The justice’s wife allegedly spat at her neighbors’ car and traded insults, prompting the young couple to call the police
After reports that an upside-down American flag had flown outside the Virginia residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito during the period surrounding Jan. 6, 2021, the conservative justice blamed the flag’s placement on his wife, Martha-Ann — claiming her actions were a result of a clash over a neighbor’s anti-Trump yard sign and a verbal insult.
Now, the Alitos’ neighbors — Emily Baden and her then-boyfriend, now husband — are disputing the Alitos’ version of events, according to the The New York Times, which reviewed text messages and a police call to corroborate the claims. According to the Badens, Martha-Ann instigated the weekslong conflict and, at one point, spat at their car as they drove by the Alito’s home.
Per the Times, the couple had placed signs on their yard that read “Trump Is a Fascist” and “You Are Complicit” shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Emily told the publication that the second sign was not directed at the justice and his wife, but at Republicans in general. The signs were soon taken down by Emily’s mother out of safety concerns.
The problem is that we do get a lot of actual legitimate calls through these VoIP apps, or from people calling from out of the area, on our 10 digit lines, etc.
I don’t know the actual demographics, but it seems like a lot of people use these apps as their primary phones, especially in lower income communities, homeless people, etc. and of course those people have have actual emergencies too, and we wouldn’t want withhold or delay appropriate resources from them in an emergency just because we don’t like their phone number.
We also get people from across the country or occasionally even other countries calling our 10 digit lines because they spoke with their friend or relative either on the phone or over discord or facebook or whatever, they disclosed that they’re having an emergency but are unable or unwilling to call for themselves, so their friend looks up our number and calls for them.
And a lot of these swatting type calls aren’t too far-fetched, we do get murders and shootings, barricaded subjects, etc. with some regularity (not an every day occurrence by any means, but if you work here for a year or two you’ll probably at least see a couple happen if not answer the call yourself.)
When it might be called for, we do send swat, they can take a while to mobilize thanks to how it’s organized in our county with the SWAT teams being made up of officers from multiple different departments, so it’s better to have them stage nearby and not need them than to wait until shit hits the fan and potentially take 20-30 minutes or even longer for them to make it there.
But again, they’re staging, they might go as far surrounding the house, evacuating neighbors, drones in the air, etc. but unless there’s a clear immediate threat they exhaust all possible options before breaking in, and so far that’s paid off. YMMV, I absolutely do not trust all departments to show that much restraint.
Thank you for the perspective on this. Maybe the ones I hear of are the more egregious departments that do not behave with restraint. If there are legitimate calls coming in that way, it does make sense to respond.
Yeah, we’ve had calls come to us in all sorts of crazy ways called in by all sorts of different people for all sorts of wild situations. We kind of have to treat all calls as if they might be real no matter how outlandish, and just make sure we notate anything weird about them. I could probably write several books about all of the crazy 3rd and 4th party calls, people calling from the emergency phone in an elevator, suicide threats called in from a bank because the person decided to bare their soul to Wells Fargo customer service, calling from deactivated phones on VoIP apps because it’s the only way they could call, etc.
Of course there’s a lot of room for new regulations, training, etc. on how police can/should act on the info from our calls. The cops in my area mostly seem to have a good idea how to handle it, but not all departments are created equal. And it’s an ever-evolving situation with new stuff always coming up. We hd to recently explain to one of our cops about crash detection from iphones because he’d never heard of it before.