This story is insane and infuriating. The police had no need to destroy the house. They could have "sieged" the house and waited for him to come out when he ran out of food. This could be expedited by cutting the water to the house so the suspect had nothing to drink. This would probably be cheaper for the police in the end anyways as the extra few days of salary are offset by not having to use and pay for "tear gas, robots and police negotiations".
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.
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.’”
It seems like the gun was present for but not used during (even to threaten) the crime, which doesn't change the fact that he was armed while shoplifting or that he was probably a dangerous dude to be around, but does make it a bit different from a guy waving a gun around in a store while robbing it.
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.
Any neighborhood with $2million homes behind gated community barriers like Greenwood has cops who will shoot at shoplifters and roust bums (jail them and or drive them to the designated poor people zone).
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?
> They could have "sieged" the house and waited for him to come out when he ran out of food.
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.
>And those men remain at risk throughout the duration of the siege.
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.
> It's almost like police officers signed up for a career that puts them at risk.
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.
It's exactly the same for teaching. Around here the nicer schools even pay worse because they get the best applicants anyway! The job's way easier, more pleasant, less full of horrors that haunt you for years after, and you don't have 3rd graders swearing at you and threatening to stab you with alarming frequency. Well worth 10-20% lower pay.
Pretty big fallacy bro. Its not in the top 10 most deadly jobs in America. "Danger" is a relative term. If a squad of 20 soldiers get in a gunfight every day over 3 months, and none of them die, was their job less dangerous than the 20 guys who work in an office, where Jerry was killed by a vending machine tipping over?
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.
I never see a shortage of cops anywhere due to a lack of people applying. The idea that they're going to flee to other cities because we don't allow them to blow up houses and murder people with impunity is ridiculous. If we need higher compensation to adjust for not having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy then I'm fine with that. We need cops to stop being murderers.
> I never see a shortage of cops anywhere due to a lack of people applying.
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.
I suspect if we make cops accountable and change their training to quit fucking shooting people at the drop of the hat, the high school bullies will quit trying to be cops because they can't lord their impunity over everyone. Ultimately the situation we have in the US is unacceptable and something needs to change. It doesn't matter how expensive it is, cops need to quit murdering.
> I suspect if we make cops accountable and change their training to quit fucking shooting people at the drop of the hat
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.
... or you DEescalate the situation, because we're talking about policing a crime, not fighting a war.
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.
> At any time, the police could have simply broken it off and tracked him down later.
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 do realize that police keep investigating crimes and tracking down suspects afterwards, right? Showing up at his home the next day while he's eating dinner and less likely to act as a scared animal is not letting "a criminal go free".
> You do realize that police keep investigating crimes and tracking down suspects afterwards, right?
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.
If the offense is limited to shoplifting, then the lack of desire to spend resources on a full investigation obviously leads to that 2%. So that stat would be relevant for a shopowner who went after a shoplifter themselves, but not this situation - the police expending more resources is already taken as a given.
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 was directly responding to your stat that only 2% of shoplifters are caught after the fact, pointing out how this differs.
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.
> I have already stated my general judgement for when the police went wrong - escalating into causing some serious public safety hazards.
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.
> what is the correct decision, in your opinion, when a criminal floors it and reaches 90 mph in an attempt to evade officers
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.
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.
I'm actually kind of appalled that you think a handgun justifies not only arming police departments with military surplus, but also the use of them.
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?
> I'm actually kind of appalled that you think a handgun justifies not only arming police departments with military surplus, but also the use of them.
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".
> And those men remain at risk throughout the duration of the siege.
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.
The entire situation of a "high-speed chase" followed by such a stand-off for shoplifting a shirt seems ridiculous to me. I don't want to defend the shoplifter here, but the reality is that these kind of chases and stand-offs come with real risk of injury and death to innocents. The police should be wiser than pursue at all costs for such petty crimes.
The issue isn't that he stole a shirt, the issue is that he ran from cops, which is a pretty serious crime. Trying to evade arrest and capture is extremely dangerous and if police were to say "well he ran I guess we'll just let him go" crime would skyrocket because thieves would know all you have to do is run and you're home free.
