle@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
They mentioned in the video more cops came because they wanted to meet the gaming grandma, and they cleared the scene pretty quick.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I don’t think a grandma would have to raise money for cancer treatment in the EU…
matchaotter@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
It’s only be more American if the cops entered her home and shot her while claiming a controller was a gun
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Takes a special kind of asshole to swat a little hold lady for trying to host a wholesome gaming stream for a good cause.
chuckleslord@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
The fact that swating still happens just proves how much of a joke policing is in general. The fact that you can get a bunch of gun-wielding adrenaline junkies to show up somewhere, frothing at the mouth for violence, in the most spurious of ways is a damning indictment for the whole institution.
end_stage_ligma@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Yet they won’t do a damn thing if someone is actually assaulting you.
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 16 hours ago
I still believe that “defund the police”, is the correct choice. The whole damn thing has to go.
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 15 hours ago
You don’t know what she did in Minecraft.
(/s)
Evotech@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I heard she made a mob farm of babies
daggermoon@piefed.world 1 day ago
This happens frequently enough where you’d think there would be a system in place to prevent this type of abuse.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 1 day ago
But then they wouldn’t get to cosplay as action heroes.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Genuinely hard to do. Even if we ignore the problem of guns in the US (this also happens in the europe, for example).
Emergency services kind of have to assume every call is real and act accordingly. In hostage and shooting situations there’s not really much time to debate the validity of the case, because if they delay and it was a real situation, they now are responsible for potentially more victims.
The only real solution is that the forces need to arrive with the potential that it’s a fake call. But that’s easier said than done
Oh, and prosecute the hell out of the callers. Which is not always possible, depending how energy they put into making the call anonymous
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 14 hours ago
they now are responsible for potentially more victims.
No they are not. Multiple court cases have exonerated police for failing to respond or not responding quickly enough. See: Uvalde (among many others).
They are trying to play it both ways: not responsible but also must respond in the most over-the-top aggressive manner possible.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 22 hours ago
It’s the ol’ “boy who cried wolf” situation. You probably don’t want public services like police and firefighters deciding which calls seem real or not.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
K but there has to be some happy medium between 20 swat cars and showing up 2 hours after the pizza driver.
rustydrd@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
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.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
People have already died from swatting. Faster and cheaper than hiring an assassin.
1984@lemmy.today 16 hours ago
Once I read they threw a flashbang through the window and it landed in a baby bed with a baby inside.
Things we don’t want to know…
Skyrmir@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
From the point of contact, or including time to find a good one? A good assassin can be very quick.
I’ll give ya cheaper though. Good work costs good money.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
They need to respond, but they need to end the whole “Killology” mindset that American cops are trained into.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Yah, send a car around first to at least glance, maybe try calling them too.
Tolc@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
why a 82 y.o. grandma have to stream to pay for fucking cancer?
echodot@feddit.uk 8 hours ago
The greatest nation on earth ladies and gentlemen.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 14 hours ago
This whole story is a series of failures.
Fluke@feddit.uk 13 hours ago
Murica!
CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
#Freedom
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 hours ago
Because orphans need to be ground and you gotta pay to stop that.
kibblebits@quokk.au 1 day ago
All cops are idiots.
Soulifix@piefed.world 1 day ago
Never ceases to amuse me how they send a ridiculous amount of deputies to one situation. They couldn’t agree on a team or maybe two qualified people, no, let’s send the whole fucking department and have extras just incase.
edgemaster72@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Meanwhile, when an actual credible threat is ongoing: “We’ll send our best confrontation avoider and check back in about 3 hours from now”
FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I was paid a dawn visit many years ago by an armed unit (UK). The way they ran it was two plainclothes (handguns only) officers knock on the door to assess the threat, with a van full of tooled up guys in balaclavas just outside, just in case. It was all very chill and no unnecessary stress/escalation for anyone. Seems like this would be a more sensible approach.
Spacehooks@reddthat.com 1 day ago
I wouldn’t be surprised to see there is a episode of something where someone needs to do a crime in area so they pull this so all the cops are in other side of town.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I mean if they had been told there were gunshots, several dead in the street and hostages. That might be a fairly reasonable response.
