In this case, it seems obvious that the police should have to pay if the accessing of a device from a given IP should be enough to escalate a search warrant to that of a destructive one.
How did they make the trace? Is it possible the suspect was using a VPN? How did they verify they were never actually at that address? Has this police department executive destructive search warrants based on IP address traces that ended up being incorrect, and then they continued doing so knowing it can likely be inaccurate?
This is something your insurance should be required to cover or should be part of a standard homeowners insurance package, and the insurance company can sue the government and try to get those questions answered from the city.
The attempt to blame this on excessive policing in a broad stroke seems to be the wrong angle that doesn’t address the nuance of these situations.
Do they ever? Even if they were guilty, wouldn’t it be on taxpayers to pay?
If it is so, then any investigation about potential wrongdoing should be separate from reimbursing the victim - they suffered damage by a public entity without personal fault, and that should be covered whether protocol was followed or not.
That way, there is no public economic incentive to declare police innocent, which is an extra plus.
The incentive issue of police mishaps being paid from taxpayer funds is entirely independent.
> any investigation about potential wrongdoing should be separate from reimbursing the victim
I explicitly stated that insurance should reimburse the victim and then the insurance company can pursue damages for police wrongdoing after.
I meant public funds, regardless of insurance. As in, if you (or the insurer) need to pursue damages then state payment is tied to wrongdoing. My point was that if public action results in a loss it should be reimbursed period.
A citizen doesn’t care (only) that protocol was followed, they care about a broken house either way.
Then the city would have to charge the taxpayer. It's more fair to just revoke police personal immunity and have the incurence company sue the individual police officers involved. This way the police will be incentivized to not wreck people's homes, no?
An individual citizen should not be bringing these complex issues to court for a $16k payout. Obviously their insurance companies should be covering victim compensation and then suing the city.
It makes perfectly good sense when the police are right, but when an innocent gets caught up in it compensation should be due.
I don’t really understand how any of these outcomes can be the result of anything except excessive policing. What kind of crimes warrants police turning up with enough fire power to destroy an entire building?
In the case of a search warrant, what was wrong with just knocking on the door and looking around inside?
For a criminal barricaded in a building, what wrong with surrounding the building and waiting them out? They’re gonna need food, water, sleep eventually.
If there isn’t a clear immediate risk to life, what’s the justification for turning someone home or business into a war zone?
Not all of which the government should be responsible for paying out.
On the contrary, if the government was always on the hook for the damage they cause, even if the victim had committed a crime, then police would cause less property damage.
Often the claim is that would give time to alter or destroy evidence.
No. Most people are distracted by qualified immunity, but this is exactly where the rot starts - poor incentives from damaged caused by "government agents" just being waved away as if it is nobody's fault, like it was some kind of natural disaster.
The primary reform we need here is that any damage caused by government agents should start off being the responsibility of the government itself. If the government wants to shift that liability (eg your stuff was damaged because you committed a crime and were found guilty, or as part of a plea), that's fine. If the government successfully subrogates (you were hit by a cop during a high speed chase, so the government and the criminal that necessitated the high speed chase are jointly liable, and the criminal's insurance company has paid out), that's fine. But the basic default should be one of making the victims of policing whole. To do otherwise is to fail to account for the full cost of policing, taking the extra from its victims in a perverted reverse-lottery.
My point is that it makes far more sense to have insurance lawyers deal with this. It’s a much better way of aligning incentives to have large insurance companies pressure the government to operate better than individuals.
This article references an earlier event where a $500k house was destroyed - one and a half orders of magnitude larger - with the same legal outcome.
Is it that hard to believe that the state has excepted itself (and its agents) from legal liability?
But I would apply this to all such victims. You spend a night in jail and are not convicted, you are owed some statutory compensation which I think should at a minimum be your annual earned income/365.
Call me crazy, but committing a crime doesn't mean you potentially forfeit everything you own, implicitly.
I already included how I propose this is handled - explicit law outlining that the liability falls to someone convicted of a crime.
> or the person who was convicted had ongoing permission to access whatever is involved
I don't see why this needs to be an exception, and also if it was an exception why it wouldn't just form another avenue of unaccountable abuse (eg imagine roommates. Let's say the police bust up a whole apartment for fun - the innocent roommates really should be getting compensated for that (they're innocent, remember?), and if that damage was necessary to effect the arrest/search, the govt can then recover from the criminal.
Seems like they could have used some mm-wave radar, or other means to sense whether or not somebody was inside, before destroying somebody else's house.
Setting aside politics here...
Was the IP address recycled? I used to see this all the time with my old home providers but much less often now. However I go through about 40 IP addresses a week on my mobile data.
Insurance company should do that.
> As a reminder, Hadley urges us to hold that: “innocent homeowner[s] with no connection to the sought-after sus- pect[,] whose property the [government] intentionally and se- verely damage[s] through a military-style assault … to exe- cute a warrant to apprehend [a] suspect … when the property otherwise would not have been damaged” are owed compen- sation.
> Mindful of our decisions’ precedential effect on future cases, we have concerns about the administrability of Had- ley’s proposed holding. It raises difficult questions, not least of which is, how does one determine innocence? For example, must an ancillary criminal proceeding conclude to show in- nocence before proceeding with a takings claim? Does having “no connection” with a suspect—as Hadley asserted herself— render the landowner “innocent”?
Like come on, this seems like a nonsensical rebuttal. We know she was innocent and that the police wrongfully raided the wrong home. Our court system is supposed to be built on the presumption of innocent until proven guilty. The judge argued that she should've instead brought a case against the police to try and surmount the qualified immunity defense but they're just kicking the ball down another losing court decision.
voidfunc•3mo ago
We've completely lost the plot with our courts "strict" interpretation of laws.
hn_throwaway_99•3mo ago
People can only be fucked over so much before they start to consider that the whole system is corrupt, including the courts. The only reason this hasn't been decided the other way is that it affects relatively few individuals, so it's not a rallying cry for most people.