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)
This is the police policy we have in the Netherlands – and I believe in much of Europe – and last time I checked crime is not "skyrocketing" here.
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.
A lot of what is wrong with America seems to boil down to broken short-term thinking that places too high a value on "heroics" with a big emotional zing attached to it over actual solutions.
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.
My own – perhaps controversial – take is that a lot is explained once you realize that the United States, as a country, is deficient in empathy.
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.
the United States, as a country, is deficient in empathy.
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.
I didn't intend to contradict your post, but rather add to it, or have a conversation.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
that doesnt mean there isnt discretion. running over a baby to catch someone who stole an apple is letting principal get in the way of pragmatism.
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.
no, it's just ridiculously punitive to go scorched earth in order to recoup $10 for some already uber-profitable business.
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.
I'm generally pretty fair and balanced when it comes to police versus public issues, but this is the same kind of shit that excuses the cops that shot the fleeing 16 year old in the head.
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.
I think all cops are bastards and I don't sympathize with them. I just want a rule of law along with accountability. I'm not of the opinion we need to use overt force when pursuing, but we need to pursue.
Generally police must assess the risk to public safety (including the suspect's and their own safeties) and balance that with the need to apprehend the criminal.
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.
Why did I have to scroll so far down to see this comment? It most likely would not have escalated to that level had he not shot. It probably doesn't help that they later mistook something else for being shots too.
Yes but for a shirt? Capturing a shirt shoplifter is worth the same effort and potential damage to innocents as a murderer? Or a bank robber? Or an organized group hitting electronics retailers? If someone refuses to pay a parking ticket, how much collateral damage is worth getting them to pay their ticket?
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.
>Trying to evade arrest and capture is extremely dangerous and if police were to say "well he ran I guess we'll just let him go" crime would skyrocket because thieves would know all you have to do is run and you're home free.
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...
>The homeowner deserves to be made whole and I think that should be the police departments responsibility...
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.
The article just said they offered $5k total to go toward the deductible and temporary housing. It says nothing about how much that actually cost, which was surely more. That wouldn't even cover fairly modest housing for a family during the time it'd take to tear down, clear the lot, and rebuild. The homeowner claims he's out $400k total for various reasons, beyond what insurance covered. Even if he was underinsured (likely), sure, that's on him, but the police did choose to do an absurd amount of damage to the house with all their fancy toys rather than just shutting off utilities and waiting. It's not like the guy took hostages, and there's no indication they even thought he had. For attacking the house to make sense in such a time-insensitive situation they must have thought they had a pretty solid perimeter set up. They chose to wreck the house.
>The homeowner claims he's out $400k total for various reasons, beyond what insurance covered.
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.
Ah, good point, I read those were his expenses and didn't catch that was before insurance reimbursement. Looks like the actual damages beyond that are just loss of personal property in the house and whatever it cost to deal with the whole, you know, police-blew-up-my-house situation, which is surely non-trivial but likely well under $400,000.
I agree that armed robbery is not shoplifting and shouldn't be portrayed as such. But I don't see how that hypothetical changes things; from the article timeline, the boy had left the house before the cops even got there. It's not like he decided to let him leave due to the bombardments.
> Consider the guy blindly opened fire on the police, things could have been a lot worse had he kept the boy.
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.
If the gunman kept the boy the Police would not have been so indiscriminate in their use of force. However, the gunman being alone in the home permitted them to be as indiscriminate as they were, presumably to keep the police out of harms way of entering the premises.
>This story is insane and infuriating. The police had no need to destroy the house. They could have "sieged" the house and waited for him to come out when he ran out of food.
That's how it was done in my country at least in a famous case back a couple decades ago...
- 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.
"but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whoever is damaged by their actions along the way."
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.
I'm not certain whether or not either of you are aware, but most home insurance policies specifically preclude any claims precipitated by certain circumstances. Industry wide, a few of the standard circumstances that you would have to specifically add coverage for would be things like, acts of war, or, for instance, police actions.
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?
Insurance is only economical for unpredictable, rare circumstances. Flooding is basically guaranteed in certain areas, so it would be crazy to offer insurance for it, as it would simply turn into a payment plan for a future expected expense. Much like health "insurance" exists in the US.
