Police blow up innocent man's home. No recompense, court rules
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The homeowner deserves to be made whole and I think that should be the police departments responsibility, in order to encourage alternative approaches when possible.
Recall an NYT article[1] on the topic.
It describes how police chiefs will make a spectacle out of their newly purchased tanks or whatever, even bringing them to schools for kids to check out.
Best quote was from a police chief who hadn't been swept up in the mania for military gear and vehicles:
“I go to schools,” he said. “But I bring ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’”
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-poli...
I mean, does getting away with one belt and one shirt sound like something someone drew a gun to do? That's some comically bad armed robbery if so.
No the use of force was in response to the guy opening fire on the police.
The guy involved led the police on a high-speed carchase, and fired his gun at them from the garage of the home when they arrived. He definitely posed a threat, both to police and innocent people around him (from the car chase, etc)
As it was, the siege took 19 hours. It could easily have taken days or weeks to starve him out if the family had emergency rations stocked up (i.e. winter power blackouts, etc). How many police officers would have to have camped out to make sure he didn't escape? What would that do to people who might otherwise have needed those police officers elsewhere in the city?
To be clear, I don't know that I find any of those arguments convincing or sufficient justification. He had homeowner's insurance, and the city offered to cover the deductible and provide rental assistance. Nothing will be enough to make up for irreplaceable items, trauma or time lost. Hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment, would it really have been the right call to tie up the police and SWAT for a week or more when they might be needed elsewhere?
Both 2nd amendment activists and anti-gun people make the same mistake here: the physical presence of a gun changes everything. Guns favor the offense, not the defense.
The solution is always the same: if the opponent has a weapon, you bring bigger weapons to subjugate them. APCs will allow you to move forward without risk of getting shot at, while heavy weapons like grenades and rocket-launchers destroy the cover and concealment of the defender.
The first step is recognizing the root of the problem. The handgun. Remove the gun, and the heavy-weapons wouldn't have been necessary. But as long as the general citizenry has access to firearms, it is necessary to give bigger and better weapons to law enforcement.
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Consider this: how would YOU form a perimeter around the house safely and effectively? An APC is the natural weapon: thick plate to provide immunity to small-weapons like handguns. If the local police only has one APC however, that's not enough to form an effective perimeter: you can only cover one side of the house.
So you put men around the house, and hope that they don't get shot. And those men remain at risk throughout the duration of the siege. Thick body-armor doesn't protect the head, and it still gets hurt to get shot at.
It's almost like police officers signed up for a career that puts them at risk. They need to accept this risk and act like more civil servants than bullies with dangerous toys. There also needs to be more focus on deescalation than "fuck it let's just bomb him" which would also make officers much more safe.
That's how you lose Police Officers. Workers prefer to work in safer jobs, and are even willing to take pay-cuts to work in a safer area.
A US-police department is in constant competition with rival cities for the same pool of applicants. If your local police department gets a reputation of not backing its officers, your officers will LEAVE to other cities. Period.
There's a reason why all cities back their Police Departments with as much support as possible. Its a necessary part of attracting the best candidates. Some Police Officers have degrees in criminal law theory, college-educated. Other police officers are just high-school graduates with some muscle.
When police departments struggle, they lose the higher-quality officers to their local rivals. Which means either fewer officers, or being forced to hire low-quality officers.
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The fundamental issue here is that Police Departments are too small, making the politics of "local rivals" a toxic culture. Police departments need to be forced to merge together and cover larger areas.
A nation-wide police force would probably be too big, but we can start by eradicating all town-level police forces (less than 20,000 citizens) and merging them into a larger regional area. As long as there are Police Departments that only protect $1-Million homes (where virtually no crimes are committed), you'll have the quality Police Officers leaving the dangerous areas where they're needed (ie: typical inner cities) and working to move towards the richer areas.
You gotta fix the fundamental politics: the underlying driver of the culture.
Police officer isn't a bad choice, then. It does not even break into the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America.
Police officer in an area with $1 Million homes in gated communities is even better.
If you're a college-educated, high-quality Police Officer, there's basically no reason to work in the inner-city Ghettos. There's always a suburbia which is safer, quieter, and simpler to work at.
If you can't work in rich-suburbia, then working in those cities with military-grade weapons is still better than inner-city ghettos.
The FBI tracks Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA)[1]. There are around 540,000 police officers in the US, and about 58,000 recorded assault. Now, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Some of those assaults are undoubtedly some Kelly Thomas type BS where the cops beat the crap out of a guy and got blood on their uniforms and counted it as assault. There are also likely assaults that don't get listed/reported. E.g. a man who just murdered someone is running from the cops, car chase ensues. 10+ cop cars behind the suspect, who starts shooting at officers. This did not get recorded as 10 assaults, though 10 cops were shot at.
Also keep in mind that these statistics are of all reporting agencies. Every Mayberry town with 100 citizens, 1 sheriff, and 1 deputy. Every command staff and supervisor who are effectively just managers with a badge. The cops who do entirely admin work and don't wear their vest anymore. The High Tech Crimes guys who don't respond to calls, but do computer forensic analysis in pedophile cases. These are all less likely to be assaulted than the cop doing a solo patrol, responding to calls.
