suffering. says this investigating a mass outage of its systems users were unable to send any tweets for more than an hour the social media platform says there's no evidence the problem was caused by a security breach or a hot. time for a quick check of the headlines here on al-jazeera the world health organization says the number of coronavirus deaths in europe could be up to 5 times higher by january if containment measures on stepped up france germany and the u.k. are among countries tightening restrictions. to full winter search didn't used to unfold in europe with exponential increases in daily basis and matching but a scent that increases in daily deaths the evolving it be demoted situation in

europe raises great concern daily numbers of cases or a hospital admissions or and cover it is now the 5th leading cause of deaths at the bar or $8000.00 bits per day has no been reached u.s. president donald trump and his white house challenger joe biden have been quizzed by the public during rival televised town hall style events they were asked about issues ranging from the coronavirus to conspiracy theories the supreme court and trumps finances they were supposed to face each other in a 2nd presidential debate but trump withdrew from that and its format was changed to virtual rather than in person early voting continues to be a popular choice in the upcoming election long lines formed outside of voting centers in north carolina on thursday on the 1st day of early voting in the state across the country more than 40 and a half 1000000 people have cast their ballots. the israeli knesset has overwhelmingly approved

a deal to normalize ties with the united arab emirates israel and the u.a.e. an ounce the u.s. brokered agreement over signing a deal and a white house ceremony would only come into full effect when the u.n. formally process. an operation is underway to return home more than a 1000 prisoners across the front lines of yemen civil war planes carrying who fighters who've been held by the saudi coalition have been arriving in the capital sana'a. azerbaijan's president says his army will take all of nagorno-karabakh to major regions unless on media agrees to withdraw ilham aliyev comments appear to have dashed hopes that a moscow mediated ceasefire could bring an end to the conflict. so those are the headlines at the news continues here on al-jazeera after the stream station that's watching.

al-jazeera. we're at war. it they're welcome to stream at home edition i'm josh rushing sitting in for me ok today if you're watching this on you tube i could really use your help see that box over there that's a live youtube chat and we actually have a stream producer a little producer who is in that box looking to get your questions and your comments to me so i can get them to our guests during the show so help me out one chip today we're talking about something that i knew little about before it was pitched it's called swatting it's

a kind of praying where someone calls in and says that there is like a hostage situation at a house that they're not at so that the police will respond with swat to that house it started with gamers on sites like twitch and in fact check out this video you can watch one actually happen here. you see phantom. pain before i did. understand why we didn't just have one or a 3rd one many was a bump. on somebody's teeter adaptions or employer and let's please walker's walker. in that particular video that young man his father handcuffed outside the house while the police went through the house of what started as fun and games actually turned deadly when a man in california called the police in kansas to say those a hostage situation and when the police showed up they shot

a 28 year old man dead on his front porch who had nothing to do with it wasn't even the right address for the gamer that they were trying to prank and in fact that person who made that call was sentenced to 20 years in jail last year in california now to talk about this today we're joined by an exciting panel of guests who i'm actually going to ask to introduce themselves to you themselves so we'll begin with . good morning thanks for having me my name is malina abdul a professor of pan african studies at cal state l.a. also co-founder of black lives matter well santa listen one of the original members of black lives matter and i am a single mom of 3 kids who was recently swatted about a month ago and happy to talk more about that and what that meant for me and for my children. thank you for being with us today molina we're going to get into

your story in just a minute and what a story it is doing by alito from dallas hi i'm the lead to buckner in if i am a professor of law and senior associate dean at s.m.u. deadman school of law in dallas much of my research is in critical race theory and most recently i have taken up the topic of swatting and also something that's been described as white collar crime that is to say where black people become the victims of false police calls who were joined by divied in seattle hey josh and if you jim ali i me at are a large newsweek but i'm also a fellow for the anti-defamation league looking at swatting as well as the co-chair of seattle police department's efforts to combat swatting and sadly enough i too am also a victim. well swatting. so let's begin with the lena we have

