Swatting of officer families
For spouses, kids, parents. The call goes to your kid's school or your spouse's work — found through your broker page.
Run a free scan. No signup.How this plays out for officer families
Family swatting routes through you. The fake call is placed not to your address but to a relative's. Your parents' house. Your spouse's workplace. Your kid's school. The swatter found these locations through the broker linkage that connects you to your family.
A single Spokeo or TruePeopleSearch page lists you, your spouse, your parents, sometimes adult siblings. Search any of them and the addresses come back. The swatter has options — and an adversary who can't reach you directly will sometimes maximize harm by reaching for the people around you.
What's at stake
Your kid's school in lockdown. Your parents waking up to officers at the door. Your spouse's workplace evacuated. The harm spreads across people who didn't take the job — they're exposed because of you, often without knowing it.
People have died in swatting incidents. Andrew Finch in Wichita in 2017 — see the Wichita case. Mark Herring in Tennessee in 2020 — see the Herring case. The mechanics don't care whether the target is you or a family member.
What to do right now
If a family member has been swatted in the last 72 hours, see the swatting recovery checklist for the action checklist. Walk the swat-team-just-came playbook with them for the post-incident steps — first hour through this week.
Otherwise: run a free scan for yourself and walk through the results with your spouse. Talk to your kids' school about flagging unfamiliar callers and pickups. Tell your parents not to engage with unknown contacts on social. The broker pages link you all — closing yours and leaving theirs open just shifts the target.
How we handle it
We sweep the family the same way we sweep you. Standard opt-outs across broker sites for every household member, plus adult relatives where they request coverage. Re-checked every two weeks.
For NJ officers who are covered persons, Daniel's Law also covers immediate family members residing in the same household. We file across the household. For federal judges, the Lieu Act covers immediate family the same way. For everyone else, we run the broker cleanup continuously across the household.