Street voices
Hugues
·
United States
"Swatting. False reporting a serious crime in an attempt to incite a SWAT response at a specific address with the sole intent to terrorize someone. My god man, did you see what happened to that one streamer last week? No? No what happened? Dude, he got fucking swatted. Someone swatted him? Yeah, 20 guys went into his house because someone filed in a false, like, hostage report, dude. Jesus."
What it means
Means falsely reporting some terrifying violent situation so armed police storm a person’s home, usually to scare, punish, or humiliate them. It grew out of internet trolling culture and is proper vile because it turns real emergency services into someone else’s weapon. You’ll hear it loads around streamers, gamers, and online drama when harassment gets way out of hand.
Usage examples
"That streamer got swatted mid live, mate, all because some loser phoned in a fake hostage call and turned his whole house into chaos."
"The streamer from Kansas City has been swatted three times in the past eighteen months, the local police force has now flagged her home address in the dispatch system, and the FBI has finally arrested a suspect in Ohio after eighteen months of forensic work on the spoofed call records."
"Swatting has become so common in the online gaming world that the major platforms have introduced reporting mechanisms specifically for these incidents, and several US states have introduced harsher penalties to discourage the practice from spreading further to ordinary households and innocent victims."
Where it comes from
Swatting takes its name from the United States Special Weapons and Tactics teams, the heavily armed police squads first organised in Los Angeles in nineteen sixty-seven under Daryl Gates, and rapidly copied by other American cities throughout the seventies. The malicious practice of placing a false emergency call to summon an armed police raid against an innocent target emerged in the early online gaming community of the late two-thousands, with the first widely reported cases tied to Xbox Live disputes in two thousand and eight. The FBI began tracking swatting cases formally in two thousand and seventeen after several fatal incidents involving streamers and gamers.
Editors of this term
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