It’s been nearly 15 years since the FBI officially designated “SWATing” — prank-calling emergency services to prompt a violent police response from a Special Weapons and Tactics team on an unsuspecting victim — a dangerous “new phenomenon” done primarily “for the bragging rights and ego, versus any monetary gain.” In that time, the practice has led to multiple instances of police violence — sometimes fatal — against unsuspecting marks whose sole crime was raising the ire of someone willing to anonymously deploy state-authorized force as a means for revenge.
This week, that unsuspecting mark was none other than Georgia congresswoman and enthusiastic Christian nationalist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claimed Thursday morning to have been “swatted” a second time in as many days.
Greene’s claim came just one day after the police department in Rome, Georgia, confirmed that it had dispatched officers to the congresswoman’s home after receiving an anonymous tip that someone had been shot at her address. Officers then received a subsequent call from a suspect who “explained that they were upset about Ms. Greene’s stance on ‘trans-gender youth’s rights’, and stated that they were trying to ‘SWAT’ her,” per a police report of the incident.
Now, it’s worth mentioning here that Greene’s “swatting” claim is tempered slightly by the fact that police didn’t actually burst into her home using special weapons and tactics. According to their own police report obtained by CNBC, the officers on Wednesday simply rang Greene’s front doorbell, then Greene answered the door and “assured us there was no issue.” Officers did enter Greene’s home and do a check, a department spokesperson told CNBC. The congresswoman later claimed she had a “gut instinct” not to bring her own firearm with her while answering the door, adding that was “very out of norm for me.”
The police report from the Thursday incident detailed a similar response. As of Thursday morning, no arrests have been made in connection with either call. The Capitol Police Department is also investigating the calls. A spokesperson for Greene told CNBC the congresswoman’s “safety is our number one concern,” adding that she was a “victim of a political attack on her family and home.”
It bears asking whether things would have ended differently had Greene not been a white, female member of Congress with a gun on site. All told, I suspect Greene will likely be just fine in the long run — she doesn’t seem to be in any acute danger, and may even parlay the events of the past two days into more political fodder for her ongoing effort to demonize transgender children and transform the GOP into “Christian nationalists” (her words).
