Texas woman wins round in lawsuit challenging swat teams destruction of her home
ij.org
ij.org
"Police later told Deanna that their plan was “shock and awe.” Using the department’s BearCat armored tactical vehicle, the SWAT team toppled Vicki’s fence and drove through her front door. They also used explosives to blow through her garage door and fired more than thirty explosive tear gas canisters through the windows. When they finally stormed the house, they found that Little had committed suicide in her bedroom. The only living thing remaining inside was Deanna’s dog which was left deaf and blind from the explosions."
Why on Earth did the police feel it was necessary to do all this just to catch one guy? No checking whether the guy might have offed himself? Or did they ever consider just waiting for him to come out and then arresting him? Nope! Just reach right away for the cool bang-bang toys! These tools and tactics are what soldiers use when they want to destroy an enemy fortress, not what civilian police ought to be using...well...for any reason.
Wow, do you have a citation for that?
Edit:
States are apparently required to file an LESO operation plan. Here is an example from the Minnesota LESO operation plan
Section III. C.
> ... are required to utilize property within one year or schedule its return
https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/hsem/homeland-security/Document...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Property+obtained+under+this+SPO+m...
“Property obtained under the SPO must be placed into use within one (1) year of receipt, unless the condition of the property renders it unusable, in which case the property can be returned to the nearest DLA Disposition Services Site. If property is not put into use by the LEA within one (1) year, the State/LEA must coordinate a transfer of property to another LEA or request a turn-in to return the property to the nearest DLA Disposition Services Site. All costs associated with the transportation, turn-in, or other expenses related to property obtained through the LESO 1033 Program, is the sole responsibility of the LEA.”
https://www.dla.mil/DispositionServices/Offers/Reutilization... has request forms.
The last I've really heard of someone doing that in America was the guy who flew his plane into the IRS building.
On the rare occurrences when it happens it does change how the agency involved approaches things in the future. See Waco vs Bundy ranch.
You tend to see the same thing in police departments where officers get shot conducting unnecessary no-knocks. Of course it never makes more than the local news.
While there were no known punishments for agents/managers of the Branch Davidian incident, there was clearly a massive change in attitude toward using such tactics, lasting decades. The Elian Gonzales incident seemed a hesitating/reluctant resumption 15 years after, again avoided thereafter. The Bundy Ranch incident seemed ready to go there again, but was largely dissuaded by armed citizens. Of late, perceived rhetoric pointing toward resuming aggressive raids is increasing, but held back back per plurality of sentiment willing to fight back.
Note that I'm referring to incidents perpetrated by federal agents. Local police, as the lead article depicts, are ramping up aggressive raids faster - with some, as noted, learning by law or lead that doing so is a bad idea.
The following is an opinion and may be an unjust one:
They had toys and a rare chance to play with them.
I don't think much else is required or stands in the way.
That's one of many things the author of "The Rise of the Warrior Cop" argues.
He also argues a fundamental flaw in recruiting for SWAT and similar police units: these squads should be all about de-escalation and defusing violent and complex situations, but instead are full of guys who just want to blow shit up. The kind of police officers who would like to join SWAT, he argues, is precisely the kind who should be rejected.
Good luck fixing that, though.
No, they weren't.
Cops were a mob, and their primary purpose was originally to hold the other mobs in check.
> Can you imagine them pulling any of this in an old Italian or Irish neighborhood?
Yes. In the North, the original major police forces were basically ethnic gangs given government sponsorship and deployed first and foremost to do battle with other ethnic gangs, so that’s exactly the kind of neighborhood the police would be using major force on, if it wasn't the one they were drawn from.
That’s so what less the case now because the police became an independent political force with a union and lobby that tends to be decisive in local elections, so they became able to effectively pick their own targets, and going in strongest against soft targets and mostly avoiding the harder ones is a lot safer, if you have the clout to swing it.
probably because doing this kind of stuff is fun when there are zero consequences. If you're a sociopath its probably even more fun because you don't need to feel bad about other people's lives being ruined.
I think I heard it on Freakonomics, but I'm not sure.
It’s pretty disingenuous to try to pin this on Trump. (And I’m no fan of Trump.) Both parties are very complicit.
It's because they had a good time doing it.
