My mom a retired Vet. Had her house raided on a warrant obtained with false testimony by a confidential informant. My door still doesn't shut right. The city never replaced it. Because they found one cannabis seed and a jewelry bag for peircing jewelry, so according to them the raid was justified.
The job description attracts the worst people too.
You want to exercise power over others, punish people for treating you impolitely, ruin the day of people you dislike without consequence?
Join the police!
Thugs. Maybe don’t defund the police, but let’s take a teeny bit of funding away from the paramilitary organizations using warlike tactics to find headphones that are actually located in the street.
At the very least hold them accountable for this sort of unnecessary damage.
Why not ring the bell and ask? Why not first walk around the house to get a more accurate bearing on the airpods? And why even wreck an entire house over some airpods? There's no sense in any of this, and people should definitely be held accountable.
Because they're not liable for any of the outcomes, either individually or in aggregate. I don't believe the govt is generally liable for these damages as long as there was a genuine purpose to it.
I'm starting to think that the modern, loose usage of SWAT is cruel and unusual punishment without a proper conviction. The punishment for actually stealing the air pods is likely less than the trauma of being SWATed and the fines are likely less than it cost to replace windows/doors/whatever.
When they're going so out of their way to cause damage to innocents, they clearly should be held liable. In a lot of places this sort of extreme behaviour would definitely have at least some consequences. Though likely still not enough; I think the person who made this call should be fired or at least demoted, and the police department should definitely pay for these damages.
I think doing things like this shows that the police are unable to use discretion in their execution of warrants, so my solution would be to take it away.
Have the warrants specify where, when, and how the search should be executed. Whether they're allowed to break the door down, whether they're allowed to be fully SWATted up, etc. Make it clear that any actions taken outside of the warrant's directions are done as a citizen, not an officer.
Then penalize officers for poor execution of warrants, and judges for poor issuance of warrants.
This problem has nothing to do with the police. This problem has something to do with whoever is giving the police the ability to get away with (sometimes literally) murder and not face any consequences even for obvious, blatant misbehavior. Qualified immunity and all that bullshit.
>> One SWAT team member punched a basketball-sized hole in the drywall. Another broke through a drop ceiling. They turned over drawers and left what had been an orderly house in disarray.
The "defund" argument, which I am explaining rather than endorsing, is that none of the other systems for consequences actually work in the short to medium term, but it may be possible to elect local candidates who have control over local police budgets.
> it may be possible to elect local candidates who have control over local police budgets.
Local candidates generally can exert no control over the police, even in large cities. If you piss off the police too much, they just stop arresting people, and then organized crime moves in.
They are not legally allowed to do that, because of literally this exact situation. Democracy doesn't work if the police can just strike and let society collapse if we vote for something they don't like.
I think the grimmest timeline there is the city needing to fire their entire police department and using the state's National Guard as police for an interim period while they find new officers.
> They are not legally allowed to strike, but they can just really slow things down.
Then fire them for performance? I also don't think a judge would be hoodwinked that easily. They aren't generally that stupid, and the law isn't generally that inflexible.
As terrible of an idea as it would be, I get a perverse sense of glee out of imagining replacing the police with the National Guard and then having them harass the FOP until they drop the inevitable lawsuits, like the FOP has done to many others. Terrible idea, but fantastic daydream.
> I don't feel democracy is really working, where the police are concerned.
This is going to be the police's downfall, though they appear to be too dense to realize it yet. The only difference between the police and a street gang is that the police are ostensibly directed by and accountable to the people. The whole monopoly on violence, except now the people are no longer the ones wielding that monopoly.
The system will respond with the only reaction it knows when faced with a perceived existential threat: massive, overwhelming force and the abandonment of core principles like innocent until proven guilty. Guilt will be presumed by association until the traditional systems feel in control again.
To be clear, I think that's a bad thing, and literally everyone would be better off if we didn't get there, but I don't see any indications of that happening this far. The citizens keep getting more pissed, and the police keep convincing themselves they're invulnerable.
This exact situation is happening in NYC, Philly, and so on. Cops have basically stopped doing their jobs because they don’t like having to get “probably cause” and follow “laws”.
> "A reasonable officer would have promptly known that it was an innocent family's home and not the sort of place inhabited by drug-crazed criminals."
This sentiment is why this happens. We're talking about stolen AirPods and carjacking. Not a terrorist cell or cartel operation. This statement essentially argues that they didn't deserve it because it's a nice home in a good neighborhood but living in a trashy home in a bad neighborhood doesn't justify this kind of violence either. Unless there's an imminent threat (and there almost never is) you should expect the police to be required to do at least a modicum of reconnaissance work before sending in the big guns.
A carjacking does not require swatting a house to pieces. Stop defending the police - they only exist to issue reminders to the public in the form of fear and sometimes death.
We already have constitutional due process. Let’s use that instead of pretending we’re in country on deployment and fighting terrorists because we never got to murder anyone when we joined the national guard at 18.
"How far does Bluetooth usually reach? Commercial electronics, including most smartphones, headphones, earbuds, and portable speakers, fall into class 2, which gives them a range of about 33 feet"
If this is considered a problem, it's about tracking devices in general, not Apple itself.
But it's really a problem of policing approach, which includes accountability. I've experienced a similar problem, but the police didn't tear my home down. I use tracking devices (Airpods) and I accept the side effects, as long as they're not extreme.