_____ [1]1https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka
There are different grades of Police Officers. You want the college-educated, criminal law graduates in your city. That's how you get fair-cops. This pool is smaller than you'd expect.
There are PLENTY of high-school thugs who want to be Police Officers. But its very short-sighted to base your police force primarily on that pool of applicants.
> If we need higher compensation to adjust for not having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy then I'm fine with that.
Its not just compensation. Its perceived safety, and other issues. A college-educated cop might be willing to take $50,000 / year if they only have to patrol safe neighborhoods in suburbia, but the same cop will need to be paid $70,000+ to patrol a dangerous ghetto (which happens to be the areas which most need a fair, well-educated officer).
Bonus points: safe neighborhoods in suburbia also want officers to patrol their gated communities. "Rent a cop" services provide ample opportunity for overtime with very low risk. The ghettos simply don't have the money to offer this opportunity.
That's why I'm saying that there are too many small police departments out in Suburbia: taking away the good officers from the areas that truly need them.
That's called sensitivity training and its widely deployed in the richer areas... but poorly deployed in poor police departments.
Sensitivity training, Diversity training, De-escalation training, etc. etc. Police departments know about this style of training and have names for these programs. It costs money though, money that not all Police Departments have.
If you think your local Police don't have enough sensitivity training (or whatever), either talk to your local Mayor, or local Sheriff, or police commissioner, or board (every town's political structure is different), and try to push more of it. There's probably budgetary constraints involved, but I don't think anyone's really against the idea of good training for their local cops.
Firearms favor defense, hence the standoff between one guy and many police. The solution is not to elevate the stakes of standoffs with bigger weapons, nor is it to make police more armed than the citizenry. In fact, that misguided approach of arming police with bigger weapons is a root cause of this incident.
The whole situation started with basic theft and kept escalating, which is an explicit choice of each party. At any time, the police could have simply broken it off and tracked him down later. But instead they chose to play heroes with their toys, and somehow managed to get indemnified for it.
You'll let a criminal go free because he forced a high-speed chase, and took shots at an officer with a handgun? Take a guess what the local criminals will do if that hits the news.
That's WHY criminals enter high speed chases: because they know that officers sometimes let them go at that point. You have to continue pursuit if the criminal escalates, or else the other criminals will change their strategy.
You realize that most shoplifting suspects are never caught, right? Some stats suggest a 2% chance of actually catching a shoplifter after the crime. Letting them go at this point means 98% chance that they'll get away.
For the officer: keeping up the police chase is your best bet. You keep chasing until the Helicopter comes in, and then the Helicopter can follow the car no matter where it goes.
This is why criminals force a high-speed chase, because they can (and often do) get away with it (as long as they disappear before the Helicopter arrives). The mistake for the criminal here was shooting at the Police Officer, which enrages officers to a severe degree. Once you apply lethal force to officers, they'll chase you down basically forever.
But sure, let a few more incidents of shoplifting escape justice because the perp manages to get away. It would take an awful lot of shoplifting to rise to the level of harm of blowing up a house, or (in other incidents) killing innocent bystanders in a high speed chase.
Either way, municipalities and police departments aren't even able to properly weigh those options if they can simply escape responsibility for the damage caused by their choice. Instead, shirking any potential harm pushes them into that same must-act mindset that you're arguing from.
Society is not going to fall apart from a little more shoplifting, but it will fall apart when people see the police as a source of chaos and injustice.
The offenses in this case started with shoplifting, but then quickly turned into running from a police officer, a high-speed chase, as well as firing a handgun towards chasing officers.
Are you saying that:
1. Police shouldn't have pursued the shoplifter?
2. Police shouldn't have engaged in a high-speed chase?
3. Police shouldn't have further escalated after taking gunfire?
At what point did the Police go wrong, in your opinion?
I have already stated my general judgement for when the police went wrong - escalating into causing some serious public safety hazards.
You keep trying to drag the conversation into a simplistic paradigm where the heroes can always do something more to win, with its corresponding blindspot to all the resulting destruction. Watching a movie, nobody really cares when some extras die. But in reality the entire mandate of the police is to protect the extras.
The high-speed chase already appears to meet your criterion. So are you suggesting, that the Police should have not escalated and pursued the high-speed shoplifter?
Escalating to a high-speed pursuit innately increases the risk: the police may crash into innocent civilians. The criminal may crash into innocents. Etc. etc.
So that's why I'm asking: what is the correct decision, in your opinion, when a criminal floors it and reaches 90 mph in an attempt to evade officers? Should the officers just let them go?
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If the pursuit was "morally correct" by your judgement, then the next point of escalation was when the criminal started to shoot his handgun at the Police. Should the Police stand-down now that gunfire is involved? Stray bullets have a high chance of harming innocent civilians (even if the criminal isn't intending to kill someone, the risk remains).
Should the officers let the criminal go at this point?
Etc. etc. There's a series of decisions here which make up the story. I'm trying to figure out how your point of view lines up to the reality of the case.