a video of the show when the police showed up to your house. again with any danger no i mean we got a call to this location that there's a millionaire holding guys hostage if you will be dogs are going to go here but then and i. know my good now somebody that there's nobody in the house except my own security company that we just want to make sure that you're ok i'm fine my kids are petrified. but that's why we're here they must have the mind to. believe it could you walk us through what happened on the shore so that's just the remainder of the video that was. basically what happened 9 o'clock in the morning on a weekday morning i'm getting ready to go to a press conference actually about some work that was happening at school and i travel with security anyway because of the work that i do with black life matter

and ongoing threats and my security personnel arrived at the hall at my home what we're getting ready to eat and he notes that when he told that the police had my house surrounded and i said oh well it's not for me i didn't think it was for us because you know there's incidents that happen i live off a crenshaw in los angeles it's a very active community sometimes things happen in my neighborhood. and i looked out the window and police come to the window there's police everywhere they come to the window and point assault rifles swards me through the window and then i realized it was for us and so i immediately tried to get my children in the safest place possible towards the back of the house i go live which is this is a cliff i think for my instagram allow. but there's an announcement over the

loudspeaker that the police have my house surrounded there's a helicopter overhead this is just a small number of the police that were around there were about 30 or 40 officers armed very heavily when ounce that everyone in the house needed to come out with our hands up of course i since i was live streaming i announced that i had my phone in my hand i kept thinking about qur'an gain since defunct who've been murdered for having their phones in their hands while black and gratefully thankfully my neighbors are who protected me my neighbors refuse to allow me to walk towards the police without them and literally put their bodies on the lines for me on the line for me but it was a horrific incident and it was something that we were grateful to have survived and still deeply traumatized as my children. get through it when we feel

it would why did you imagine they were there. i didn't know why they were there you know i know that i'm a constant target i'm a pretty well known. police. abolitionist i work on reimagining public safety i organize with black lives matter which is why i think that a piece around swatting also the political swatting of organizers is a lot different than you know swatting is a prank right that a caller who called on me had sounded like a white southerner male and was very clear about him targeting he was targeting black lives matter and i believe that the police are complicit when they think that something you know when they get calls like that it's not that they're going in

blind they knew precisely who i was and they risk why this call was coming in and to move in that way i believe they were complicit in what could've you know brought my death and the death of my children. should the police if you told them i think that there's it's easy enough to you know get in touch with me they get they've gotten in touch with me and many other instances it would have been easy enough for them to make a phone call it would have been easy enough they clearly didn't believe the call because if you look at the calmness once i was terrorized and asked to come out with my hands up once i had assault rifles pointed at me they did nothing more to ensure my safety or the safety of my children so they were complicit in this call in my view they could have if they were really concerned about my safety there were

other ways to check on my safety and they didn't do that. if it is a sampler to your experience well you actually had a chance to talk to chief more about molina's case when we did a panel i peep at look the point that i want to hit on here is both of you mentioned have described swatting as a hoax it is not a hoax it is in fact a crime as you heard from the lead actually beyond the legal realm it also has it's an act of terror right it goal here is to terrorize it's not just the physical act it's the it's you know spread fear and as molina say it's not just a tool that's being targeted at gamers we're seeing it use that disenfranchised you know we're seeing black activists being targeted by this but we're also seeing the c.e.o.'s of c.e.o. of instagram right so this is a tool that can be used by anyone really to go and reach out and try to get this kinetic thing so it's not just a hoax and that someone's calling it a threat the goal here is to play an inherent bias as the lead is pointing out to

try to elicit an incredibly strong armed police response with the goal of inflicting violence so that's incredibly dangerous but here's the other part of this josh there's no consequence so people can do this and you know what seattle and what we're working on is really to help police departments adana fi and tailor their response but when it comes to investigation let alone prosecutions it just doesn't happen and there's a lot of reasons for that so right now if you want to swat someone unfortunately the chances of you being arrested let alone prosecuted and convicted are damn near 0 so that's a chilling thing when you realize the damage and consequences it can have on individuals and groups. later we were joined by a lawyer a legal expert on this little league of well how could this be legal. wow you know i absolutely agree with what i've just been said 1st of all this is not a hoax people who engage in swatting are very purposeful this is an act of terror

