Swatting of prosecutors

How this plays out for prosecutors

Prosecutor swatting follows a clean pattern. You charge someone. They — or someone in their network — pull your home address from a broker page. They call in a fake high-priority emergency. SWAT shows up at your house.

DAs in high-profile cases catch this most. AUSAs working organized crime, gang prosecutions, or politically charged cases catch it too. The trigger is usually a charging decision, a verdict, or sentencing. Sometimes it's nothing more than your name in a press release.

What's at stake

Your family inside the house when the entry happens. The responding officers, who don't know the call is fake. People have died in swatting incidents — Andrew Finch in Wichita in 2017 had no connection to the dispute that got him killed. See the Wichita case.

For prosecutors, the second risk is family targeting. A defendant's network that can't reach you directly will sometimes go for the spouse's workplace or the kids' school instead.

What to do right now

If you've been swatted in the last 72 hours, see the swatting recovery checklist. Follow the active-swatting-threat playbook for the time-bucketed steps if a charging decision or verdict is generating credible threats now.

If you're a NJ prosecutor: Daniel's Law — a state statute that lets covered prosecutors, judges, and officers sue brokers that don't remove their home address — explicitly covers active and retired prosecutors and their immediate household. We file those demands. If you're federal: the Lieu Act covers federal judges but not AUSAs — your protection runs through the broker opt-out path. Run a free scan to see your current exposure.

How we handle it

We work the broker side continuously — same cadence, same coverage. The household runs through the same removal queue: spouse, parents, adult kids if they live with you. For NJ prosecutors, Daniel's Law demands across the household.

If your office wants to cover the full prosecutor roster, reach out.