We all can agree that deescalation should be prioritized. But we have a realistic case here. How would you have de-escalated the situation? Furthermore, we have the benefit of analyzing this from the safety of our desks, with all known information. So surely you can come up with a better decision with careful analysis, compared to an Officer who has to make a decision on the spot.
They've got a suspect description, car description, and license plate. There is no reason to believe the car is stolen, so there is a registered address. There is likely a helicopter on the way, and ANPR cameras will flag the plate. It was a property crime. Yes they should let the perp speed away and catch up with them later, rather than using the situation as an excuse to engage in their own sanctioned criminality.
If you call any police station and ask this question in terms of say a hit and run collision and whether you should pursue, they will give you a similar answer.
I've pulled the affidavit for the case, so that we can go through these details with more accuracy.
https://www.greenwoodvillage.com/DocumentCenter/View/13916/A...
The timeline of events:
1. Shoplifting at 1:22pm.
2. Abandoned his Lexus (with temporary tags)
3. Ran around town... jumping a fence, ran across a highway, attempted hitchhiking, eventually entering a private home.
4. Police eventually caught up, blocked the garage with their vehicles, and the siege started. The time was 1:54 at this point.
Apologies for wasting your time with unnecessary hypotheticals, but its important to stick with what happened. The car was already abandoned, the Police caught up because the people's home was invaded by the shoplifter.
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> They've got a suspect description, car description, and license plate. There is no reason to believe the car is stolen, so there is a registered address.
With regards to this hypothetical: The car was registered to David Seidle. NOT Robert Jonathan Seacat. The car also had temporary tags. I don't know if Seidle was related to this case at all.
Under your hypothetical, Mr. Seacat would have gotten away, and Officers would have at best, gone to David Seidle's house.
Unlike in a military conflict where the combatants are actively trying to create casualties in enemy forces and all the horrors that entails, the police have a lot more things to consider. That's why in a high speed chase police tend to back off and track the suspect from the air rather than endanger the public more. However, by your logic if they knew the suspect had a handgun they would be justified in using a surplus drone or gunship to just destroy the vehicle with little regard to anything else.
Force escalation is not defensible for civilians, why on earth is it acceptable for the police?
My argument is a bit more subtle than that. The military surplus culture is IMO due to local-police departments trying to out-compete their local rivals.
If you're a Police Officer candidate, with a criminal law bachelors, aiming to join a Police department... which one do you pick?
* Dangerous area with military-grade weapons for officers?
* Dangerous area without military grade weapons for officers?
That's where the fundamental issue comes in. Police departments want to attract the best candidates, and the military surplus items provide an aura of protection, as well as assurances of a "Police-culture".
Assaulting the house seems to me many, many times more personally risky than hanging around a block away behind cover watching the house for a day or three.
edit: I'm not sympathizing with cops or trying to say the use of force here was justified (it wasn't). I'm just saying we need to make attempts to pursue (within reason)
I am not claiming the police should just give up once someone runs, but there is a cost/benefit ratio to these things, and endangering random people in a high-speed car chase to catch a shoplifter does not seem a good cost/benefit ratio.
It's also hardly the case that you can just "run and you're home free". There is CCTV, license plates, the guy can be caught next time he shoplifts, etc. etc. There is more than one way to catch criminals than this kind of brute force.
We tend to want to "help the homeless" rather than designing a system that reduces the incidence of homelessness. We get all bent out of shape about "justice" and "righteousness" for some detail, like a stolen shirt, completely missing the big picture.
America is a fairly religious country. That's probably related. We have this Puritan ethics thing going on, which is often about guilt and shame and being judgy rather than creating a civil environment.
We're a young country, founded by misfits who so couldn't make life work in Europe that a very dangerous move to a new land made sense to them. I think this still impacts the culture here, a la the biblical phrase about "the sins of the father...unto the fifth and sixth generation." But I usually get a lot of negative reactions when I try to talk about that. Other people seem to see no connection between the details of how America was founded and the culture it fosters.
One example is The American Dream: the idea that anyone can be rich if they just work hard enough, which also implies that being poor is a personal failure: you didn't work hard enough. What this misses is that in the end, you're still going to need people to pick up the garbage, and serve McDonalds, and so forth. turns out not all of society can be composed of lawyers, doctors, and computer programmers. Who knew?
There are many more examples, but I don't want to sideline this too much by various political issues.
I'm not entirely sure what the source of this is, or if it's recent or more rooted in history. It's just my observations of the US as an adult.
That doesn't really contradict what I said. Social misfits often do lack empathy. This is sometimes at least partly biologically based, but is frequently compounded by more "normal" types behaving monstrously towards them because they are different.
I've raised two special needs sons. They don't intuitively get a lot of social stuff. I've had to carefully explain many things.
But the reality is that a lot more social stuff is learned than most normal people want to admit. Needing to actively and intentionally teach it to some people who don't readily pick it up without instruction isn't as bizarre and alien as the world wants to pretend it is.
