Couple was swatted 55 times in 2 years over a post about Norm Macdonald
A Milwaukee couple was awarded a $575,000 settlement by the city after armed police responded to their home 55 times in two years due to hoax crime reports. The harassment, known as swatting, began after the husband posted a negative opinion about comedian Norm Macdonald on social media. Despite internal police awareness of the pattern, no officers were disciplined, and the city has not changed its policies regarding such incidents.
- ▪Patrick Tomlinson and Niki Robinson received a $575,000 US settlement from the City of Milwaukee for repeated swatting incidents.
- ▪The couple was targeted 55 times over two and a half years following a 2018 social media post criticizing comedian Norm Macdonald.
- ▪Internal police memos indicated that officers were aware the home was a target for swatting, but the captain declined to mark it as such to avoid complacency.
- ▪The couple's lawyer stated that no officers were disciplined and no policy changes were implemented by the city despite the settlement.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 2,573 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | CBC |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/milwaukee-swatting-couple-9.7370118 |
| Publication time | Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:42:24 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-07T02:24:25.465Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-07T02:24:25.465Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | rY5tiWjVfBMA · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
As It HappensThis couple was swatted 55 times in 2 years over a post about Norm MacdonaldA Milwaukee couple was awarded a $575,000 US settlement from the city after armed police officers showed up at their homes 55 times in two years responding to bogus reports of violent crimes.Patrick Tomlinson and Niki Robinson awarded $575K US settlement from City of MilwaukeeSheena Goodyear · CBC Radio · Posted: Oct 05, 2026 6:15 PM EDT | Last Updated: October 5PlayListen to this articleEstimated 5 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at CBC.