Basically, my best effort at resolving violence entirely capitalist-inhumanist (economic stick/carrot, culturally agnostic solution, allowing an individual to be hobo's, addicts, foreign diplomats, aliens or robots basically) leads to a strange capacity-assurance metagame.
Basically it ends up being pretty Cyberpunk 2077 by the example of their 'medical extraction teams'. There's something oddly desireable about that style; professional and expensive, highly capable performance orientation. And, by that example, enforcement operations are actually very similar.
That example also makes you realize very quickly that you're 'putting a gun in the first chapter' (it tends to be used later in the story).
How would a gang war be possible if both sides had: - Health insurance (you pay my healthcare costs) but also - Prevention Bonds (if you do not prevent it, you forfeit your upfront)
Basically, a gang member is expect to potentially operate with a security company. The usual conflation of professional life or lifestyle is sort of removed with that - violence is worth money, but it's worth better money when it's legal violence. Prevents the idea that one's raison d'etre is their relationship with their gang. Similarly - a vested interest in issue prevention can be forced upon the entire circumstance. Machine Learning to validate the effectiveness.
Could be very fun once we have AI prevention mechanisms, to throw rocks at people and just watch them somehow not reach the target. Or, idk, have the 7G mast spazz your muscles out before you toss it or something. Getting the control mechanisms right is clearly important, and things like adapting a poison dart to a person for their allergies should be pushed directly by (tuneable) financial incentives.
Basically, could be made very unattractive 'overall financially' if things go badly with individuals. Regions of the US could be given higher taxes or 'forced commitment' to a qualifying group of enforcement organizations, if certain criteria are met. Basically - 'talking' to such communities' lack of harmonic practices through their pockets. Could end up as a forced reroll on any neighborhood that produces issues; it's often a consequence of not being in a good circumstantiality and it'd benefit a lot of these monkeys to just land elsewhere.
I'm positive this fiscal-first approach makes it 'right-wing' or something, but the appearance of a great deal of scalars for tuning the security circumstances through fiscalities strikes me as a left wing affect.
Of course, this analogy falls apart when they engage in civil forfeiture (they take your money without cause). In that case they don't act like active military, they act like pirates.
I would love to see a 3rd or 4th Amendment case against some of this stuff.
More than the actual army itself, the militarized police is the standing army that anti-federalists warned about.
I grew up thinking it was normal for an trainee officer or at formal events for an officer to not have a gun. It was an expected cultural disappointment to see an officer walks in with a gun on university grounds in the U.S. (not shock...).
Case in point: European police to call about ak47 carrying robber hitting during the night a bank to the security guard: stay away and we will investigate and catch him later (they did, no gunfight)
U.S.: Suicidal person holding no hostages at some store and asking for people to call the police to kill him: the two officers charge in and start a gunfight almost getting killed(just pick one of the posted YouTube body cam videos...) I am just speechless.
While many people may think that now, it is by no means the reality. The vast majority of encounters are non-violent.
The U.S. has many problems with policing and they should be addressed, but you should not let the media control your perspective about how common these things are.
Your examples are also not really comparable. Someone using a weapon for theft is not the same as someone looking to commit suicide by cop. The former is unlikely to kill someone without cause, the former is an unstable individual who is expecting no consequences to matter for their actions since they intend to be dead. Everyone in their vicinity is possibly in mortal danger. That doesn't mean the police acted correctly, but it's not comparable to the other scenario for the purpose of how police should act.
Usually they don't. But they know that it could happen, and act accordingly. And the people they pull over know that one wrong move could turn into "I thought they were going for a gun".
That encounter is incredibly tense, no matter how minor. One person always has a gun. The other might. There is no way to avoid that tension, given how many guns are out there.
That's assuming the best of intentions on the part of the officer. Not all police officers are saints, and even small thumbs on the scale of their tension easily turn into tragedies. If the officer doesn't like the look of you, for whatever reason, the danger just went up. And if you're a member of a group that officers often don't like, you've brought even more tension to an already tense encounter.
So yes, most people walk away from most encounters. But the potential for violence is always there, on the officer's hip, ready to be brought into use. Both the officer and you would be fools not to be acutely aware of that.
And yeah yeah, "ratio something disproportionate blabla". I dont even care. The reality is if you want to be pragmatic and fix the problem you need to get buy in and support from as many people as possible. You need all people to understand that anybody can get gunned down for effectively no reasons.