Plus, the lesser emphasis on empathy in America does have positives. Differently wired people tend to have a higher tolerance for things more empathetic people can't cope with. High empathy is not a good thing for being a soldier or a surgeon, both important roles in the world.
the idea that anyone can be rich if they just work hard enough
The origin of that idea is that we had escaped entrenched class structure in Europe. America was conceived of as the land of opportunity.
This was a positive thing, not a way to blame poor people for their poverty.
For a lot of people, that proved to be true for a long time. Those ideas aren't fundamentally broken, but some things have changed and we aren't coping so well with some of those changes.
I think we can resolve our problems. It's not hopeless.
I'm just not entirely sure how we get there from here.
> A lot more social stuff is learned than most normal people want to admit
People tend to have an innate ability to socialize with their immediate surroundings: family, friends, coworkers, and other people they personally know.
Beyond that, things are harder, and more learned. Fiction probably plays a very large role in this by the way.
> High empathy is not a good thing for being a soldier or a surgeon, both important roles in the world.
I'm actually not so sure about this; empathy isn't some sort of binary toggle, or uninfluenced by intellect; we have some control and choice over it. All other things being equal, a surgeon empathic to a patient's concerns (rather than indifferent) would make for a better surgeon, and a soldier highly empathic towards their fellow comrades would probably be a better soldier.
> The origin of that idea I that we had escaped entrenched class structure in Europe. America was conceived of as the land of opportunity. > >This was a positive thing, not a way to blame poor people for their poverty.
I appreciate that, but that was almost 250 years ago and things have changed rather a lot since then. Especially in modern context, "it's your fault if you're poor" seems to be a natural (though often unspoken) consequence of "you can be rich if you work hard enough".
> For a lot of people, that proved to be true for a long time. Those ideas aren't fundamentally broken, but we some things have changed and we aren't coping so well with some of those changes.
I think they are, because at the end of the day what a society needs if a fairly small group of people doing knowledge work, and a fairly large group of people facilitating that. One reason we can work as computer programmers is because other people do our food growing and construction and cleaning etc.
None of this is unique to the US, but in a lot of countries there seems to be more recognition of this in the form of worker protection, better social welfare, etc.
The industrial revolution changed that. We now need relatively few people growing our food.
At one time, you needed like twenty farmers for every non farm job to feed that non farmer. Thanks to modern technology, modern farmers provide food for many people per farmhand.
This frees people up to be teachers and scientists and any number of other things that are about developing new knowledge or preserving and passing on existing knowledge.
There is a long history of human cultures collapsing. Some of them collapsed when people no longer knew how to effectively maintain extensive irrigation systems that supported farms and helped keep the people fed.
If our current system collapsed, the sudden die off could be to the tune of billions of people.
There is no shortage of work that can be done. What needs to be done varies as cultures evolve.
There are endless people with problems too trivial to address in a subsistence culture that can be worked on by more advanced cultures that have freed up workers to do things more trivial than just try to come up with enough food to not die of starvation this year.
Sexual satisfaction.
Emotional contentment.
Good social relationships.
Health issues.
I think the problem with this is that not everyone is cut out to be a teacher or scientist, or other kind of knowledge worker.
I left school at 16 and before I worked as a computer programmer I worked various minimum wage jobs for about 10 years. Some of those people are suitable for knowledge work (like me), but the vast majority ... yeah nah. At the risk of sounding condescending, but I don't think they have the interest, aptitude, or both.
I mean, in principle I agree with your reply, but I think it will be a lot harder than it sounds.
In most departments now the officer is required to weigh the crime against the potential danger of the chase. Traffic infraction? Don't chase. Felony warrant: Chase?
Source: Family members that are in the CHP.
if your choices are "put everyone in the vicinity in massive immediate danger" and "let someone non dangerous escape" Id hope the need to make running itself a serious crime doesnt overrule the duty to the public's overall safety.
hell, there are no chase policies in washington DC among other cities because it's dumb as hell to engage in military style warfare, bystanders be damned, for things like illegally riding an ATV in the street/sidewalk.
i'm not sure where this attitude for vengeance/retribution comes from but it's eerily deeply ingrained in the US.
But you're not. Police might get you in half an hour, or tomorrow, or in 2 weeks.
Of course that requires proper documentation of the case (photos or even videos, fingerprints, ID of the stolen goods, ...) and follow up, both of which is less exciting than trying to outrace the perpetrator on the highway.
You aren't going to get reliable or useable prints from the scene of a retail store.
Even if you did, you have to have a match in AFIS for them to be useful.
Even if you do, congrats, you know the guy exists, his name, and social. Now you just have to find him before he robs someone else at gunpoint, and/or ends up killing someone.
Every non-tiny police department has a pursuit policy. It tends to be some form of one of the following:
1. Only pursue if the danger of the pursuit is less than the danger of this guy to society. Consider the crime, how easily we can find this guy, current traffic conditions, weather, etc. Guy robber a liquor store and is going 100mph on a well lit, perfectly straight 5 lane highway at 1am on a Wednesday with no other traffic? Get em. Same guy is going 100mph through a residential as the school busses are about to drop off kids? Terminate pursuit. Sadly, it is never that cut and dry
2. Don't pursue unless it was a murder/attempted murder, and the conditions are safe for it.
3. Don't pursue.
#3 Works amazing for about 5 years. Somewhere 5-10 years later, the local gangs and career criminals learn that if they just drive fast enough to endanger lives, the cops will leave them alone. State police departments, which usually spend more time on highways, tend to have a policy closer to #1. Because of this, they will often assist local agencies that have a policy of #2 or #3, when they are doing stuff that they expect a vehicle pursuit may ensue.