one of the significant problems is that you know perhaps one of the most significant safety mechanisms that have been created in the u.s. over the last few decades is the widespread access of the 911 system that is one of the tools that we use in order to keep ourselves safe and that's true whether or not we fear violent crime or whether we have for example a medical emergency it is shocking and regretable that the 911 system is being deployed in this way but let me also just add it's not just calls to 911 that are being used very often swatting also occurs via calls to non-emergency police numbers the reason that this can be so insidious and so difficult to control is that. frankly you know outside of the sort of pure hoax calls where someone is calling up on a game or or where someone has a you know

a beef with someone very often callers can make the claim the very much subjective ice claim that they were fear fearful or that they somehow thought this was going on it was very hard to challenge someone subjective or subjective like to claim about something they thought was going on it's very difficult number one number 2 even though i would say in the vast majority of us you're stiction it is a violation it's a criminal violation to make a false report many of those mechanisms for criminalizing that act they are low level they are misdemeanors they are not felonies of the case in california where someone was just convicted and got 20 years in jail that's because someone ended up dead number one number 2 it was also possible to harness the power of statutes you know i think that was prosecuted as an involuntary manslaughter

case. those people who do criminal law recognize that. it's really difficult to make out many manslaughter cases i mean you need a certain amount of intentionality and that was present that case and you still end up not with murder but with i believe a manslaughter charge so that case is actually exemplary of what of how even in the worst case scenarios it becomes difficult to prosecute or if it is possible to prosecute it's difficult to get a felony prosecution and if you can get a family prosecution it's often difficult to get the highest level of penalty there are understand some jurisdictions that are trying to put in place some explicit statutory responses to this but that's been slow going so far and i would guess my . yes can jump in here i would guess that's because we don't want to have a chilling effect on people's ability to call 911 how do you balance that with the

very real fact that people are using this as a weapon against others you know. if it's passed i think though we also need to think about that the police are not neutral and all of these cases so this is used when we talk about the targeting of black activists and organizers you know this is used i think as. an excuse for them to come in and terrorize it's not that the you know the police can if you even watch just that short clip of the video in my case you know the police can't claim he claimed he didn't know who i was now no police officer and all of l.a.p.d. doesn't know who i am and doesn't know who black lives matter is we are the largest and most active chapter in black lives matter and this is happening at the time

when black lives matter is now the largest movement in global history come on now you don't come in and come to my house and not know what it was and so it's really important that we you know one absolutely say that it's more than a hoax so the caller absolutely has some responsibility but police departments who are using it as an excuse to further terrorize harass and really place in jeopardy but lives of activists you know also bear some responsibility and i think that we need to remember that law enforcement units are not neutral they have their own agendas that they're trying to advance the reviewer's i would as it. i was going to say so to that point look clearly i listened to many many swatting calls and you know again people who are calling in a swat team they want to get a police response so they're going to play inherent bias and clearly race is part

of that but you know you can't ignore the fact that like i said the c.e.o. of instagram has been swatted in my case it was actually the former head of v.h.s. . that was actually swatted and that's what actually brought a federal beef but here's the larger point you know you go to police department and you ask them they don't know what the hell swatting means they don't even but most police officers don't know that's the thing so that's one problem and then you know to my co-host point about the legal part of this you know the molina she was terrorized this was awful it's clearly had an impact on her in a lot of ways but you know you go to police officer you say how do you record this they're even of a crime to record this at because there's no physical damage there's no loss of life so in many cases they'll just recorded as a false no one call which at best is not even it's not a felony it's a misdemeanor so there's no investigative purposes i'm sure the f.b.i. has not been in contact with molina and i'm sure you know i can tell you from from experience that these people who are swatting someone like her are doing this prolifically they're not just targeting her they're target all sorts of people but

the biggest challenge here is getting the feds to investigate it because what we found from squatters is not only are they out of state as as as again it was point out they're calling the non-emergency line which you can't call 91 in austin unless you're in austin for example they're not only out of state in some cases they're out of the country so we need federal involvement to investigate and prosecute but on the law enforcement side really is absolutely right like police should know that this is a thing they should know that there are people who are actively trying to plan their inherent biases right so they know if they say it's a black man with a gun it's more likely going to get a stronger response and they're playing on that there's no doubt about it but again i just want to make clear that this is not just just like i would say it's not a tool to use in the game or community it's not just a tool used against activists although that is a that is a part of it it's also used. like trump administration officials and you know c.e.o.'s of large companies and that's why unfortunately that's why it's finally getting some attention heck i mean i didn't point spoken to the departing defense about this and we've talked about nation states using this as a tool to disrupt