Sometimes I wonder if BLM may actually be a pro-criminal-police conspiracy to divide the population by re-framing the police brutality problem into a racial issue.
Events involving the police abusing power are often “he said, she said” situations that are heavily biased in favor of the police. We’ve seen an uptick in reporting since everyone started carrying a camera, and when every home has an always-on video security system, victims will have the evidence they need to really fight for their rights.
(Warning, violent dog abuse)
https://twitter.com/haleyjrichey/status/1465785057134710787?...
This cop violently attacked this dog, for absolutely no reason. Without the camera, the cop could brush this off as “the dog attacked me and I had to get in” where clearly that is not the case.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/18/...
In some countries, the police don't even carry guns.
You just don't find many of those people on HN.
I see plenty of them here in this discussion.
Firstly, this requires some real historical revisionism as police were actually around when the founding fathers were. American law is foundationally based on British Common Law, which also employed police vigorously.
But I agree with you about HN. Most of the commentators here probably supported the giant expansion of federal, militarized police: the Capitol Police. That $3B expansion funded on conspiracies of white supremacists everywhere has led to two new charters of a federal police in states not in the Capitol.
Sheriffs, in other words.
We can debate whether or not more or less power should be given to directly elected sheriffs and deputies, or the police, but that is immaterial. Sheriffs and police are two near identical systems of power that are applied in different manners. The critics of police power are also critical of sheriffs, in many cases more so.
I would personally prefer we demilitarize the police, including federal police and the FBI, but the idea that local cops is a standing army is silly.
They're the very opposite of this issue here, and explicitly call out non-violence as goal, and to ensure policing is supportive and at the will of the population, not to subjugate the population.
Later codified as:
- To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
- To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
- To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
- To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
- To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
- To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
- To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
- To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
- To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
But those things are not controversial. I think what happened to this lady is terrible and her case is correct.
What I'm pointing out is the hypocrisy of the people who are ACAB but then supported tens of thousands of troops guarding the Capitol ("ol" not "al") and an expansion of a real national military police on silly, false pretexts.
The right answer is that the police department (not the officers) should pay for all damage caused, regardless of whether it was justified by the circumstances. Implicitly then, the taxpayers are sharing the load for the full cost of police protection.
We should expect that the police will occasionally cause damage, and this is just part of the cost of funding a police force.
This would also add a nice check/balance, since the taxpayers will be more aware of how much damage police are causing and have an incentive to say something about it if it becomes excessive.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/visuals/photography/la-me-fw-archive...
After all, its not like the officer went rouge. The problem is police policies not that one individual.
I think an in-built insurance system that all workees contribute to mandatorily works better. If less in damages is awarded than was collected, they could partially return as a proportional bonus to the workers
It's not a straightforward issue but I think most would agree the current incentives are skewed towards doing whatever and not being responsible for any damage or cost
Also, I'm way more worried about use of force against pets, they seem awfully trigger happy vs. dogs sometimes.
Also, I think officer's should be required to carry malpractice insurance (similar to doctor's), and qualified immunity should be thrown out. This would give insurers a strong incentive to drive-out the cops that are prone to committing assault, battery, and unnecessary property damage. I guarantee you an insurer with a profit motive isn't going to just ignore 13 use of force complaints against an officer.
Such a scheme would also make it harder for bad officers to move a city or state and continue abusing the public elsewhere. Their insurance premiums would remain too high.
They will when they're threatened by a gang of police officers.
Malpractice insurance is an important part of police reform but alone I think it will be insufficient. If you combine some sort of mechanism that sees lawsuits against police departments being paid out from the police pension plan instead of taxpayers coffers I imagine you would see police reform really quick.
It's all about aligning incentives and only when one shit-head police officer's corrupt behaviour is detrimental to the group will you see reform. Divide and conquer.
It disagree:
(1) Malpractice, by definition, is negligent violation the professional standard of care, i.e., what is routine in the profession; violations of that are by definition not the issue with systemic problems.
(2) The actual systemic problems are the kinds of things which are generally categorically uninsurable for very good reasons; intentional, and often—though usually unprosecuted, which is why people are concerned with civil liability—criminal wrongdoing.
> If you combine some sort of mechanism that sees lawsuits against police departments being paid out from the police pension plan instead of taxpayers coffers I imagine you would see police reform really quick.