No it will be largely confined to property damage. Shooting random bystanders for example would be still be an unreasonable use of force against that person.
Not in the US. The police just have to claim they felt threatened. And property damage is just as bad if you've now made a person homeless and bankrupted them through no fault of their own. The judge was wrong here. The government cannot just take property and provide no recompense. This is effectively the same as eminent domain.
It's definitely bad but not that broad. See this Myrtle Beach raid where they're stripped of qualified immunity even though he was holding a gun at the time because the police were out of uniform, did not announce themselves, and didn't issue commands.
Also that's something the US is starting to turn the corner on in some places.
"goes home"...he didn't think about that. Presumably the guy whose home that he blew up, isn't part of the "community" because he has no home to go to.
I think it is always good to remember that police are law enforcement. That is their reason for existence. Protection is not necessarily part of the description. If you want to be saved, you call a firefighter. Police are there to punish.
Your last sentence is incorrect. Police should not be dealing out punishment. Police are not allowed to assign guilt or innocence. That falls under the courts.
Police level of response needs to be appropriate based on the given situation. Seems like this police department just had a bunch of toys they really wanted to play with.
The way judges expect normal people to, within reason, use good judgement and will hold them accountable if they didn't, but will take police at their word that whatever dumb shit they did was totally necessary and appropriate and they can't possibly be blamed for it, is really frustrating.
The "reasonable person" standard [0] is deeply interwoven into our legal infrastructure. Yet as you say, courts/judges seem deeply reluctant to apply this standard to the police (there may be selection bias at play; we don't hear about the instances where unreasonable police actions are held to account).
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.
Exactly. Why doesn't the police dept carry insurance for _exactly this_? Yes it will be expensive, but it's a leveraged bet that allows them to do what they need to but have some consequences for doing things they don't.
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.
Especially when it sure seems like they had a good or superior alternative. If the situation/area was sufficiently under control that advancing with siege equipment didn't involve excessive risk of harm to officers or of the suspect escaping in the commotion, then staying put and holding the perimeter was at least as safe and would have kept him contained, surely. No mention that they believed he had anyone else in there with him or anything, so why on Earth did they choose to assault the house?
> And I assume part of their argument was precisely that this was reasonable.
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.
I assume a simple "they didn't have a good reason to wreck my house and should pay for it" was a legal non-starter, then, hence the plainly longer-shot (all else being equal) eminent domain argument?
Of course the state should reimburse the family, whether they have to by law or not (though if they don't your laws are fucking stupid).
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.
There is an ever growing boundary between ordinary citizens and government officials. Unless there is a drastic shift, this does not bode well for the U.S. as a country.
In Denver there are "Civilian Crash Investigation" cars which drives me crazy. Police and government officials are also civilians. The distinction on the car is such an "us vs them" mentality and very out of touch.
Police use military terminology when talking among themselves. Many current police officers come from the military before becoming police. Officers refer to non-LEO as "civilians". If the police are supposed to be a civilian agency, someone forgot to tell them. The "us v. them" mentality comes from both sides. Though my personal opinion is: the police (and the government they serve) started it and actively encourage it.
The distinction is longstanding, from a simpler time. The problem is that the police are taking more and more advantage of it.
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 answer is simple. Initiate a high speed chase directly to the homes of your local judges and see how they like it when the police destroy their homes.
This ruling is only on the Takings Clause question: whether the police actions violated the constitutional prohibition against the government taking private property for public use without adequate compensation. Here, the 10th Circuit affirmed the trial court ruling that the Takings Clause did not apply. That decision seems reasonable because this case is not like other Takings clause cases, for a variety of reasons.
The defendants may still be liable under negligence or some other theory. But this ruling doesn’t address those possibilities.
America has become a crazy place. It's like a movie.
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?
Total loss to Walmart was probably like $10, wholesale, shipping, and stocking. That they pursued him more than about 100 meters is kinda nuts. The "high speed chase" that seems to have preceded this was dumb as hell, too.
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.
Armed suspects walking around in Walmarts have committed mass murders recently, guessing that might be informing the response to situations like this.
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.
