Good Stuff Strand Cam ends after 25 years, ‘swatting’ to blame
By Laura Garber
by Laura Garber
For over 25 years Good Stuff restaurant in Hermosa Beach has livestreamed a block of The Strand capturing the daily musings of passing tourists, bikers and 13th street volleyball players to online audiences worldwide.
Last week, the Good Stuff Strand Cam was taken down as a safety precaution, according to Cris Bennet, the restaurant’s owner.
“[Anonymous callers] will call the police, and they’ll say, ‘There’s a guy down there in Hermosa, on 13th Street, that has a black backpack, a blue shirt and they’re carrying a bomb,’” Bennet said.
Hermosa Beach Police Sergeant and Public Information Officer Keaton Dadigan said a trend called ‘swatting’ has sprung up nationwide and most recently in Hermosa Beach. Swatting is a criminal hoax where someone places a fake 911 call to lead law enforcement into sending a tactical team to an unsuspecting person’s home or business.
“It usually happens where there’s live cameras and people are taking advantage of this live camera and the 911 service in general, and essentially making false reports to 911 in order to get a reaction out of the police, film it and try to put it online,” Sergeant Dadigan said.
Threats were called into HBPD claiming bombs had been planted near the restaurant, once on Tuesday, July 7 when police evacuated surrounding areas including the 99-room Beach House hotel. Gardena police with bomb sniffing K9s aided in a search of the beach and nearby businesses, finding no threat.
When threats were made a second time on Sunday, August 30, HBPD asked Bennet to cover his livestream camera. HBPD evacuated staff and patrons at Good Stuff restaurant at 1 p.m. on Sunday and Bennet chose to remain closed the rest of the day, losing thousands of dollars in business. HBPD is still investigating the incident.
“[HBPD] were pretty frustrated and they asked if we could keep the camera down,” Bennet said. “I probably will never get it back up to be honest. It’s not worth getting closed down on a weekend day.”
During BeachLife Festival’s third day on Sunday, May 3, a fake bomb threat postponed festivities in Redondo Beach until the threat was cleared by police.
Though national records tracking annual ‘swatting’ calls remain uncollected, the Anti-Defamation League estimated more than 1,000 occurrences during 2019, costing communities upward of $10,000 for every incident.
“We learned that it probably came from a livestream camera, because what we started to do is, cover up the cameras when we’d go to the calls, and the person would be angry on the phone and then hang up. So that’s how we pinpointed it to them targeting livestream cameras,” Dadigan said. “We know they want a reaction, so we’re not going to give that to them. We’re going to cover cameras, we’re going to find ways to not let them get their footage.”
Bennet says that the camera angle from Good Stuff focusing on pedestrians created more opportunities for criminals to make false accusations.
“HG Grill has the surf cam, but we are the people cam, so they’ve been targeting us,” he said.
Although a series of fraudulent reports triggered multiple evacuations in recent months, HBPD treats each call seriously.
“We treat them very delicately because we’ve got to treat every situation as if it’s actually happening and serious, but we also don’t want to create panic from the public,” Dadigan said.
Dadigan says that the police staff in Hermosa Beach isn’t enough to respond to threats of this nature, so HBPD calls for additional assistance from El Segundo, Redondo Beach and other neighboring agencies.
“It takes a lot of staff, a lot of resources from multiple departments,” he said.
The threats may not come locally, Dadigan added, saying technology allows swatting calls to be made from anywhere in the country.
“But there are ways for us to figure out who they are, and we will take appropriate criminal action against the person,” Dadigan said. “They think just because they’re behind the computer, they are anonymous, but when it becomes a crime, there’s ways for us to write search warrants or find IP addresses. There’s all kinds of ways that our detectives can figure out who these people are.”
“It makes me sad, because we were one of the first to have a camera up on the web,” Bennett said. “It’s too bad that it’s been abused and people get their kicks by causing havoc like this.“I’m hoping that we can get it back, but there’s always in the back of my mind that, gosh, if I do, [the threats] are probably going to come back again and I have to do an evacuation. I can’t afford it.” ER
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