The police pension plan is the public coffers; it's a fund set aside to fulfill a contractual obligation of the public agency and which the contributing agency is legally obligated (barring discharge in bankruptcy) to make up any shortfall in.
Since we're presumably already talking about changing the law, we could presumably set up a system whereby those legal obligations are reduced according to those judgements.
I don't actually advocate it, but (paraphrasing) "that doesn't even make sense" isn't the most interesting response.
I mean, sure, we could presumably amend the Constitution to weaken due process protections to allow that kind of collective punishment, but that's a fairly drastic measure with enormous knock-on effects.
But also, that takes much deeper and wider political support at all levels to pass than just electing DAs that will prosecute cops for crimes; if law enforcement has enough politics pull to prevent the latter, it has more than enough to prevent dismantling fundamental Constitutional guarantees just to make punishment of officers not proven to be directly involved in wrongdoing easier.
> I don't actually advocate it, but (paraphrasing) "that doesn't even make sense" isn't the most interesting response.
It may not be the most entertaining, but the proposal is incoherent on many levels, so its really the only possible response.
I didn't mean entertaining, exactly, so much as that it seemed unlikely to convince anyone who held the opposite view since it (shallowly) seemed easily worked around. It was an important part of the more interesting argument, which you've elaborated on further and which this morning I would have expected to convince - "it is probably harder than the thing we need, and also still relies on the thing we need" seems pretty conclusive if accurate.
What other policies do you think we should put in place to rein in corrupt law enforcement in America?
While reforming QI so its not functionally absolute immunity is probably beneficial, corruption in law enforcement in the US is not principally a policy problem, it's principally a problem of people not believing it's enough of a problem not to consistently defer to law enforcement recommendations at the ballot box, particularly when it comes to electing the people who will implement the existing (and any potential future) policies intended to hold police accountable.
I’m not sure which issues you are referring to; if they are the ones that get heavy media coverage of widespread complaints, I think they are largely real problems, some quite severe, and that they barely scratch the surface of real, systemic problems in American policing.
My issue is with people pushing “solutions” that ignore the nature of those problems and the political context creating/supporting the problems, not with the idea that they are problems.
At least that's better than normal people having to put up with that and pay for it. Now on to solve the next problem with police...
It is completely reasonable to make them keep in mind all the potential and direct effects of their actions.
I think it would be beneficial for them to find alternative ways of catching a bad guy than busting down doors. It's a completely unnecessary escalation far more often than not.
Deescalation is a skill that requires understanding human nature, displays of understanding and empathy, and is most frequently done through talking. But also in patience and not forcing issues at times and places likely to result in a violent confrontation.
(The moral ideal may be practical if it is entirely successful as a deterrent.)
They should. The community elects the leaders who control the police. The incentives align pretty well.
You can have bad cop with lot of education and good cop with very Tuttle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk
They were actively recruiting for the type of person who would enjoy being on a SWAT team like this.
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/07/newport-beach...
Nothing good. I think.
So it's definitely going to hurt in both directions.
I wild fire them for stupidity but guess who is more stupid for not voting them out...??? It is all our fault at the end of the day.
The case is a little different because in the case from OP, the resident at the home knowingly let the fugitive into her home(who she knew was a fugitive). She then left and called the police. Whereas with the case I linked in Colorado, the fugitive illegally entered the home.
On the flip side, the Colorado suspect was actively shooting at the police from the home, while the Texas suspect apparently didn't do that, and merely committed suicide in a bedroom.
> Authorities say the suspect stole two belts and a shirt from a Walmart
> In an attempt to force the suspect out, law enforcement blew up walls with explosives, fired tear gas and drove a military-style armored vehicle through the property's doors.
Amazing...
> he broke into Lech's house for protection and was firing at officers with a handgun
That really doesn't read very well.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/criminal-ju...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
That was a lie.
In this case and in many of the victims of last year's unrest people are finding insurance doesn't cover it. Ethically the city would cover the actions of the officers and the voters and taxpayers would consider that in the next election cycle. If the incumbents win, the people have spoken that the actions are valid. Currently qualified immunity has given a wide path for police to rush in and worry later.
Sadly a dog got hurt, in other cases it has been a flashbang in a crib mutilating a minor. Elections show the will of the people.