'The Caller Told Them I Was Going To Open Fire On The Police': A Black Writer Discusses Swatting
Swatting is an occasionally deadly form of online harassment involving a hoax call to police and a SWAT team rushing to the house of an often unaware victim.
At 4:48 a.m. on a Sunday, Leonard Pitts Jr. woke up to a call from the police department in his Maryland suburb.
“The caller identified himself as the Bowie Police Department and asked if I’d looked outside my window lately,” Pitts says. “He tells me that half the city of Bowie’s police department is at my front door, and they’ve received a call that I’ve murdered my wife, and I need to come downstairs.”
The Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for The Miami Herald says that in the dark hours of the morning on that June 30, he was “swatted.”
Swatting is a form of online harassment
