Minneapolis Star Tribune. February 2, 2024.
Editorial: ‘Swatting’ is a sad sign of our times
Incidents are bipartisan, dangerous and a waste of law enforcement resources.
It’s tempting to view “swatting” — the deceitful practice of calling out squads of heavily armed police to people’s homes under false pretenses — as a special kind of offense, something that only a deranged individual would do. And certainly, it is despicable. And dangerous. But it’s also part of a larger problem.
The most recent high-profile incident of swatting in Minnesota occurred last Saturday at the Delano residence of U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn. A caller to emergency services said that he’d killed a man in Emmer’s house, and that he had taken a hostage. Thankfully, neither assertion was true, but the Wright County Sheriff’s Department made the right call and responded as if a serious incident was underway.
No one was hurt. No one was even at home. Such incidents do not always end so well, however. An innocent person died when shot by police during a swatting episode in 2017; another died of a heart attack during an incident in 2020. Paradoxically, unless they actually intend to cause someone’s death, the callers who send law enforcement officers on these missions are relying on the professionalism and restraint of the very people whose time and resources they are wasting. Remember, officers responding to an emergency call must assume that they may be entering a dangerous environment — possibly even a trap.
Jim Stuart, executive director of the Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association and former Anoka County sheriff, told an editorial writer that “in a day and age when law enforcement is being ambushed, it makes it that much scarier to respond to events, not knowing what the true intent behind them is.”
“They’re going to be coming in with their head on a swivel, trying to take in everything: Is there a suspicious person in a car? Is there a tricky area? Is there anybody on the roofs? Is there anybody in the trees? It sounds kind of silly, but you really are scanning everything you can,” he said.
“It’s a very dangerous and irresponsible thing to do. It reallocates resources away from where they could be.”
In some respects, swatting is similar to the old-fashioned bomb threat. A few days into the new year, Minnesota’s was among more than a dozen state capitols that were temporarily shut down or evacuated due to an emailed bomb threat.
These local incidents are part of what the New York Times describes as a national ” climate of intimidation.” Here and elsewhere, public people and figures of controversy see their private information published on the web. Groups of demonstrators target public officials in their homes. Swatting tactics are employed against people as diverse as Nikki Haley; U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who had ruled the 14th Amendment required that former President Donald Trump be kept off her state’s ballot.
And let’s not forget the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That was not an empty threat, as swatting is, but a significant contribution to the climate of intimidation all the same.
It is sort of comforting to note that the targets of these tactics are bipartisan. Perhaps we’ll be spared nonsensical claims that anonymous 911 callers are merely exercising their freedom of speech.
In Minnesota, swatting is treated as a gross misdemeanor and rises to a felony if someone is hurt or killed. Nationally, the FBI has begun tracking such incidents. We hope that initiative might lead to an effective strategy for thwarting the perpetrators.
Even more, we hope that the country will begin to lose its addiction to violent rhetoric in its public discourse. As long as our candidates for public office refer to their opponents as “vermin” or “deplorables,” some of their supporters will infer that they are being encouraged to do something they shouldn’t.
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Mankato Free Press. February 2, 2024.
Editorial: Transparency: U of M should name multiple finalists
Once again the University of Minnesota appears to be seeking a president without giving taxpayers a robust list of who is in the running. This skirts the spirit of the Minnesota open government laws and nicking the integrity of one of the state’s leading public institutions.
Some 46 candidates applied for the job, and a special presidential search committee interviewed 12 candidates and recommended four to the Board of Regents. The regents will discuss, but not identify, the candidates at an upcoming meeting.
The university cited Minnesota law that candidates can only be named once they are finalists, but the university has cleverly worked around this law in the past by producing only one “finalist,” leaving the public with no input in the choice. This was the process that was followed with previous President Joan Gabel, who left after five years when a conflict of interest issue arose that apparently neither the university nor the public knew anything about.
This time around the university is saying those who are interviewed by the board will be named and participate in public meetings. The university uses plurals in talking about candidates interviewed and public meetings, so we hope it follows through on that pledge and not again circumvent the openness laws.
While all indications suggest the university will finally put forth multiple candidates, that hasn’t been the case in the previous three presidential hires. In the past the university leaders seemed to make wink-and-nod deals to allow candidates to withdraw before being named “finalists,” a term which would trigger Minnesota’s Data Practices Act requirement for revealing the names of candidates.
It seems no matter how much public scrutiny and criticism the institution takes, it resists the transparency necessary for a good decision.
In the past, university officials have argued that such secrecy is needed to draw a strong pool of candidates who would rather not let their current employers know they are looking to move on. That’s acceptable in the world of private business, but the university is a public institution funded with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and is therefore beholden to those taxpayers and the students they serve.
Secrecy has been a higher priority than transparency in to the presidential selection process. Let’s hope that changes this year.
Maybe the U needs to find leaders with a certain respect for the public nature of the institution and the process instead of ones who would rather move on to the next deal.
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