Someone had a mean-spirited thought to focus on Boston Mayor Michelle Wu on Christmas day.
A Boston Police Department spokesman advised the Herald that the division acquired info {that a} violent taking pictures had taken place at an tackle matching that of Wu’s Roslindale dwelling Monday.
The taking pictures was a hoax.
A spokesman for the mayor declined to touch upon the incident.
Such calls reporting critical crimes that demand a police response which can be positioned solely to harass or probably endanger the resident of a house are referred to as “swatting.”
“To ‘swat’ someone is to falsely report a dangerous situation that provokes a police response,” based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s web site, which provides that the act is “malicious and harmful.”
The phenomenon has been reported by numerous information retailers to price tens of hundreds of taxpayer {dollars} for every incident and has at occasions resulted within the demise of the goal who had been falsely accused of a violent crime like a murder, a hostage scenario or a bomb risk.
The scourge has develop into prevalent sufficient that the FBI took an unprecedented step of forming a Command Center in May 2023 for all federal, state, native and tribal legislation enforcement companies to share experiences of swatting incidents.
The FBI’s National Swatting Virtual Command Center, which doesn’t seem to share statistics publicly, “is the first time ever that the federal government has created a centralized command center for law enforcement agencies across the country to exchange, track, and share information related to swatting incidents and is a key step towards being able to better understand the nature and prevalence of these crimes,” based on a report issued by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”