When I first started this blog over 20 years ago, I named it in my kitchen after wielding a fly swatter and going after the pesky winged creatures that buzz around during the summer. It was a hot July and my thinking was that the name ‘Swatting at Flies’ also has a hint of baseball. Fly balls. The Sultan of Swat. Never mind that this blog has nothing to do about baseball. I don’t even watch baseball much. I gravitate towards football and tennis.
Yet – ‘Swatting at Flies’ also literally refers to my attempt to hit issues that fly around my brain with some form of coherency through words.
What this blog is not about is the remotest support for an insidious, lawless practice known as ‘swatting’. This practice weaponizes our hyper-militarized police forces around the country against hapless individuals who happen to make these spineless assholes mad in some way, be it a personal beef or some kind of political vendetta.
Anyone who makes a false police report should be shunned by society and deported to a remote island with no food or water. Our country, built mostly by criminals cast away from Britain, has a love affair with the criminal element, romanticizing the mafia (Godfather movies), street gangs (West Side Story), and exploitive individuals and systems (Donald Trump, Capitalism). But, that should not allow us to give a free pass to people who are clearly evil, leveraging the manically paranoid and trigger-happy blue line of violence that is a poor excuse for law enforcement around the country. Punishment of crime in this country is notoriously lax. Overzealous persecution of minorities over trivial “crimes” (the hideously inept, tremendously wasteful, and blatantly racist ‘War on Drugs’) has filled the for-profit prison system to the maximum capacity. Prosecution is pointless. Blatant treason, the giveaway of national secrets, and the stated goal of shredding the Constitution (Donald Trump again) is viewed as worthy of slow-roll ‘Special Counsel’ prosecution as if really it’s just one person who cares about this. The justice system itself couldn’t care less – it simply can’t care – being a deaf, dumb, and blind system of conflicting priorities, warring political factions, and pointless bureaucratic processes that are mind-numbingly callous.
Beyond the individual who engages in ‘Swatting’, the fact that such a thing actually exists is a demonstration of the complete ineptitude of the lug-headed “law enforcement” military play-actors who would not make it two seconds in America’s actual military. The idea of a heavily-armed populace is bolstered by the randomness of the police. At times unresponsive and uninterested in enforcing any laws (hang out in my neighborhood during holidays where assholes are happy to shoot off loud fireworks – and shoot firearms – at all hours of the night – and the police issue friendly warnings rather than bring down the hammer on clearly lawless activity), the police across the country morph into “SWAT” mode when a single shooter is hinted at by a single phone call with no other evidence. How about send a squad car to investigate? What happens if a bunch of pranksters calls 911 and claims this is happening at multiple locations across the locality? Where do the resources get deployed?
It sounds to me like law enforcement chooses to go into destructo mode by design. And who are we to know who is actually making the call to instigate the ‘SWAT’. Apparently, the FBI is starting a database of these incidents. It must be nice to have a database. What will become of this database? I have seen many databases which independently stop laws before they even occur – they are hooked up to individuals who have pre-cognition who are deprived of sensory input and placed in special vats to live their lives to see crimes before they happen.
Anyway, “Swatting” in this 2024 sense is in no shape or form supported by this blog. I also don’t support knee-jerk, lug-head, pseudo-military response from local law enforcement for any reason other than credible threats. I expect smart people to be hired into positions with that kind of power to deploy lethal resources on behalf of the community they purport to serve. And if they aren’t smart enough to figure out the difference between a true threat and an asshole with a grudge, then swatting mistakes should result in termination of employment for those in charge of that police station.
Swatting At Flies 