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> 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.

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?

The examples given are a subset of all circumstances where property damage occurred as a result of legal police power.

Not all of which the government should be responsible for paying out.

> 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.

> 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.

Often the claim is that would give time to alter or destroy evidence.

As if destroying someone’s house couldn’t also destroy evidence!

>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.

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?

While that may or may not be my belief as well, it’s a broader question than this specific article is addressing.

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.

The insurance companies specifically do not cover government actions.

It makes perfectly good sense when the police are right, but when an innocent gets caught up in it compensation should be due.

>In this case, it seems obvious that the police should have to pay

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.

What?

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 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.

> Trying to make broad assertions regarding who is financially responsible for the lawful execution of police power seems useless.

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.

There is nothing you said that we disagree with.

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.

Attorneys did deal with this. Courts decided against the victim. Courts have decided against the victims in much larger cases, where even more money would have been spent on attorneys. Fundamentally, there has to be a cause of action in order for insurance companies to apply any "pressure".

The attorneys you buy, and the hours and angles they’re willing to explore for a single $16k payout is very different than the attorneys your insurance company buys for 50 $50k payouts.

Why are you putting so much faith in an idea that more attorneys will necessarily prevail? This seems in the neighborhood of the just world fallacy.

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?

I would say victims of erroneous policing. No compensation is due if the person who suffered the loss is convicted, or the person who was convicted had ongoing permission to access whatever is involved even if they didn't own it.

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.

>> I would say victims of erroneous policing. No compensation is due if the person who suffered the loss is convicted

Call me crazy, but committing a crime doesn't mean you potentially forfeit everything you own, implicitly.

> No compensation is due if the person who suffered the loss is convicted

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.

What makes this case particularly egregious is that the criminal was never inside the premises. The police were apparently so cowardly that they were too afraid to enter and search, without first lobbing 30 tear gas canisters through the walls that they tore down.

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.