a military base which you can absolute do so this has a a broader concern if you had an emerging threat and again that's the absolutely frightening thing here is no matter which way you look at whether it's someone you have to molina or someone who went after the former head of v.h.s. in many cases there's euro consequences and so you know what's to discourage people to do this they know they can do it without with impunity and they only have to be right once and you know that's it you've ruined his life it is not even the last lecture to a course or is that risking that horrible is the trauma for evermore of a city we're in here call it terror that's the whole point of terrorism right yes and so it just happened to a black college student stephen f. austin down in texas and it could put this video range christian christian evidence the police stormed into her room at 3 am in the morning and here's the the trauma from this happening. i feel safe here i don't even know how

to. sleep at night because of this. it has made me really paranoid that i'm always taking my room in vegas and everything is over. or i go to sleep. i was looking forward to making friends and having a good time and that's your team but since this is happened it's made it really really really hurt. so i'm just like as i'm taking it what. milena can you touch on the emotional trauma that last long after the actual event sure i mean. what shook me most is that my 3 children were home. and after asking the sergeant if i was free to go i walked back to my home and

watched as my 13 year old daughter just shook in terror she as i walked out the house when i was you know they called for everyone to walk out the house with their hands up you know i was trying to draw the police away from the house so my children what they have to face guns pointed at them actually and you know thankfully the police trained their guns on me and not on my children because they were kind of barricaded in a back room and i was able to draw them away from the house. but thinking about what it meant for my children to watch as these assault rifles and this is dozens of officers surrounding their mother with assault rifles you know this is. something that's going to live with them and with me for the rest of our lives and you know definitely you know there is therapy that's in place as

a result there are there's a lot of anxiety you know in black folks always already have to live with anxiety when we see police but the way in which we were threatened causes additional anxiety i watch how my children behave when the police are around and it's almost unavoidable these days it's not like i can keep them safe from police but it's it's definitely taking an emotional toll on us would be to. use in our communities and this is video comic quickly that request. in the most recent example of swatting or campus police raided the dorm room of a black cheerleader at stephen f. austin university the police chief made the assurance that the incident was not racially motivated even if it may not have been in that instance there is a long history where race plays a major factor in false calls the police a lot of times callers know that the police will more likely respond and respond

urgently when they include race in a false report any cooper knew this when she called the police claiming that a black man was threatening her life and a little known fact about a more famous case or its 1st texas it all started with a false report about a black man going crazy with a firearm in an apartment in the lawrence case this led to a bad arrest based off of about law but this is not always the case and an encounter with the police can easily turn out deadly as in the cases of tanner rice and briana taylor this happens more than a 1000 times a year at this place in the u.s. right now a lot of people are used to community are asking what should be done about it what can we do about it lida from a legal perspective do we need some new laws here we absolutely need some new laws here as i mentioned a few moments ago right now in most jurisdictions very it's very little on the law books in state statutes that would directly respond to this except for those very

statutes that criminalize false reports reports to the police or to 911 but i think beyond law i think we have to come at it from a couple of angles and this goes back to something that molina said i think that even if we had a law on the book there could still be people who let's say somehow. honestly but incorrectly believe that someone at her home is holding them hostage let's say that that were true and let's say that it was just completely wrong one of the big issues is the heavily militarized response of a number of our law enforcement. members we probably along with creating some laws that would criminalize false reports we also need to create mechanism so that our law enforcement community responds to these sorts of potential peril without going in as if they are going to war i mean it is not for nothing that this has been called swatting that refers to the swat special weapons and tactics those of us who

have read about a member of the eighty's recall that this was the era of big militarized policing and that's often the kind of response that we get so yes i do think we need some more laws on the book we need local laws that is to say at the at the city level we need state level laws that could be widely used in criminal courts of jurisdictions but also i think mention this this should be also federalized very often these callers are contacting people or contacting the police will cross state lines. i'm going to have to wrap it up there here's what we need to leave viewers with this is not a hoax this is terrorism this is dangerous in a sounds like we need new laws to catch up with it or think all my guests for joining me today that's it for me this week next time you'll see to me ok back in her chair so thanks for joining us with this treatment susan.

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