Cops Destroyed This House to Arrest a Shoplifter | Hacker News Reader

Cops Destroyed This House to Arrest a Shoplifter

reason.com

33 pointsAnon8414 comments

I wonder if things would be different if that house was a historic landmark, or government property.

> Lech did get a $345,000 payout from his homeowner's insurance, but that was not enough to cover the full value of the home, which was appraised for $580,000... Lech ended up having to take out a $390,000 loan to cover the costs of rebuilding.

Looking at the picture of the home, it sure as hell doesn't look like a $600,000 home, let alone a $740k home to rebuild ($345,000 insurance payout + $390,000 additional loan + $5,000 payout from city).

He should have been able to rebuild the home with the $345k insurance payout. Keeping in mind that he still owns the land, which is the bulk of his overall home value.

Keep in mind that his "appraisal" took into account home VALUES, based on comparable homes that sold recently in the area. Home value is not at all related to home cost. Since most homes now sit on land that is worth more than the house itself.

That house can easily have been rebuilt for $345k.

As for the police overreach, it does seem like the police took excessive means to apprehend a petty criminal. A 2 day standoff for a shoplifter seems like a huge waste of city resources and taxpayer dollars.

Although, while I agree that the police took excessive measures in this case, this man is not the first person to have property damage as a result of police apprehending a criminal. This happens every day, all across the country. He isn't going to overturn any precedent that has already been set over the past 243 years that our country has operated.

When police damage property during the pursuit of a suspect, the fault falls on the suspect themselves. The criminal caused the police to chase him, the criminal went into the home and held the police off at gunpoint. Therefore the criminal is at fault. This means filing an inusrance claim with your insurance provider and let them duke it out. They will attempt to sue the criminal, or get the criminal's insurance to cover it.

And that is why you have homeowners insurance. For freak stuff like this. You get a payout and the insurance company figures out how make right with the situation. Now if you don't have adequate coverage for your home (which seems to be the case here) then that is the fault of you as the homeowner.

>A 2 day standoff for a shoplifter seems like a huge waste of city resources and taxpayer dollars.

Correction: a 2-day standoff for a suspect who when chased by police, barricaded himself in someone else's home with a gun.

If that is how he acts when under observation by the police, what does he get up to when he thinks he is not being observed?

> The suspect had stolen a shirt and a couple of belts from a Walmart in neighboring Aurora, Colo.

And shot at the police.

Ah that excuses everything

That seems besides the point. Not everyone has homeowners insurance. If anything the insurance company should be going after the government too.

The point is, there should be restrictions on how much damage police can do in pursuit of a criminal, and any damage beyond reasonable should be considered the fault and liability of the police force.

In Illinois the government goes so far as to actually pay for hospital bills caused by criminals. Keeping the city safe is considered the responsibility of the government paid for by your taxes, so the gov takes some liability for criminal damage.

But look at the car chase procedures that a lot of police have adopted - non engagement.

Some realized that putting everyone on the road in danger is not worth popping some ticket skipping asshole

Obviously with car reg and helicopters this could be mitigated, but the police could have just waited the guy out.

The crime did not warrant physical violence or disruption to third parties that eclipsed the crime itself by several orders of magnitude

The police should be punished.

Nobody would agree to have their house destroyed to catch a guy who stole their own two shirts and a belt, and it makes no sense that they should bear that burdern on behalf of a business that have an accounting column for such events.

He didn't steal two shirts and a belt; stole two shirts and and a belt and he brandished a firearm and committed a home invasion into a property with a small child present.

> Nobody would agree to have their house destroyed

Somebody who wanted to replace their dilapidated shack with a a new house would. The owner couldn't have gotten several hundred thousand dollars of insurances support for his rebuild if he did the knockdown himself.

would the police bomb a house to near collapse with an innocent kid inside ? No, the kid was out of the house.

I guess that must count as one of the riskiest, stupidest insurance scams ever

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted; this really isn't that simple an issue and there's good points on both sides. While I think the police response here was utterly ridiculous, I would like to know why the homeowner supposedly needs so much money just to rebuild the house. Houses aren't valued by how much it costs to rebuild them; they're valued on how much you can get someone to buy them for, and an appraisal value is based on how much the land is worth (location, location, location!!) plus the rebuild cost. Insurance value is generally based only on rebuild value. Most of the value of this particular house should have been the land alone, and the police ineptitude didn't change the value of the land. The only additional cost is really the cost of demolition, which shouldn't be that much: bulldozers aren't that expensive to run for a day. What's more, the house's foundation is most likely in usable shape, and that's a significant minority of the total rebuild cost. Homeowner's insurance isn't supposed to pay you enough to build a house twice as big as your current one.

I don't know, if I'm househunting the neighborhood where houses get invaded by shoplifters and then blown up is devalued in my eyes.

A one-time event shouldn't affect the house values in a neighborhood significantly. If this were a pattern, then the house's value should have already been impacted before this. I don't think this house's owner would even be required to disclose to potential buyers that this event happened. However, if the suspect had been killed in the house by the police, this would probably be different, so it's good that didn't happen. A lot of people won't buy a house that someone died in.

1. Rebuild cost is often far in excess of $TOTAL_HOME_VALUE - $LAND_VALUE due to a combination of depreciation and very high construction/permitting costs. My HOI coverage seems absurd for my house, but all people I have consulted indicate that it's about right for rebuild costs.

2. His $345k from HOI needs to cover all lost possessions as well. Even with a car or two, it's probably not over $100k though.

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