Tim Pool Swatted Live in Studio While Streaming Timcast IRL Show
L_Hall91 | Jan 6, 2022 |
Tim Pool, host of Timcast IRL, was shocked to see police walking around his studio while recording a live show.
He was told by police that they had received a call saying “two people had been shot and killed and that the gunman was threatening to hurt themselves.”
Someone called Police and said they shot and killed two people and were going to kill more
Police were told not to enter without a warrant but said they didn't need one due to exigent circumstances.
This is a large house used as a production studio with many employees on site https://t.co/VDveCal4TE
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) January 7, 2022
The incident occurred as co-host Luke Rudkowski was speaking about historical pandemics when he looked up and saw police walking around the studio. After an abrupt stop in the show, guest Brandon Tatum from The Officer Tatum YouTube channel asked, “Did somebody swat you?” Producer Lydia Smith then responded, “Yep, somebody swatted us.” Tim asked, “How do you know,” and Lydia replied, “I have somebody texting me.”
At this point, Tim leaves the studio to talk to the officers as Rudkowski highlights how dangerous the situation could be: “That’s something that’s extremely dangerous, extremely reckless, because swat incidences have led to a lot of innocent people dying.”
When Tim re-enters the room, he says, “We’ve been swatted. I am extremely unhappy with this.” After he explains the call that led to the swatting, he says, “They didn’t send a SWAT team; it was just a couple of officers.”
Giving his first-hand knowledge of policing, Brandon Tatum told the Timcast crew, “If the police do a swatting call, right, and it’s found to be illegitimate, any evidence that they think they may have is suppressed, because this was an illegitimate entry into a house. You can enter under exigent circumstances, but if it’s an illegitimate exigent circumstance, there’s no searching for evidence and different things like that.”
The nature of the call was believed to be an exigent circumstance at the time, as it was a potential double homicide. Brandon Tatum then describes exigent circumstances as “meaning that it’s a circumstance in which you have to do it in a hurry; it’s a right-now thing. That means that, right now, I have to act; it’s an emergency.” This explains why police who were at the scene had no issue in entering the studio searching for evidence of what they believed to be a high-level threat, as the call they received involved a potential double homicide.
As Tim was reeling about how the police just barged in and walked around the studio while they were live, Brandon Tatum, speaking from a police perspective, also said, “As a cop, I see how you can’t just not do anything.” These officers just received a potentially dangerous callout, and Tatum makes the argument that they had to respond to the call for the safety of others.
Tim Pool then posted some more information on his Twitter account, claiming multiple departments/jurisdictions were involved.
It looks like Maybe 8 vehicles, multiple departments/jurisdictions involved
The security footage shows this may have been worse than we realized.
Fortunately our CTO was outside as they drove up and deescalated the situation https://t.co/VDveCal4TE
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) January 7, 2022
He also posted an image of security camera footage showing police outside the studio compound.
Cops got call at 8:20pm, arrived 8:27pm
Security camera footage time isn't adjusted for daylight savings
At least 8 vehicles, several different jurisdictions
If it wasn't for our CTO going outside and calming things down it would have been bad pic.twitter.com/0P8RJzYPD1
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) January 7, 2022
You can check out the moment police arrived in the video below:
Comments (1)
Signed up just to comment on this. For a little background, I’m a LE vet of 23 years; patrol, vice, SWAT.
The 4th Amendment requires that the government/Police need a warrant based on probable cause prior to searching a person or their property, but there are several exceptions to that requirement. I wont belabor you with all of them but the one involved here is exigency. Getting a warrant takes time and if something is happening that requires immediate action the Police are not expected to let people possibly get hurt or die while waiting for a warrant.
I have to correct Mr Tatum somewhat. As long as the Police had exigency, any evidence in plain view not associated with the call would certainly be valid. As long as that evidence was found while performing actions associated with the original call. In this example police would be looking for dead or wounded people, a gunman, etc. If they see a kilo of Heroin on a kitchen table that would certainly be admitted because you cant check the kitchen for a body and NOT see that kilo. If they searched the toilet tank and found it taped to the lid that would NOT be admissible because you are not going to find a body or active shooter in there…hope that makes sense.
Some people seem to think that because the responding officers seemed to think this was a likely SWATing that exigency didn’t exist. Thats not the case, police cannot just brush off a call like that on an assumption.
If they had actually used a SWAT Team, or kicked in the door and cleared the place at gunpoint while thinking it was actually a SWATing all along? Yeah, that would be unreasonable. The way the officers handled this was perfectly reasonable and legal IMO. We certainly wouldnt want a situation where people were actually killed/threatened and have the police just assume it was a prank and not follow up appropriately.
The person who called this in certainly broke the law, but with VIOP and number spoofing and all the other ways to place anonymous calls it’s very difficult to ID the callers.