In other news, I got accidentally swatted a few weeks ago. Some crackhead from a Section 8 a couple of houses down called 911 from in front of my house saying he “took a shot in the jaw” from his roommate. Dispatcher interpreted it as “someone got shot in the jaw”, geolocated his phone in front of my house and sent the LVMPD helicopter and a dozen units code 3.
I was just leaving the dog park while all this went down about 10 minutes from the house. My housemate was working from home and texted me saying “dude, there’s a helicopter above the house and it’s shining its light down on our house”. I kinda brushed it off thinking “it’s probably the crackhead neighbors again”. Drove into the neighborhood and found squad cars blocking both entrances into my street. I was about to park and talk to my other neighbors who were also stuck when they moved the squad cars so I figured everything was good so I drove in and backed into my driveway.
At this point there’s still like a dozen squad cars and cops on the street in front of my house but I saw they had the crackhead neighbor in handcuffs. Went to reach up to open my garage door when I see two cops walking up to me with their handguns drawn and not looking happy. They told me to get out, hands above my head, the whole bit, disarmed and cufffed me. I’m so confused at this point.
Apparently seconds after my housemate texted me, they had about 8 cops stacked up on our front door and backyard, the helicopter above, and a cop on the bullhorn yelling “residents of 123 Fictitious St, come out with your hands up”. Of course my roommate coms out, they took him into custody. Then the crackhead neighbor who initiated this whole thing walks up to everybody and also gets handcuffed. Then they searched our house looking for the gunshot victim and unfortunately searched my side of the house where I had two of my 2-stampers out of the safe (the Kuna and the 5.7 SBR) because I had just gotten the Form 1s in and was working on them. I don’t usually secure all my guns in the safe when my housemate is home. Needless to say they had concerns, and I can tell the Kuna was moved from its previous location (somebody was admiring).
So they had me in cuffs in front of the house, doing the whole background thing, checking my CCW. My housemate was also in cuffs about 3 houses down so I didn’t see him. They were asking me what side of the house I lived in which I thought was a weird question until I remembered my guns were out. One of the cops who searched my room was also an Army vet and we got to bullshitting about our Infantry days. Took them about 5 minutes to clear the whole mess up and uncuff me and my housemate. They moved a couple houses down and repeated the whole “residents of 345 Fictitious St, come out with your hands up!” rigamarole.
The basic gist of it was that the Section 8 (who’s always had issues with their residents and always has police/fire/ems in front of that house a few times a month) had two residents brawling over (presumably) drugs. The crackhead who got the worst of it called the cops as he was walking away, which put his GPS ping in front of my house, which kicked this whole thing off. Had to explain the whole thing to my neighbors in the next couple of days, which was no biggie since everybody knows about the crackhead house and everybody knows me as the guy who helped out the neighbors during their home invasion incident.