I Was Swatted For More Than A Year. No One - NO ONE - Deserves It

 

I have rarely shared my personal experiences in my political columns beyond opinions because I don’t think they should affect anyone’s opinion. And I’ve been reluctant to share this particular experience because it has been one of the most traumatic I’ve ever lived through, even though I have seen certain parallels in many aspects of life and our discourse. But recent events have made me realize I have a personal experience that parallels something that the rest of the world has become all too familiar with. And because of the partisan divides that I am all too painfully aware of and seem to filter the way that even the most horrendous experiences that people go through them, I feel compelled to relate it. That said, I will keep the names of the individuals involved and even my neighborhood anonymous.

I moved into an apartment in June of 2021. Less than two months after I had moved in, the police buzzed on my intercom and claimed that they have received a noise complaint.

My first reaction was terror – the TV had been on loud and I didn’t want to get my new neighbors angry with me. I buzzed the police up, and we had a short conversation before they left.

I would eventually learn that this phone call had been made by the individual who lived in the apartment directly above me. This individual was suffering from a mental disorder that could be controlled with medication but they periodically forgot to take it. This individual was also fairly old and now experiencing dementia. I never learned how long this person had lived in that apartment but after discussion with my neighbors both in the building, the surrounding area and the police themselves, I learned that I was not the first victim of this individual’s behavior of harassment, nor even the first individual who’d lived in the apartment below me. One of the many hard parts of coming to terms with the trauma they inflicted on me over the next two years  - until they were eventually moved to a long term care facility – was that none of this was personal, merely geographical. I just happened to be there, and this person thought that I was the cause of everything that when wrong in their life.

At some point I might go into great detail about this long experience because there are many lessons to learned from it about our society and aspects of it. For now, I’m just going to focus on the part that is most pertinent. Over the next year, this person would call the police dozens, if not hundreds of  times and make false reports that I was responsible for something going wrong in their lives. These included countless false noise complaints, accusations that I had stolen things from them ranging from their glasses and checkbook to, ironically, their cell phone to the possibility I’d broken into their apartment.

The police from the local precinct became a weekly, if not daily presence in my life over a period of more than a year. You could tell given the nature of their visits over time that they knew none of these complaints had any merit but they had to answer them anyway. This individual could be very noisy and brazen; I would frequently overhear them making the calls but insisting on remaining anonymous when they asked for the name. I lost count of how many times the police came to my doorstep over this period – at one point, they came twice within hours of each other. The latter time one of the officers berated this individual and claimed they had received over 100 9-1-1 calls over the course of 2022. He told this person that in May.

By now, the rest of the world knows that this is referred to as ‘swatting’. It was not the most horrific form of harassment this person did to me over the course of more than a year and a half or even the most horrible thing this person did when I lived in the building, but I’d wager it had the most long-term psychological damage to me. I got to a certain point every night around the same time expecting my intercom to buzz, telling me the police were there. It is one of the reasons that, a full year after the last visit from the police of any kind, I still flinch every time my intercom buzzes. The entire experience with this individual was a nightmare that only recently has come to an end. And it is the kind of experience that I would not wish on anybody in this world. Anybody.

When you live in that kind of nightmare you don’t know that there’s  a term for it. Even when I learned that Marjorie Taylor Greene had been receiving anonymous 9-1-1 calls several times, including over the Christmas holidays, and the police had been there nine times on ‘swatting’ calls, I did not relate the experience to what I had gone through. It has taken a few weeks to realize that this is something police are now coming to terms with as a ‘new threat’. This is yet another case of the media coming to something years after the fact. This has been going on in my neighborhood for years, if not a decade, and I can’t imagine that it hasn’t been going on in so many parts of the country for a very long time. But now that it can be tied to ‘partisan politics’ and a sign of the decline of order, it’s news.

And it should come as no surprise that while Greene and other Republican politicians were victims of this pattern of harassment throughout the past few weeks, there has been no report on it from the mainstream media or the left wing web sites. But when the Secretary of State of Maine receives swatting calls to her house, MSNBC just says its another sign of how MAGA is destroying all the values they hold dear.

I have found many aspects of the way both the media and partisan politics view certain factions of our life and the value they hold for people they disagree with infuriating over the years. But having been a victim of one of the more recent ‘signs of the decline of civilization’, I can assure you it is not something anyone deserves to be a victim of. I think very little of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert as individuals, politicians or elected officials. That doesn’t mean they deserve to have their homes disrupted by the police by 9-1-1 calls, saying that acts of crime or violence have occurred there. I know all too well that the left thinks that any time a right wing figure, a Republican politician, or anyone they disagree with is humiliated in public that they deserve it. And considering their vast silence in the past year when conservative Supreme Court justices had protestors or other individuals come to their homes, I know what they are implying without saying.

Similarly if a Democratic elected official makes a ruling or a stand that the right does not like, they are no more deserving of receiving anonymous 9-1-1 calls to their homes late at night and have the police show up. No one wants to see the police come up to the door and tell them they’ve received a complaint.

Including the police. I need to make this part clear. The police were constantly frustrated that they had to keep making visits to my building every time this person called. I eventually struck up a conversation with one of them – believe me, I became very familiar with them the last couple of years – and I learned for every time the police actually came to my building, there were three or more they never bothered to knock on my door at all. After a certain point, they knew these complaints were false and had no merit but they also knew that had to follow their duty and respond to all of them. Because most of mine involved noise complaints, all they had to do was drive by and they were sure they were false.

And they knew even when this started, that almost all of these complaints were going to be false. Because, again, this person was disturbed. The harassment calls that this individual made were by far the least harassing things this person did over the course of years, if not decades to the entire neighborhood. At a certain point it was clear to everybody that this person was a threat to not only others but themselves. When they were removed, one of my closest friends was glad because he had been certain it would end with the person dead, if not at the hands of the cops than maybe a complete stranger.

Now because I know all too well the swamp I live in, I can already see and hear the rationalization beginning in so many readers head.  He’s using his personal experience as a generalization that has nothing to do with the problems in our country. Our nation is in a state of crisis and we must use whatever means necessary to maintain control. All variations of: ‘they deserve it’ and ‘it doesn’t apply to me.’  Empathy stops depending on identity politics or the border between red state and blue state.

Yes I admit my experience was far more traumatic then just the mere swatting I got for months and years. At some point I might share the details. But right now I want to ask a question that has just two answers, yes or no. Do you think it is right for any individual, office holder or private citizen, black or white, male or female, cis or LGBTQ+, Progressive  or MAGA, to be the victim of a campaign of harassment where the police are called on a semi-regular basis to their homes, to disturb their peace of mind, to waste everybody’s time, and to be the victim of another person’s delusions?

I think you know where I stand on this. If you hedge your answer, equivocate, hem and haw or come up with whatever pathetic justification to say: “No, but…” then I know where you stand. Don’t bother responding; there is no justification you can give that would make me feel anything close to sympathy for you. And for those of you who do respond some variation of yes, I will simply unfollow you and ask very simply that you take a good look in the mirror afterwards. I’ve heard too many excuses about why this kept happening to me over the last two years; I don’t want to hear yours as to why someone should go through the same thing just because of who they represent.