Someone usually brings up "Oh, well if you have the license plate why not just arrest them later." Because it doesn't work that way. You see a masked guy rob a store, jump in a car, and peel out of there at 1am, and don't pursue? If you run the tag, go to the registered house at 1:30am, find the warm vehicle in the driveway, knock on the door, registered owner can answer, and will tell you that a lot of people have keys to his car, he doesn't know anything, he was home asleep.
And theres not a thing you can do about it. The only way you can prove it was him was if you saw the driver and are 100% sure its that guy, or you convince him to talk himself into getting caught in a lie, or give up his cellphone, or some other dumb decision.
More likely, the car was stolen.
Cops are public servants. They have a duty to the public to safely enforce the laws and apprehend lawbreakers. This "get the bad guy at all costs" shit has to stop.
Capturing a non-violent criminal would not typically justify a high risk of causing a deadly road traffic accident. In the UK for instance, the National Decision Model must be used to evaluate whether to pursue a criminal; authorisation must be requested to conduct a pursuit.
That isn't the issue either (that he ran from cops), the issue is that he began shooting his gun at the cops.
Also I feel your comment may be implying that this sort of hyper aggressive enforcement is the only thing keeping crime down - I would suspect that crime at the level of shoplifting a shirt is more often due to need and desperation than to purely malicious intent, and while hyper aggressive enforcement may have some deterrent effect those crimes would probably be better resolved by trying to eliminate the core issues driving them in the first place.
Talk about minimal returns. There are 1000 other factors (in police, laws, and culture) to fix before crime skyrockets from not "catching with excessive force random guys who did minor/no offenses and tried to run away". Starting from social support for poorer districts and a legal/prison system that doesn't encourage recidivism...
While we're at it, in no civilized western or eastern country is "getting out of your car when stopped by a traffic cop" something that's met with a shooting...
It's like the police force is not professional over there, but just a joke with a gun, and on the first adverse situation (which could be as "adverse" as merely meeting a black guy) they get their guns out rather than doing any critical assessment, handling of the situation, etc. Sorry, un untrained thug can do the same exact thing. There should be higher standards from police officers...
It sounds like the homeowner was likely made whole by their insurance company, the article hints that the home was insured and the Police department paid for both temporary housing and the insurance deductible.
It is unknown, but in all likelihood the homeowner probably got the full policy limits on the insurance claim. Then, either: a) the insurance limits didn't cover the full amount of damages and they sued for the difference (and additional damages); or b) the insurer was behind the suit in a subrogation claim against the Police station for the claim amount.
One of the problems with insurance cases is your not allowed to talk about the insurance companies. Nevertheless believe it or not these kinds of cases (house destroyed in emergency responses) are quite common, but usually it has to do with fires (not armed police chases of criminals) where in order to stop fires from spreading from house to house a team of firefighters may purposely damage/destroy houses that are not on fire to prevent the lateral spread of the fire. Of course homeowners/their insurers sue the Fire departments with similar outcomes to this case.
>This story is insane and infuriating.
Losing a family home/all your belongings can't be minimized, but as a kidnapping victim myself, I also want to point out the gunman broke into a home where a 9 year old boy was alone and the boy was permitted to leave unharmed. Consider the guy blindly opened fire on the police, things could have been a lot worse had he kept the boy.
Exactly right. I'm shocked and saddened that the Hacker News community has reduced this to a "shoplifting."
That is not what the homeowner claimed. He claimed his damages were $400k total, and the house was covered.
What wasn't covered were the contents of the home because it was a rental and the renter didn't have renter's insurance.
Also there were some runaway costs to the owner in the rebuild because the owner repoured the foundation (which wasn't damaged) in order to build a bigger home.
>They chose to wreck the house.
And he choose not to rebuild on the existing undamaged foundation and lay a new foundation to build a bigger home, but the damages to make the homeowner whole were otherwise covered by insurance.
Yeah - the boy could have been hit by a projectile, much like that 2-year-old in Georgia who was burned by a flash grenade thrown by cops into his crib. Just one more reason to avoid this kind of destructive approach except when absolutely necessary.
That's how it was done in my country at least in a famous case back a couple decades ago...
- Leo Lech owns the home
- His son was renting it and living there when the incident happened.
- Robert Seacat was the guilty party. He is entirely unconnected to either party above. After a high speed chase he hopped a fence and ran into a random house owned by Lech.
Whats at stake is whether the government can willfully destroy your shit in the course of police work and not pay for it.
So can they also kill bystanders freely without compensating the family, or where does this logic end?