No, but I'm asking what the alternative is given that he committed armed robbery, then fired on police. Do they just wait, given that they don't know who or what is inside just to avoid property damage? How would you feel if someone's family was killed while the police were "waiting to avoid hurting the house". Also bear in mind that while the suspect is shooting at the cops, he could have walked out anytime. At the store, during the drive, after the first bullet, the first tear gas canister, etc. He also waited this whole time, and then wants to have the damage paid for.
I didn't want to go here given the anti-police sentiment prevalent in society right now, but your comments are begging for me to point out a few things.
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.
Home owner in this scenario != shoplifter. It was different people. Shoplifter guy posted up in a random house, which was subsequently bombed. Now the feds won't pay up to the rando who actually owned the place.
Did you _read_ TFA?
Let's see off the top of my head. Sending in an armed drone. Performing a breach of the house with multiple teams and eliminating the threat. Using optics to figure out where he was and then sniping him. All of these were options that didn't require destroying the house. If they planned on destroying the house anyways why not just bring in a tank, attack helicopter, or do it old school and set the house on fire? All of these are viable options for a single suspect in a house if we follow your logic.
Of course it would. Just like it's different when police see another police speeding, or their relatives breaking traffic laws with their fake badge stuck on the windshield.
Pretty sure cops can follow the same rules to tear apart your car looking for drugs, and even if they don't find any, will happily return your stack of car parts and say "have a good day."
The court acknowledged that this may seem “unfair,” but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whoever is damaged by their actions along the way.
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.
I am not in a position to judge the tactics they used but it’s hard to understand how the government could refuse to compensate the homeowner who had nothing to do with this and had no choice.
Having been in insurance, I seriously doubt anything in insurance can be pithily and accurately summed up with a one liner.
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.
> The court acknowledged that this may seem “unfair,” but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whoever is damaged by their actions along the way.
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.
It's too bad that we, as a society, haven't yet found any solution to this band of insane, armed madmen roaming around destroying whatever and whoever they want, stealing whatever they want, and generally doing whatever they want with no accountability whatsoever. And then there's also the guy holed up inside the house that's a minor issue. One day, we may join other civilized countries that can actually control their police rather than letting them run rampant, terrorizing the population.
A lot of people are missing some key points here, and getting angry at the wrong aspects. Let me start by saying that I do believe the family should be compensated by some means. They shouldn't become the de facto victim of the crime.
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.
They used 40mm and tear gas grenades, shaped charges, and APCs. The police did their job, but the city should be paying for this. The city is the one at fault for not providing appropriate recompense.
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.
They feared for their safety. The only possible response was to immediately annihilate the potential threat, no questions asked. Better use the rocket launcher and be safe than sorry.
The "modern" American policing system is such a joke (a scary one).
I'm glad your comment got vouch-rescued, mtgx, so that I can tell you that you have been shadow-banned, and almost all of your comments, except those that are rescued by vouching, are invisible to almost all HN readers (except those of us who have the "showdead" setting turned on). It looks like the shadowban began about 90 days ago, after you left a very mildly disparaging comment related to John Carmack. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20582828
You were banned, but many others who say much more offensive things never get banned.
> 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.
Hmm, I wonder what the ideology he's battling is? Could it possibly be the hypercapitalist ideology promoted by the sorts of people who own the site? You know, the white billionaires who own and control Google, Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, etc?
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.
Gee, so how much uncompensated destruction is permitted if the police are fired upon? What if they leveled the block? What if they drove a tank through the neighborhood, destroying everything they passed on the way. Or every building the shoplifter was suspected of having entered?
Started as theft, moved up to attempted murder of a police officer. Use of force is justified. Not repairing the house is absolutely condemnation worthy. My local police department paid for a door broken in during a breach so it's not the same everywhere.
There are gradients of force, they could have done this without destroying this person's house, it's not like he had hostages that were in immediate danger, he was hiding in a house..
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.
Shop-lifted shirts started the whole fiasco. However, the suspect was stopped for questioning, then attempted to run over the questioning officer while fleeing, then broke into and barricaded himself within an occupied home.
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.
Right, but the government offered to cover his deductible.
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.
