[ad_1]
Las Vegas Review Magazine | Tribune News Service | Getty Images
Author Patrick Tomlinson and his business owner wife, Nikki Robinson, have been “beaten” in their Milwaukee home more than 40 times, often resulting in police pointing guns at their heads. Their tormentors also called false bomb threats to places using their names in three states. However, law enforcement was unable to stop the calls.
The couple’s horror comes as such incidents seem to be on the rise in the United States, at least on college campuses. In less than one week in April, universities such as Clemson, Florida, Boston, Harvard, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Rutgers and Oklahoma, as well as Middlebury College, were targeted by strikes.
To combat the growing problem, the FBI began formal measures to obtain a comprehensive picture of the problem at the national level.
Bureau chief Scott Schubert of the bureau’s Criminal Justice Information Services headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia, told NBC News that the agency put together a national online database in May to facilitate the sharing of information among hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country regarding beating accidents. .
Schubert said the effort would provide the office with “a common operational picture of what’s going on across the country.” He added, “We are taking every step to monitor this national problem and provide assistance as much as possible.”
What is multiplication?
Security expert Lauren R. Shapiro, Assistant Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice: “Beating involves people making fraudulent calls to 911 to report serious criminal threats or violent situations such as bomb threats, hostages, murders, etc. They deceive the police into raiding the home or business of someone who is not committing a crime in reality “.
Hitting can have deadly consequences. In 2021, Mark Herring He died of a heart attack During a police response to his Tennessee home due to a fraudulent shooting report.
Patrick Tomlinson and wife Nikki Robinson, NBC News
And in 2017, a Wichita police officer — who didn’t realize the caller had falsely reported a murder and hostage-taking in Andrew Finch House Finch, 28, was killed.
Such deaths are incredibly rare, Shapiro noted, thanks in large part to highly trained SWAT teams who respond to false calls.
No central agency has tracked beating incidents or suspects in the United States, so no official statistics are available. By 2019, there were an estimated 1,000 domestic beating incidents each year, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, with each incident estimated to cost at least $10,000 to the affected communities, even before spending on follow-up work such as investigations, property repairs and counselling. .
Swatting is increasingly enabled by technology that can be used to disguise a caller’s real voice, phone number, or IP address (also called “spoofing”) or to make their false report appear more credible.
Schubert told NBC News that the FBI’s new central database should help the agency “have that shared picture of what’s going on across our country so that we can learn from that.”
Tomlinson horror
Tomlinson’s troubles began after he posted an off-the-record note on Twitter in 2018 saying he didn’t find comedian Norm MacDonald personally very funny. like The Daily Beast reported, the tweet caught the attention of online trolls who soon began harassing, stalking, impersonating and defaming Tomlinson and his wife, using their own website along with social media accounts on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube to target the couple and invite others. to pile on.
Their teasers mostly converge on a website cloned elsewhere so that participants can quickly migrate if their forum is blocked by the service provider.
Since The Daily Beast’s report, online and offline harassment has escalated.
The couple was attacked most recently in their home on Tuesday, bringing the total number of battering incidents to 43. Tomlinson’s parents, who are both seniors, also suffered beatings at their home about two hours outside of Milwaukee this year.
“We’ve been robbed of our sanctuary,” Tomlinson said of the constant harassment, adding, “We don’t feel safe in our own home. We don’t know when the door is going to be kicked.”
Tomlinson described one incident: “I make my way downstairs to find there are half a dozen cops with handguns drawn, shotguns and AR-15s, all shotguns and flashlights pointed at my head. “.
Police handcuffed Patrick Tomlinson outside his Milwaukee home. Courtesy of Patrick Tomlinson
Besides abusing emergency services, the impersonators also fraudulently called the couple’s natural gas provider, We Energies, to turn off the heat during cold Wisconsin nights on two occasions, most recently in March, according to records shared by the family.
“We woke up with our breath inside. The temperatures were in the 50s in our house,” said Tomlinson, putting the couple and their pets (two cats and a bearded dragon lizard) at risk.
False threats using couples’ names have also reached a local Irish pub favorite twice this year, prompting police to bring bomb-sniffing dogs into the pub during one of Marquette’s matches on one occasion.
The Swatters also called a false bomb threat to American Family Field, the baseball stadium where the Milwaukee Brewers play, one night when Tomlinson publicly announced that they would be in attendance. And on December 10, 2022, false bomb threats referring to Tomlinson caused thousands of fans to be evacuated from… Patti Labelle concert The Riverside Playhouse in Milwaukee.
The couple say they have spent tens of thousands of dollars in the past five years trying to protect themselves. Among other things, they said they purchased high-end home security systems, personal defense weapons, and more.
Tomlinson and Robinson sued the owners of an online forum their stalkers used to target them. But their case was not heard by the court because they did not have the names of the website owners to sue. They sent a subpoena to get these names to their web services provider, Cloudflare, but that was overturned. The couple said they were forced to withdraw the lawsuit and now say they owe more than $50,000 in legal fees to the people who attacked them — enough to potentially bankrupt them.
Why no arrests?
While the first recorded case of spanking occurred in 2002, to this day, there is no specific law criminalizing spanking in the United States, says Shapiro John Jay.
“Without a law, there are no specific resources or training for battery investigation,” she said. “911 dispatchers do not have the resources and training they need to distinguish between actual emergencies and false reports.”
Legally, the Misinformation and Deception Act, also known as Section 1038, is used most often to prosecute spanking. Other laws can sometimes apply—one relates to interstate threats involving explosives and the other relates to interstate communications, which refers to extortion or the threat of injury or kidnapping of someone.
“A lot of times, the offenders are slapped on the wrist compared to the consequences their victims suffer,” Shapiro said.
As far as law enforcement goes, the couple and their predicament are now familiar to the Milwaukee Police Department. During the recent beating, the police went to their home and simply left a calling card but did not wake the couple, let alone point guns at their faces as in the past.
Robinson is an advocate of training police to handle battering as a result of her experience.
She said she had to explain to the police what the beating was while they were pointing guns at her door. “There’s no excuse for any police department, no police officer not knowing what a spanking is, and every department in this country should have policies and procedures and training about it. It’s been around for over a decade. People have died from it. It’s insane.”
“It is the duty of the MPD to respond to calls for service in order to ensure that no one is in danger and that precautions are taken during these incidents,” the Milwaukee Police Department said in a statement.
At the federal level, Tomlinson filed a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center in November 2020. He never saw a response, so in early May 2022 he went to the Milwaukee branch of the FBI in person to file a new request.
An FBI special agent is appointed to assess his condition. He says the agency already had a dossier on Tomlinson for a false bomb threat that crowds called out to a hotel outside Detroit in April 2022, a few weeks before a presentation he was scheduled to give. The title of the presentation, which is part of PenguiCon, was “Elon Musk is full of S—.”
Since then, Tomlinson said, “there has been almost no contact by the FBI.”
One agent requested more evidence from his family by e-mail on rare occasions. But the agency did not bring him or his wife in for an interview, nor did it arrest people the couple identified as participating in the harassment and battery.
The FBI’s Schubert was unable to comment on their specific case, but did recommend, in general, “If you receive a threat or information that someone is planning to engage in a beating event, immediately contact local law enforcement.”
[ad_2]
