U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer said Monday he plans to introduce legislation that would stiffen penalties against people convicted of lying about or exaggerating the circumstances of situations involving first responders and law-enforcement units.
The practice, which he referred to at a news conference as “swatting” because it often involves the deployment of SWAT teams, was recorded 53 times in Nassau County since 2014, Schumer said, most recently during an April 22 incident in East Garden City in which more than 100 people were evacuated from a five-story building after a 911 caller falsely alleged there had been a man inside with a gun who had taken people hostage.
“These dangerous pranks are, in fact, not ‘pranks’ at all — these ‘swatting’ attacks are serious incidents in which our emergency responders use up their time, energy and resources responding to false threats when they could have been elsewhere protecting the community from real ones,” Schumer said. “What the perpetrators of these calls see as a practical joke is actually a terrifying experience for innocent bystanders, a business detractor for local commerce, and a costly crime that forces our local emergency responders to use up thousands of taxpayer dollars on fake alerts.”
In a statement, Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano said he supports the legislation, saying it is necessary to protect homeowners.
Schumer is proposing that people convicted of “swatting” serve a maximum eight-year prison sentence, a three-year increase from the current sentence, and pay restitution and damages stemming from costs incurred to deploy emergency personnel and law enforcement.
One April 2014 “swatting” incident in Long Beach, in which more than 70 first responders investigated a prank in which a man claimed to have shot family members and threatened to kill others, yielded $100,000 in law enforcement costs, Schumer said.
He said he is also supporting a second law, called the Anti-Spoofing Act, which would make it illegal for people to disguise their caller ID on Skype and other internet calling programs which are often used during “swatting” incidents.
“We need to make sure that every time a 911 dispatcher answers a call that it is a real emergency, and we need to swat down this disturbing trend before it is too late and someone is seriously hurt,” Schumer said.