They offered $5000 toward the deductible and temporary housing. No mention of actual costs involved (like, how large was the total deductible, for instance). Given how long it takes to build a house, plus extra time + expense for demo & removal in this case, I'd expect $5000 to be a small part of just the temporary housing costs.
This is prime example of what insurance should cover 100% no questions asked with no premium increase. These circumstances are way out of a homeowners' control, maybe this guy should look into suing his own insurance company.
According to the article, the city did offer $5k for rent assistance and insurance deductible coverage... not sure if that was before or after the court proceedings got underway.
It sounds like it was going to according to this [0] article. The issue is the amount offered wouldn't even cover the temporary arrangements while the insurance rebuilt the home, 5k covers a hotel for 30ish days way less than it would take to replace the house.
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.
So far as I'm aware homeowners insurance in almost all cases will not cover government action, just like it typically won't cover floods, ground movement, and various other things. Read your fine print. In all likelihood since the criminal did not cause the damage they will reject any claims.
This should be the insurance company's problem. Also, they should have filed in the criminal case with the State judge for the damages who probably would have granted them.
They garnish his wages in and out of jail for the rest of his life. Yes, it's unlikely they'll ever receive full restitution but he's the one who should pay, not the police.
Is your argument that because the perpetrator is unable to pay, someone else (the police) should?
My argument is that it was the police firing 40mm rounds blindly into the house, using shaped charges, using battering rams for a single suspect with limited ammunition is completely unreasonable. I've seen police safely breach in more dangerous situations. They could have done a number of things before making the house unliveable and should have been expected to be trained in those options. The town should be paying because their actions caused the house to be unlivable and function as essentially eminent domain of the house. The police did far worse damage and put that more people at risk than this person did though their actions.
Also he attempted to kill police officers. It's unlikely he'll get it of jail any time before retirement.
Just because he's unable to pay restitution doesn't mean they should get paid from the police. He's the bad actor here, not the police. He's the one that caused the damage by illegally breaking into their home and not surrendering.
Restitution should come from the one causing the harm, not the ones trying to protect the public from harm.
It turns out that crackheads aren't likely to have any money so how about the local government make the home owner whole and then they can sue the crackhead for part of his welfare check.
I think they probably could sue him for damages in civil court, but the problem is that (as I understand it) it is not possible to compel someone to pay. You can garnish wages, seize property, etc., but if you're stealing ~$10 of belts do you think you have $400k laying around?
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 suspect certainly has some responsibility. I would find him liable for loss of use while in the building / during investigation after, as a reasonable person would expect a building to be cleared for that. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the building to be destroyed because you're hiding in it, unless you're a sniper in a war zone. Gunshot damage, sure.
A suspect would likely be liable for damage caused by the police in the course of them resisting arrest. However, they are likely judgement-proof, not having the wealth or income to compensate the homeowner. They will likely "pay" in the form of a custodial sentence, but of course that's little remedy for the homeowner.
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.
This will be an unpopular view, but if someone is armed and locks themself in a house (the contents and perons inside which are unknown), its a bit tough for the police.
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..."
What if you and your family were being held hostage, how do the police know "they can just wait"? They don't even know if the guy is really allowed to be in the house. Also how long do the police wait, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month? How many millions is it worth to avoid damaging an armed criminals residence, especially when he can willingly walk out at any time and avoid all that damage.
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."
I don't care about your fantasy. The reality is insane overreaction to a guy who stole $20 worth of clothes. Walmart writes this into their bottom line. You know what should've happened? Nothing.
Not trying to start a flame war here, but its not a fantasy. There are 36,000 gun deaths, and over 100,000 gun related injuries in the US every year (thats roughly 3000 per week). There was an armed man who lead a high-speed chase and shot at police. The odds are very high he will injure or kill another person, its not a fantasy to think the police are thinking worst case.
