Opinion | Swatting Is a Political Problem

In a year with so much political and legal tension, law enforcement is seeing a disturbing trend: targeting public officials with swatting, or false emergency calls intended to draw a heavily armed police response. This conduct isn’t a harmless prank; it’s a symptom of a deeper disorder in American politics. Recent incidents involving officials who have taken stands seen as hostile to Donald Trump and bomb threats in multiple state capitols are signs of a troubling escalation in political violence.

These hoaxes pose real dangers. Sending armed police officers to someone’s home on the ruse that violence is occurring there risks tragic outcomes, including fatalities, as we saw in Kansas in 2017, when swatting led to a police officer shooting an unarmed man. In addition, swatting diverts law enforcement resources from real emergencies. But more insidiously, these tactics are tools of intimidation, designed to silence voices in the political process.

The frequency and visibility of these incidents suggest that swatting and political violence require prosecutors to prioritize their efforts to stop it. Recent targets of swatting include Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is presiding over the federal election interference case and whom Mr. Trump has accused of election interference; the special counsel Jack Smith, whom Mr. Trump has called “deranged” and a “thug”; and Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia who rejected Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Justice Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over Mr. Trump’s New York civil fraud trial, received a bomb threat at his home on the day of closing arguments. Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, became a victim of swatting shortly after she removed Mr. Trump from the presidential ballot in her state under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. She rightly sees these acts as attempts to chill efforts to enforce the law, calling the incident at her home “designed to scare not only me but also others into silence, to send a message.”

Public officials are human. Threats and the specter of violence can get into their heads. The possibility that a loved one might be unnerved, injured or worse as a result of one’s official duties isn’t easily shrugged off for most of us. The husband of Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, retired from his dental practice about eight years earlier than planned because of threats he received at his office. The risks can go beyond words. A federal judge in New Jersey suffered the loss of her 20-year-old son in 2020 when a gunman, apparently dressed as a delivery driver, came to her home looking for her and killed her son instead. We cannot forget that threats can escalate into violence. Fear of placing family members in harm’s way can make public officials shrink from making unpopular decisions and can even cause some good people to avoid serving altogether.

Of course, this phenomenon isn’t entirely new. At the dawn of the American Revolution, some colonists harassed tax collectors and published the names of those who refused to boycott British goods. And we have experienced bomb threats for decades, learning to live with the disruptions caused by evacuations that result when a threat is phoned in or posted online.

But the recent uptick in swatting can be attributed, at least in part, to the dangerous drumbeat of disinformation and dehumanization, a tactic long employed by authoritarians. Political extremists engage in what is known as the either-or fallacy. By framing issues as binary conflicts and demonizing opponents, they create a climate in which violence becomes normalized. Recent statements by Mr. Trump exemplify this strategy. He uses Truth Social posts to make unfounded accusations and express disdain for rivals. These posts do more than spread disinformation. They foster an environment in which violence against perceived enemies becomes not just conceivable but justified.

The consequences of such talk are tangible and terrifying. Mr. Trump’s words have already preceded acts of violence: An attack on the F.B.I. field office in Cincinnati after he baselessly accused agents of planting evidence during their search of his Mar-a-Lago home in 2022. The plot of the MAGA bomber, who sent pipe bombs to Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies in the media and the Democratic Party in 2018. The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol came after Mr. Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Recent threats against Colorado Supreme Court justices who ruled that Mr. Trump was ineligible for the ballot in their state and harassment of the grand jury members who returned an indictment against him in Georgia underscore the real-world impact of stirring up political passions. Regardless of whether he intends to provoke attacks, his rants are heard by some as calls to action. And his success is likely to spawn imitators.

There is no easy answer to reversing this trend, but one way to start is for law enforcement officials to take a strong stand against political violence. When I served as a U.S. attorney in Michigan, I found that enforcement action worked best when coupled with messaging — before and after prosecution. In 2013, after carjacking became a significant problem in Detroit, law enforcement agencies used billboards and television ads to inform the public of the long prison sentences for carjacking. Carjackers were prosecuted, and their sentences were publicized. The following year saw a 32 percent reduction in that offense. While it is never possible to pinpoint the cause of a reduction in crime, educating would-be offenders about the serious consequences probably had some deterrent effect.

We can use the same approach in addressing swatting and threats. First, law enforcement officials should make it known that communicating a false police report or hoax threat can carry significant prison time under state and federal law. Second, prosecutors should prioritize cases of swatting and threats. Prosecutors lack the resources to pursue every case that comes across their desks, so they must choose those they deem the most serious. It is time to put swatting and threats into that top category. Third, political and community leaders should express moral condemnation for swatting, explaining the immediate danger this crime presents to public safety and the long-term dangers it poses to democracy.

In addition, as citizens, we must condemn the reckless language that leads to swatting. As voters in a democracy, we can reject inflammatory speech that targets public servants and demand civil discourse from our government representatives and candidates for office. We should cast as traitors to our foundational values anyone who fans the flames of division. To be a patriot is to seek truth and promote nonviolence.

The path we choose will determine whether the current trend of political violence and intimidation fades or gives way to something even more sinister. Our democracy’s health and our nation’s stability depend on our collective response to this dangerous turn.

Barbara McQuade (@barbmcquade) is a former U.S. attorney and the author of the forthcoming book “Attack From Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America.”

Source Photographs by Jupiterimages, Ed Freeman and Onfokus/Getty Images

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