Anonymous phone calls should not lead to people potentially being killed.

If they get a credible report of a dangerous situation, they have to take it seriously. The clock starts running the moment their phone rings, so they have limited time for countermeasures.

I surely hope they're doing their best to prevent obvious fakes from getting through. They have the incentive; getting pranked by a 16-year-old makes them look like idiots. And I really hope that their procedures and training mean that they're well prepared for situations where they caller was lying, confused, panicked, or just mistaken.

But I think mere anonymity shouldn't discourage them much. For a lot of people, calling the police is a complex calculus of risk. Are they safe from the police? Are they safe from retribution from criminals? Are they inviting too much trouble for others? [1] People being anonymous may not be a great sign of a false report.

[1] E.g.: http://tressiemc.com/2014/05/02/calling-the-white-mans-polic...

After all, what are the chances of someone reporting a hostage situation from a point of termination in another country, state, county or even town from where the hostage situation is taking place? Such information should be treated as hearsay at best.

Also, I hope they don't go in guns blazing regardless of the report. A troublemaker could just as well be on the block as elsewhere.

Certainly, law enforcement needs to be thinking hard about how they response. But it's not obvious to me, as an outsider, how to handle this.

"I received a phone call from the local police department. It was early in the morning on Apr. 10, and the cops wanted to know if everything was okay at our address.

Since this was not the first time someone had called in a fake hostage situation at my home, the call I received came from the police department’s non-emergency number, and they were unsurprised when I told them that the Krebs manor and all of its inhabitants were just fine."

At least in his part of the world, it seems the cops are exercising a healthy level of discretion.

The police do however love opportunities to justify large expenditures and fancy equipment.

Many courts have upheld this principle:

BARILLARI v. MILWAUKEE http://www.leagle.com/decision/1995441194Wis2d247_1431

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia The Court explained that "[t]he duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists."

What they don't have is financial liability for the death of every specific person they aren't smart/fast/legally empowered/well-funded enough to save, because that would be unreasonable.

I see your point but I think it's a pretty arbitrary one. Have a police force every been held legally accountable for failing to protect the public? The case law that the police have no particular obligation to protect individuals is well established.

What does it mean to have an obligation to protect the public when the public is made up of individuals and the police have no particular obligations to protect individuals?

Lots of things can result in bad shit--but we seem to be looking at the civic equivalent of rheumatoid arthritis.

If a fire department shows up without need nobody is put in prison, shot, assaulted, or has their dogs killed.

Your anecdote seems to support the statement "the fire department has to respond to every fire alarm".

And I explained that to the dispatcher.

It certainly looks as if the situation was pretty well handled in this particular case.

You can either have your juvenile record "sealed" or "expunged" but neither is automatic.

Asking for your records to be sealed is possible a number of years after the conviction dependent on location. In most places it is 3 years of no offenses except minor traffic violations and you can request getting juvenile records sealed.

Asking for expungement is much more restricted and not even available in most locations. In the rare places expungement is possible it is a long and involved process.

Now, here is what sucks more -- getting your records sealed may seem like the obvious choice -- you don't want that shoplifting thing following you around. But, if someone pulls your record and sees "sealed" they are likely going to think you did something FAR worse than shoplifting.

Additionally, sealed records don't mean "from everyone forever" -- those suckers can pop up in adult trials if they fit a pattern, if they should apply to sentencing or just if the judge thinks they should.

Don't fuck up too much when you are kid, it will haunt you.

Fortunately most teenagers don't know about the relative benefits of being 17, but, if you decided that making an honest living was for losers and that a life of crime was worth giving a go, that year of being 17 is the best time to do some 'apprenticeship'.

Is this the case in the U.S. and Canada?

This, exactly.

I don't know why so many people seem to think tougher prison sentences/three-strikes laws, etc. will deter much crime. If you're going to commit a crime, you've already convinced yourself that you're going to get away with it.

I think people like to think this way because it's so much easier than trying to solve the problems that lead to crime in the first place.

Not only that, but once you go to prison, at least in the United States, you'll likely go again. Going to prison makes you unemployable, makes you lose certain federal assistance, and leads to close contact with gangs. When you finally get out, you often won't even be able to vote, you can't find a job, and you'll probably get evicted. You're pretty much a second-class citizen at that point, worse off than you were before. If we want people to commit fewer crimes, prison should be the last resort (at least for non-violent offenders), not the first step. Better alternatives exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Drug-Related_Crime

If you're interested in this topic take a look at When Brute Force Fails (http://www.amazon.com/When-Brute-Force-Fails-Punishment/dp/0...) - I found it a good take on crime in the US.

For example, if a 14 year old comes up to me on the street and commits a crime (e.g. he mugs me) and I know his name, would I not be allowed to tweet "just got mugged by <his name>"?