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 shouldn't engage in high speed chases if you're concerned for innocent's safety
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"
That 36,000 number isn't really the entire story. The majority of those are suicides. In the year that this incident took place (2015) there were 9,616 murders with a firearm of some kind. Source:
If you and your family were being held hostage the actions by the police would have put them in far more danger if they didn't know where you were since they were blind firing launchers throughout the house. The police can shut off the power and water, could have flooded the house with tear gas, could have breached with multiple teams. You realize this was more damage than gets caused in a war zone breaching right? The house was so overly damaged it was condemned. That's so in excess of what's required to get a single suspect that they know is in a confined area. They could have sent in a drone with a grenade and caused less damage. This was willful negligence on the part of the police department who didn't use proper judgement in the apprehension of a serious criminal. They literally used military rounds over and over for 19 hours, military vehicles, explosives, grenades. The same city then condemned the house and offered $5000. Destroying the property is going to cost more than that. The city decided to take the house, the city should pay for the house.
Also he shot at the police, that's pretty much going to mean they have to assume you could kill them or someone else. You really think you can not only steal, then lead a car chase, then lock yourself in a house, then shoot at the cops, and expect them to just wait hoping you don't kill someone or yourself or them to avoid property damage? And then, if they kick in your door (or after 19 hours destroy your house), you want them to pay for it, when you could have avoided or ended the situation at any time?
Police aren't supposed to go on high-speed chases anymore, especially because they could hurt innocent people. They made the situation worse in every way.
Hard to say who caused what after certain point. Certainly police has been criticized before for risky chases, for example. Is risking lives of pedestrians worth a chase for a few dollars of stolen merchendise? Then things escalated, sure.
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.
Based on your comments you haven’t read the story. The house didn’t belong to the person police were pursuing and there was nobody in the house. They destroyed the house of a completely innocent third-party.
This story is insane and infuriating. The police had no need to destroy the house. They could have "sieged" the house and waited for him to come out when he ran out of food. This could be expedited by cutting the water to the house so the suspect had nothing to drink. This would probably be cheaper for the police in the end anyways as the extra few days of salary are offset by not having to use and pay for "tear gas, robots and police negotiations".
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.
But where's the fun in that? Gotta get to use all that weaponry after all.
Exactly.
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...
All for what, maybe $40-60 in 1 shirt and 1 belt? 19 hours of police OT, paying for all their toys, this ongoing legal battle. Insanity
It was an _armed_ robbery. That's a very serious crime. Not "shoplifting".
It seems like the gun was present for but not used during (even to threaten) the crime, which doesn't change the fact that he was armed while shoplifting or that he was probably a dangerous dude to be around, but does make it a bit different from a guy waving a gun around in a store while robbing it.
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.
In California, and probably the rest of the Nation, just carrying a gun during a robbery makes it an "armed robbery." (And for good reason, too.)
Any neighborhood with $2million homes behind gated community barriers like Greenwood has cops who will shoot at shoplifters and roust bums (jail them and or drive them to the designated poor people zone).
>All for what, maybe $40-60 in 1 shirt and 1 belt?
No the use of force was in response to the guy opening fire on the police.
Just to play devil's advocate:
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?
> They could have "sieged" the house and waited for him to come out when he ran out of food.
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.
>And those men remain at risk throughout the duration of the siege.
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.
> It's almost like police officers signed up for a career that puts them at risk.
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.
> Workers prefer to work in safer jobs
Police officer isn't a bad choice, then. It does not even break into the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America.
> 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.
It's exactly the same for teaching. Around here the nicer schools even pay worse because they get the best applicants anyway! The job's way easier, more pleasant, less full of horrors that haunt you for years after, and you don't have 3rd graders swearing at you and threatening to stab you with alarming frequency. Well worth 10-20% lower pay.
Pretty big fallacy bro. Its not in the top 10 most deadly jobs in America. "Danger" is a relative term. If a squad of 20 soldiers get in a gunfight every day over 3 months, and none of them die, was their job less dangerous than the 20 guys who work in an office, where Jerry was killed by a vending machine tipping over?
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
I never see a shortage of cops anywhere due to a lack of people applying. The idea that they're going to flee to other cities because we don't allow them to blow up houses and murder people with impunity is ridiculous. If we need higher compensation to adjust for not having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy then I'm fine with that. We need cops to stop being murderers.
> I never see a shortage of cops anywhere due to a lack of people applying.
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.
