This is the Kater Daily Podcast for Friday, January 5th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Swatting is essentially a prank calling cops to come to the aid of hostages in a place where there are no hostages.

Sometimes it has deadly results. Who should bear the burden of bad or malicious tips to

police when those police in turn kill innocent people.

Clark Neely is vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute.

He comments.

A guy calls the police.

The police are sufficiently alarmed by what this guy tells them over the phone that they send a SWAT team to a home and ultimately shoot and kill an innocent person.

And in the news coverage that I've seen of this so far,

it's as if the police are not responsible for this person's death.

And it's almost as if the police have no agency whatsoever

when it comes to this death.

The focus is on how do we properly punish this guy. Do we

charge him with second-degree murder, some lesser charge? Do we charge him with

first-degree murder? It's like no, this guy made a phone call and police have several

decisions that they ought to make based on that. Two things. First it is

absolutely the case that we send police officers the message that they have

no agency or at least no

responsibility for their conduct in these situations because they are almost

never held accountable in any meaningful way. And second, it raises an interesting question, namely, when you engage in this conduct,

this is called swatting.

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