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.
Another thought that just crossed my mind, for the most part, there’s already laws in place about false police reports, misuse of 911, etc. that this kind of thing could fall under. It’s probably a better use of legislative time and resources to improve the issues with how the police respond to these calls, and to make sure that the existing laws can be enforced fairly and efficiently than to try to introduce a new law that covers a pretty narrow set of circumstances that’s not even particularly common.
If we wanted to introduce new laws specifically to address this, I’d probably want tighter regulations on the VoIP apps, cellular providers, etc. to make it easier for us to identify who’s calling (although as someone who does value my privacy and mostly prefers anonymity when possible, I’m hesitant at best to actually support that kind of measure.)
I’ve worked here for almost 6 years, we’ve probably had about as many swatting calls (somewhat more if you count repeated calls to the same address, but after the first one we usually add a caution note to the address so that everyone from the calltakers to the officers responding are aware that it could be a false call) It’s not exactly the biggest issue we face. I’d personally prefer to see something done, maybe some kind of mental health reform, so we can actually do something about the 2 or 3 repeat callers I’ve probably spoken to, without exaggeration, almost 100 times each over the last month or so. They’re hallucinating or having delusions or something along those lines, so in their minds they’re reporting an actual emergency making it difficult to make false report or misuse of 911 charges stick because their intent factors into those charges, and they also don’t really present a danger to themselves or others, so we can’t really get them committed either, and on top of that, even if it were possible to use the current laws, no one really wants to deal with the necessary paperwork and court dates and such to pursue those kinds of things, in the grand scheme they’re still a fairly minor nuisance and we all have things we’d rather be doing than that, work-related or not.
Also general public education, and other kinds of conflict resolution solutions, or other sort of social programs (some of which fall under the defend the police banner) could go a long way. We get a lot of calls for things that are in no way shape or form police issues, and a lot of situations that probably could have been headed off before they became police issues if people had access to other sorts of of counseling, mediators, and safety nets to fall back on. If people had access to better ways to manage and express their anger at someone and to address whatever issues there may be, maybe they wouldn’t try to escalate things to SWATing. Maybe a guidance counselor took note of your anger issues in school and helped you learn to handle those feelings before you decided to SWAT the guy who beat you in fortnight (or whatever the big multiplayer game is these days, I’m out of the loop on that.) Maybe if we had UBI it wouldn’t be such a big deal that your ex kicked you out of their house and you wouldn’t feel a need to start a years-long vendetta against them. Or maybe if there was an easier way to get some sort of third party involved in your dispute to act as a mediator/arbiter, you wouldn’t have as much animosity towards the person you have beef with. Lots of other potential avenues to investigate to prevent these things from happening in the first place instead of trying to deal with them after the fact.