"“My mission is to get that individual out unharmed and make sure my team and everyone else around including the community goes home unharmed,” Greenwood Village Police Commander Dustin Varney said in 2015"
Also kind of insensitive, since the family didn't really get to go home, after this.
The solution is probably to buy huge amounts of insurance, and let your insurance argue it out with the police.
The homeowner would have to review his/her policy in detail to determine if they are covered in this instance. But in light of the fact that they sued the city, I'm thinking they probably aren't protected, or opted not to add on that additional coverage, assuming it was available?
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22feared+for+my+life%22+pol...
Also that's something the US is starting to turn the corner on in some places.
https://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/news/local/article23526048...
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
As a relatively new homeowner, I'm wondering if there's some sort of insurance I can buy for this sort of thing. (I wish I were joking.) Greenwood Village, where this took place, is less than an hour's drive from me, and isn't even a "bad part of town"; just a regular middle-class south Denver suburb.
There has to be some reasonable standard that can be applied to their behavior. If they used their tank to bulldoze a block of houses looking for some guy hiding in one of them ("how were we supposed to know which one he was in?"), would we expect that to be just OK? Sounds like this ruling says "yes". There are no checks on this behavior.
No, the homeowner said the destruction of his home was a Taking per the Fifth Amendment, like in a case of eminent domain. The court disagreed, and said the destruction was based on the powers the state has for enforcing the law. Reasonableness of the action didn't enter into it.
How is this even a question? They can then later charge the perpetrator if they want to.
Your state is your community, and the police is its executive branch. When you destroy some individuals home while carrying out whatever duties you have, the entire community has a responsibility to reimburse that person.
When your representatives fail in such ways, you either change their minds, find better representatives, or you are complicit.
I'm not holding my breath though. I don't think anything will change.
Indemnifying police for the damages they cause makes it so they have no reason to even consider them. We'd expect these externalities to grow larger over time, because there's no incentive for them not to. Wait for the suspect to come out, or play commando? It's all the same to them.
The current situation is a weird reverse-lottery wherein only a rare unlucky victim is expected to bear the burden of a societal cost. Police departments should be civilly responsible for damage caused by their actions, end of story.
This story, casualties from high speed chases, arrests of innocent people. These are all damages created by explicit choices by police, and thus whomever is enabling/funding the police departments should be responsible for them. If cities/insurers/taxpayers don't like having to pay for what they're enabling, then they will institute policies to reign in the police to keep them from doing such things!
The defendants may still be liable under negligence or some other theory. But this ruling doesn’t address those possibilities.
A man you say is armed, shoplifts a shirt and a belt, then locks himself in a bathroom. So we use APC's, grenades, and 40 mm rounds to get at him in a house instead of waiting him out?
Just seems, odd.
Belt: $20
Grenades: $1000
Destroying your home: priceless.
This is why I have a big problem with giving US police forces ex-military and subsidized military gear. It's already bad enough they give themselves military rank. Now we give them Bearcats and tactical gear. At some point they're going to treat their constituents as an insurgency.
You can't have safety and leniency for armed robbers. The suspect was at fault 100%, they committed robbery, had a deadly weapon, and fled the police. Had they not done any of those things, this would not have happened.
One, if the senior officer on site was not aware of what other individuals were in that location, why was he authorizing grenades?
Two,
Actually, you know what, I'm gonna stop. We don't need any more emotional reactions adding to the noise, no matter how many facts the reactions may be pointing out.
Let me just say, there were a lot of things wrong with this takedown as it is being described. My own hope is that there is a lot more to this story than what is being told. If not, it points to poor policy, poor training, and poor judgement. I'll just point out that only one of those is the fault of the officers on site, and leave it at that.
> How would you feel if someone's family was killed while the police were "waiting...
This is self-contradictory. If they don't know who or what is inside, then how could they dare to shoot (grenades!) into the house?
Incredible. A stranger can barricade themselves inside your property, the police can blow your property to bits trying to get to the stranger, and the owner of the property is on the hook.
The court's ruling that the Takings Clause doesn't apply because it's not an exercise of eminent domain is utter nonsense. There's no such requirement in the 5th Amendment that the government needs to label their use of private property "eminent domain" to be responsible for compensation for it. All it says is "public use". If this ruling is allowed to stand, this isn't America anymore.
Was the house uninsured? Or did the homeowner's insurance deny the claim?
For the people in the back.
AMERICAN HOMEOWNERS INSURANCE DOES NOT COVER YOU IN CASE OF POLICE ACTIVITY!
In my experience, what gets covered depends on the policy you bought, the state you live in, luck of the draw for who reviewed the claim and, I don't know, whether or not it was a full moon when you dropped it in the mail.
I wouldn't draw any conclusion whatsoever about what is and is not typically covered based on the outcome of a single claim. Plus, other comments here contradict your statement.
I am not concerned, though, as in my jurisdiction (Norway) the authorities would be required to compensate me for any loss incurred.
Edit: Besides, Norwegian police prefer other tactics; they'd probably ask him to come out for a beer [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/22/world/hijacker-of-norwegi...
I actually agree, the police should not be concerned about this, they should be concerned with policing. Which is why the state should pay compensation and then take it up with the police department if police actions are costing the state too much.
