SWAT Team Flashbangs And Raids Home – The Wrong One, Open WiFi To Blame
This story is jaw dropping on so many levels it is hard to know where to start but it seems that a posting on the Topix site threatened the police, and their families, in the town of Evansville, Indiana which lead the police to send in the full SWAT team to execute a search warrant on a local house that was believed to be the starting point of the threats.
A home where the front door was open and an 18-year old woman was sitting watching television as the SWAT team smashed the front window and threw in two flashbangs before entering the home.
Apparently though the police have realized that they made a mistake and that the threats didn’t actually come from that house. It appeared as if they had because of an open WiFi router being used in the home and someone on the same block had used that access to post the threats to the web.
So did the police send in the SWAT team when they found out their mistake?
Nope. Instead they sent in a couple of regular police officers to question the residents of the new suspected home and found out that the culprit was a teenager who admitted he has a “smart mouth”.
But Evansville police aren’t backing down from their initial SWAT raid (read more about their later justification for using such force). And the targets of that raid aren’t pleased. As the owner of the first house told the paper, “The front door was open. It’s not like anyone was in there hiding. To bring a whole SWAT team seems a little excessive.”
The city will be paying to repair the damage it caused.
via Ars Technica
For video of the incident head over to the TriState news page
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About the Author
Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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