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Ok, so granny got swatted, why?
What was the police told about the situation?
Is there an article about this which explains the cause of this.
ViatorOmnium@piefed.social 1 day ago
Those questions would only matter if this kind of police reaction wasn’t almost exclusive to the US. So American police are idiots.
In Europe there were a few cases in France, but they led to changes in police procedures to verify reports more thoroughly before busting through doors.
BillyClark@piefed.social 1 day ago
All cops are idiots.
“ACAI”???
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 22 hours ago
Everyone blames swatting on the person who called in a fake report, but swatting only works because the are idiots. Someone actually decided to bring 20 cars to an house legally owned by an 85 year old with a single unverified repot as their only evidence.
merc@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
It’s not that they’re idiots, though many cops are. It’s that they don’t get punished for falling for a SWATting attempt.
If you could lose your career if you fell for it, they’d try a lot harder not to fall for it. But, instead, they never face punishment for being overly aggressive, and might face punishment for not being aggressive enough in the case of a real emergency.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
In fairness, the police don’t have a list of who is in every house at all times. They don’t exactly have X-ray vision. All they know is that they got a call saying that someone is holding someone at gunpoint in this house.
Of course, 20 vans is comically overkill
biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
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.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 day ago
Confused european here - why?
rtxn@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Since guns are handed out in America like chocolate at a Willy Wonka publicity and outreach campaign, every law enforcement agency has to be kitted out to potentially combat a barricaded suspect who can rain a small militia’s worth of lead on them and their surroundings. That’s why the response team often includes armored vehicles, snipers, and crayon munchers armed to the tits. And because abusing emergency services doesn’t cut into the profit of any big corporation, there are no effective means to seek justice from the offenders.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 day ago
abusing emergency services
I don’t understand - someone called the swat team on her? Why would they go to a private house with a giant swat force based solely on some anonymous tip? That makes no sense in my head.
Soulg@ani.social 23 hours ago
Swatting also happens in Europe. I get that were the punching bag right now, but it’s not a problem that only happens here.
Spacehooks@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Its called swatting. You call police and say someone is dangerous and they come running with all the gear to justify the bloated budgets. Kids were doing this pretty often in the news a decade ago. Especially to streamers.
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
America is a dystopian capitalist nightmare lol
DillDough@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
It never stopped btw. This has been a constant and consistent issue for well over a decade, it rarely ever makes “the news”.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Info about Grandma Crackers’ fundraisers for her grandson’s cancer treatment and Phoenix Children’s Hospital.
Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Another side benefit to The Drug War, the gift that keeps on giving.
Tens of thousands of people are sitting in jails and prisons right now for using.
blindbunny@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
ACAB
lechekaflan@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Your title leaves out the part about her being swatted. Who knows what the scammer told the police.
kamen@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Very good use of the US taxpayers’ money.
/s if not obvious
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
I’m still amazed that this keeps happening but somehow, no one is ever caught?
FosterMolasses@leminal.space 23 hours ago
Pure evil, a truly irredeemable soul. Hope terrible things happen to the person that called the Gestapo on her.
magnetosphere@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
Does the video mention if she met her donation goal? After all the bullshit, I hope she destroyed it.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 22 hours ago
Just a few days ago there was a meme of her going around. Guess some asshole saw it.
Gammelfisch@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Awful, the damn SS and NKVD would be proud of the US SWAT officers.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Just curious about why she was raided. What did the warrant say?
zeroConnection@programming.dev 20 hours ago
TLDW; Also, fuck YouTube. Can I read about this somewhere?
cheeseburger@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Shit cops with shit people calling them in, while granny tries to raise money for medical treatment for her grandson… Your shit country is working as designed.
chunes@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Why even put officers in harm’s way? Just strap some bombs to a couple drones and be done with it.
Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Well, that’ll teach her.
Kennystillalive@feddit.org 1 hour ago
I really hope, they find out who swated her and jail them.