(1) You can get "all the justice you can pay for".
(2) Be wealthy: Then if something happens to your house, buy another one and move on.
(3) If you want to be secure in your home, then live in essentially a fortress, immune to criminals, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, forest fires, police, etc.
(4) If you want something like police protection, then hire your own security force.
(5) Avoid the police and the legal system. In particular, there are hints that in the low levels of the legal system a lot of the judges are not very objective.
(6) Realize that there is a long list of rare but really bad things that can happen to you and/or your family. Some of these things are scary but on average not a very big danger.
(7) When government messes up, lead efforts to vote out the leaders, e.g., vote out the mayor and have the new mayor appoint a new chief of police.
(8) Make it clear to the police that you are wealthy, powerful, have great lawyers, are well connected to and respected by the power elite, and can protect yourself. Can do all of this without saying a word to the police: Do it by neighborhood, i.e., with houses at $5+ million each, lifestyle, reputation, etc.
Yes, (1) - (8) are cynical, extreme, partly in jest, should not be necessary, but, still, are roughly correct.
Do realize that typically a newspaper wants to scare people to have smelly bait for the ad hook.
But maybe sometimes people should be scared and, then, vote in a new mayor.
Really, seens like a tatical unit with a balistic shield would be able to do the job without that much fuzz.
The police did not "Blow up a home" over "some belts". They spent 19 hours of negotiation, de-escalation, and sound tactics, to apprehend an armed gunman who shot at police on at least one occasion, maybe two, during the stand off.
People are admonishing the use of "Grenades and APCs". The grenades were tear gas. They used tear gas to attempt to get the suspect to leave a home. The APCS are literally just armored cars. You can go and buy one right now. They serve 2 purposes. They move people, and they help stop bullets. I have friends who are alive because of their APCs.
Human beings die in stand offs like this. Some are saying "Why not just wait him out". Its a great idea in theory, but you know what they say about the differences in practice and theory.
Being on the perimeter of a barricaded suspect is dangerous. He has the most cover, and concealment. He can be anywhere in the house, and he can have anything. The police in this situation know he has at least 1 gun. He may have others they don't know about, he may have others in the home that the home owners didn't tell the police about. He may be in there constructing nail bombs. These scenarios are unlikely, but possible, and one should err on the side of caution and preserving human life, when lives are on the line.
Most entry teams run around 10-20 guys. Plus a perimeter team to keep the threat contained and not lose ground. Add in supervisors / command staff, logistical support, medical personnel, negotiators, etc, and you have a lot of resources tied up on this call.
For 19 hours.
"Just wait longer, cut off water, there is no rush".
This is correct. There isn't a rush, until there is. Until there is another barricaded suspect, or a hostage situation, or an active shooter, or just regular patrols that need to be covered. My parents are perpetually stocked up for hurricanes. I could probably live in their house without electricity or water for close to a month before I needed to start worrying about logistics.
Staying on perimeter for an extended period of time is a weird sensation. You are essentially just standing behind a car or a porch for an extended period of time. You have to keep in mind that at literally any second, you may be in a life or death gun fight. You aren't in immediate danger, but that may change without any notice at any moment.
After 19 hours, the police took in an armed gunman who invaded a home, and shot at them, without injuring him or anyone else. That is amazing, and should be commended. The fact that people are outraged at this is sincerely confusing to me. The top comment says that if they just waited outside the house for a few days, it would've saved a lot money that was spent on "tear gas, robots, and negotiations"
The negotiations are generally done by officers, so there is no increased cost. This is the year 2019. Most people in my office own a robot that flies. Any department in a city with more than 1 stop light should have a multi use bot for surveillance/bomb investigation/scouting. Tear gas grenades run less than $50 each.
So what is the outrage over the tactical response of the police? They used equipment they had to stack odds in their favor against a guy that shot at them, and arrested him without injury.
I completely understand being outraged over the lack of compensation to the homeowners. Between insurance companies, victim compensation funds, and the government itself, they should absolutely be compensated for the damage to their home. It appears that such victims tend to be reimbursed, which is bittersweet. It's good that it happens, but it makes it that more infuriating that it didn't.
In summary: Yeah, be mad that the people got screwed over by the government, but it wasn't because of the SWAT team. They did their job right.
The 40mm grenades ARE the tear gas, or baton rounds (for breaching windows/doors). If they were dropping HE/Frag in those windows, the story would be WAY different.
The shaped charges are used for breaching. Assault favors the defender. A gunman in a room knows the cops are coming in through the door or the window. He just has to wait to see, and shoot. The entry team likely does not know what room the bad guy is in, and if they dont, they dont know where in the room, and if they do, they still have to go through the tiny door way, get eyes on him, assess the threat, determine if they need to shoot, and handle whatever threat exists.
Even if you know exactly where he is, flash bangs aren't magic, and that entry is still a gamble of life. The best thing you can do to increase your odds is to make a new door.
Or maybe some redneck decided he already pulled out his detcord and didnt want to put it back up. IDK.
