Swatting

It's bad enough that there's a thing called "swatting." I've learned it's done among online gamers, who make fake distress calls or bomb threats to police -- sometimes at schools, sometimes at the homes of people they are playing against online.

They claim to be a person who's being held hostage, or that they've just been shot with a gun by a person who is still in the house. The police respond with a SWAT-like response at the home of someone who is doing nothing at all -- a very dangerous situation, obviously.

I say it's bad enough that this happens at all, but the thing that's even worse is that a white 19-year-old Texas loser who just pleaded guilty to several of these dangerous stunts embroidered his stories even more by saying the violence was being committed by black men:

On Friday, Zachary Morgenstern, 19, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, to one count of “threats to kill.”...

In phone calls, e-mails and tweets, Morgenstern threatened imminent bombings and shootings at Marshall schools and reported other fake hostage incidents....

On Feb. 16 Morgenstern called a Marshall dispatcher, saying he was a 13-year-old boy and that two black men had just broken into his apartment and shot his mother in the leg. The caller said he was hiding in a bedroom closet and he could hear the men yelling at his mother.

Morgenstern also admitted to placing similar calls to dispatchers in Ohio and Massachusetts.

In a call to the Amesbury, Mass., police dispatch center on Feb. 10, he claimed to be a boy hiding in a closet. “He falsely stated that four black men had broken into his residence and shot his mother,” according to court documents. “The call resulted in an armed police entry into the residence, after which police concluded the call was a hoax.”

It's amazing no one has been killed in any of these raids. In my opinion, this type of behavior is worse than a broken window in Baltimore. While racial hoaxes are not new, swatting takes it to a new level of resource waste and danger to innocent bystanders.