Being a victim doesn't give you any particular rights to publish this information. But the law says nothing about merely telling it to all your friends. And if you're walking the line between these two, it's probably better to talk to a lawyer before speaking.

[0] http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/Y-1.5/page-45.html#h...

It's a fine line between crime and entrapment, so when your business depends on having these crimes happen to you then you should be extra careful in how you go about dealing with the perps identities, especially if they are minors.

> A 16-year-old male from Ottawa, Canada has been arrested for allegedly making at least 30 fraudulent calls to emergency services across North America over the past few months.

Emphasis mine.

I would agree with you were the "allegedly" missing, and if instead of "arrested for", it said "convicted of".

"For 2011, the US Department of Justice reported a 93% conviction rate." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate

Prosecutors are only supposed to prosecute people if they think the person really did it, and if they think they can convince a jury.

Prosecutors aren't supposed to prosecute "just to find out what happens."

It's a bit like a big bruiser going downtown to the clubs and trying to pick fights with every drunk and then bragging later about how many he bagged.

And to post the name of the kid before he's convicted (assuming he will be convicted) is out of line and possibly even illegal (he's a minor after all).

Most of Krebs' targets are carding rings, crackers and other Internet fraudsters and criminals. These aren't clueless people being dumb, these are usually bad people (allegedly) doing intentionally bad things to innocent people..

Also, the kid's name was in the already-published DOX that he linked to in his article. It's not like he was responsible for "outing" this kid's details....

This kind of hoax should be punished harshly, even for 15-17 year old juveniles.

... and that restriction only to avoid the calculus where the punishments are equivalent, so someone getting their jollies by ordering armed responders to an innocent person's house might as well go drop rocks from the local overpass instead.

So $10k each, and 30+ times: Make him pay that $300k back.

If it includes the salaries of the officers involved, by allocating the man-hours consumed by each response, then that number needs to be lowered.

I'll accept the fact that vehicles consume gallons per mile in gas, and that private residences have to repair busted down doors and damaged sheetrock, and maybe if some other expendables were used, if say some shots were fired and it cost 50 cents in bullets, but the officers would have been on the clock anyway (overtime or no), and the taxes are already budgeted for salaries.

Did the counties get sued by the swatted? If that's the source of the number, maybe he owes a large percentage of that, but then again, maybe the lawsuit has a point and how swat teams respond to prank calls should be changed?

Every time first responders of any kind are deployed there is an inherent risk to their lives.

First responders have to drive fast to get to their destination quickly. SWAT teams are heavily armed and accidents do happen. Innocent bystanders could get shot, pets could get shot, other officers could get shot in a confusion. They might get called out on a prank call but end up finding a sovereign citizen freeman-on-the-land at home who hates the government and is willing to get into a firefight anyway.

All these things are potential liabilities on the department, not to mention the danger of having your entire SWAT force deployed to a prank call while there's a real incident on the far other side of town and not enough time to get there.

So yeah, we can argue about the cost as long as we want, but at the end of the day the primary cost on the minds of the police departments are these dangers, and the actual price tag quoted by them must take these into account.

1. It costs 10 dollars an hour to keep a cop on active duty.

2. You need 10 cops to handle a specific region based on the fact that you receive 10 incidents a day.

3. You now get an additional 2 fake incidents a day but you don't know which of the 12 incidents are fake.

4. You therefore need cops to check out these incidents. You must hire them.

5. Your cost of operation goes up.

Lesson #1: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Plus there might have call out off duty cops on overtime to cover and then there is the paperwork and reports which will have to be written up and analysed.

Plus there is the cost of damage to property, disruption to traffic and so on.

Plus the host of investigating the hoax

But sometimes, accountability makes it worth the expense.

http://nypost.com/2014/04/23/fbi-helping-to-find-call-of-dut...

Kid now is getting prosecuted with $100,000 in fines for his swatting attempt.

    The caller could face multiple charges and may also 
    be required to foot the bill for Tuesday’s police 
    response, which is estimated at $100,000.

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americ...

+ punishment for exploiting the state

1) This type of reckless, non-violent, anti-social behavior in young males has been quite common for all of recorded history. It's a shame it has to involve so much money and international crime nowadays.

2) We remember everything now. No more can you do some bone-headed thing in your teens that cost 400K and got you sent to juvenile hall for a year, then move on with your life. Now it's all over the interwebs.

I feel sorry for the guy. Don't get me wrong: this was a lot more dangerous than it seemed to him, and something had to be done. Still, as the author points out, this is a shame.

I do not believe this kid was purposefully being violent. I do believe what he did could have had terribly violent results. But until I receive additional information to the contrary, I'm going to assume that he was engaged in a prank -- a very dumb prank.

But in general, BK is a very competent journalist who is often able to reconstruct the identities of people in the Russian cybercrime underground. An obnoxious, pimply adolescent in Ontario was unlikely to present him with much in the way of a challenge.