The "modern" American policing system is such a joke (a scary one).
You were banned, but many others who say much more offensive things never get banned.
He made the mistake of being critical of a white person in power on HN. Combined with critique of a multibillion dollar tech corporation. That stuff doesn't go over well here.
Also, mtgx, welcome to the club.
Funny how some ideologies can be "fought against" safely here and others can't be. Climate change denial, a-ok. Criticizing china? It's for freedom! Labor unions? Fair game. Want to openly defend fascists? Go right ahead. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20961603
Criticizing Carmack working for Facebook? now that crosses the line.
Look man, I don't expect you to go against your boss's wishes and allow discourse that actively criticizes their actions, but don't come in here to try to sell me a different story.
Seems like that isn't even 100% certain.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/14/us/police-drop-bomb-on-ra...
Just because some force is reasonable doesn't mean all force is immediately reasonable and it's not stuck at higher levels as the situation changes. While he's being chased and posing a higher threat more force is reasonable but once he was barricaded in the house the danger posed to the public is reduced.
Surround it and wait for them to give themselves up. That's what other countries do.
That said, damaging the home to the point that it was condemned still seems like a bit much. Probably would have been easier to turn off the water and power, then blast Nickelback until the suspect gave himself up.
What exactly is he suing for? Wouldn't the insurance company be the one who would want to sue here, in an attempt to get back some of their outlay?
Any money he got from the government over and above the deductible he'd likely have to pay back to his insurance company, wouldn't he? You can't double dip like that.
[0] https://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/06/10/owner-of-home-destroy...
My dwelling policy actually says: We insure for accidental direct physical loss to the property
Interestingly, the article describes the incident as "a quasi-war zone" which is specifically not covered: We do not insure under any coverage for any loss which would not have occurred in the absence of one or more of the following excluded events: e. War, including any undeclared war, civil war, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, warlike act by a military force or military personnel, destruction or seizure or use for a military purpose, and including any consequence of any of these. Discharge of a nuclear weapon shall be deemed a warlike act even if accidental.
This article says that homeowner's was going to pay to rebuild, he wanted the city to pay for a longer term housing in the meantime while it was rebuilt.
So, its unclear what he is suing for exactly, except maybe some temporary living expenses.
This says his homeowners will cover the cost to rebuild
Is your argument that because the perpetrator is unable to pay, someone else (the police) should?
Also he attempted to kill police officers. It's unlikely he'll get it of jail any time before retirement.
Restitution should come from the one causing the harm, not the ones trying to protect the public from harm.
I don't think any of us are in a sufficient position of knowledge to determine if the police action was justified.
But it seems to me the suspect that picked the house to hole up in should be the primary responsible party.
The second part of this is that it indemnifies the police of their actions, shifting the cost of their recklessness. You pay in taxes to give them APCs, and then you pay again when they blow things up with those APCs you bought them.
The police destroyed the house. It's really that simple. Their reasons for doing that happen to include that they were chasing a suspect. So?
I expect the police would be liable if a court found them to have caused damage which was completely unnecessary, although they have a lot of latitude in interpreting this. It's fairly easy to argue that doing whatever is safest for them (doesn't put them in the line of fire) is justified, and they shouldn't take any unnecessary risk to protect property.
Given that (rightly or wrongly) typically the police will not be liable for these situations, and the liable criminal will be unable to compensate, the burden should probably fall to insurers.
Police protocols are largely based on preventing the numerous deaths and damage that they see on a regular basis, and the court ruling is based on the legal experts reviewing the case and seeing that they did what was expected.
If your family was in that house, murdered, and you were held at gunpoint for hours, you would probably be wishing the police had acted more swiftly, not just put up their hands and said "well I guess we just let an armed suspect who ran and hid inside a residence after committing a crime go..."
How well would we respond if someone was killed because the police waited saying "We didn't want to damage the house, we figured he was just taking a nap or something."
If there were (which I don't think is the case from the article), were they in more danger from the suspect or the police?
https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/
We are looking at this article with hindsight that his only crime was taking the belt, but you can't know that _at the time_, and given that these officers see shootings, robberies, and murders on a regular basis, its impossible to make the assumption that "well he's probably just harmless, lets wait this out".
I pose this simple question -- if someone broke into your house, armed, and fired shots. Would you wait it out, or assume the worst? If you assumed the worst, and that meant sacrificing your property to possibly save your life and the life of your family, but then it turned out the guy was just looking for a few items to sell, and wasn't really that bad, would you say you made the wrong call?
Police in the US are responsible for about 1000 firearm deaths each year, and getting increasingly aggressive towards innocent Americans
Police militarization increases this aggression at no benefit to the public
If the police blew up my house and offered a snarky apology after escalating the situation far beyond what was necessary, I'd be angry. Your question isn't simple, it's leading.
"Let me ask you a question that is totally different from what happened and will give me an answer I'm satisfied with"
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Chases are dangerous, and there are attempts to avoid them. For example, there's a system that some police are testing, that shoots magnetic GPS trackers to the chased car, and then police then track the car from a safer distance without putting pressure at the chased driver, and try to catch him when he stops.