Congressional firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene has reported that she was swatted by police at her Rome, Georgia home at 1am on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.
“Swatting” is commonly defined as “the action of making a false report of a serious emergency so that a SWAT team (= a group of officers trained to deal with dangerous situations) will go to a person’s home, by someone who wants to frighten, upset, or cause problems for that person”. The act usually involves heavily armed police.
In 2015, Princeton New Jersey Police Chief Nick Sutter said of swatting: “To me, this fits the definition of terrorism. This isn’t a bomb threat that a child calls in.” He called it a national epidemic.
The act of “swatting” has been applied to a number of anti-establishment figures in recent months, with former Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon being swatted at his Capitol Hill townhouse, and YouTuber Tim Pool experiencing the same several times over in the past year, sometimes while live on air.
“Last night, I was swatted just after 1 am. I can’t express enough gratitude to my local law enforcement here in Rome, Floyd County. More details to come,” Taylor Greene wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning.
Kevin Kolbye, a former FBI swatting expert, told The Economist that annual swatting incidents have climbed from roughly 400 in 2011 to more than 1,000 in 2019.
Greene – a combative, right wing lawmaker – has been the target of Democrat and establishment Republican attacks since she entered Congress in 2020.