I suspect if we make cops accountable and change their training to quit fucking shooting people at the drop of the hat, the high school bullies will quit trying to be cops because they can't lord their impunity over everyone. Ultimately the situation we have in the US is unacceptable and something needs to change. It doesn't matter how expensive it is, cops need to quit murdering.
> I suspect if we make cops accountable and change their training to quit fucking shooting people at the drop of the hat
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.
On another note, thanks for a level headed discussion
... or you DEescalate the situation, because we're talking about policing a crime, not fighting a war.
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.
> At any time, the police could have simply broken it off and tracked him down later.
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 do realize that police keep investigating crimes and tracking down suspects afterwards, right? Showing up at his home the next day while he's eating dinner and less likely to act as a scared animal is not letting "a criminal go free".
> You do realize that police keep investigating crimes and tracking down suspects afterwards, right?
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.
If the offense is limited to shoplifting, then the lack of desire to spend resources on a full investigation obviously leads to that 2%. So that stat would be relevant for a shopowner who went after a shoplifter themselves, but not this situation - the police expending more resources is already taken as a given.
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.
> If the offense is limited to shoplifting
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 was directly responding to your stat that only 2% of shoplifters are caught after the fact, pointing out how this differs.
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.
> I have already stated my general judgement for when the police went wrong - escalating into causing some serious public safety hazards.
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.
> what is the correct decision, in your opinion, when a criminal floors it and reaches 90 mph in an attempt to evade officers
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.
Apparently, I've been making up details without realizing it.
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.
I'm actually kind of appalled that you think a handgun justifies not only arming police departments with military surplus, but also the use of them.
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?
> I'm actually kind of appalled that you think a handgun justifies not only arming police departments with military surplus, but also the use of them.
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".
> And those men remain at risk throughout the duration of the siege.
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.
The entire situation of a "high-speed chase" followed by such a stand-off for shoplifting a shirt seems ridiculous to me. I don't want to defend the shoplifter here, but the reality is that these kind of chases and stand-offs come with real risk of injury and death to innocents. The police should be wiser than pursue at all costs for such petty crimes.
The issue isn't that he stole a shirt, the issue is that he ran from cops, which is a pretty serious crime. Trying to evade arrest and capture is extremely dangerous and if police were to say "well he ran I guess we'll just let him go" crime would skyrocket because thieves would know all you have to do is run and you're home free.
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)
This is the police policy we have in the Netherlands – and I believe in much of Europe – and last time I checked crime is not "skyrocketing" here.
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.
A lot of what is wrong with America seems to boil down to broken short-term thinking that places too high a value on "heroics" with a big emotional zing attached to it over actual solutions.
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.
My own – perhaps controversial – take is that a lot is explained once you realize that the United States, as a country, is deficient in empathy.
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.
the United States, as a country, is deficient in empathy.
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.
I didn't intend to contradict your post, but rather add to it, or have a conversation.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
High speed police chases are also dangerous and police should not engage in them.
I agree.
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.
that doesnt mean there isnt discretion. running over a baby to catch someone who stole an apple is letting principal get in the way of pragmatism.
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.
no, it's just ridiculously punitive to go scorched earth in order to recoup $10 for some already uber-profitable business.
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.
> all you have to do is run and you're home free
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.
Retail videos are garbage 99% of the time.
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.
> If you run the tag, go to the registered house at 1:30am, find the warm vehicle in the driveway,
More likely, the car was stolen.
I'm generally pretty fair and balanced when it comes to police versus public issues, but this is the same kind of shit that excuses the cops that shot the fleeing 16 year old in the head.
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.
I think all cops are bastards and I don't sympathize with them. I just want a rule of law along with accountability. I'm not of the opinion we need to use overt force when pursuing, but we need to pursue.
Generally police must assess the risk to public safety (including the suspect's and their own safeties) and balance that with the need to apprehend the criminal.
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.
Armed robbery probably doesn't count as non-violent.
>issue is that he ran from cops, which is a pretty serious crime.
That isn't the issue either (that he ran from cops), the issue is that he began shooting his gun at the cops.
Why did I have to scroll so far down to see this comment? It most likely would not have escalated to that level had he not shot. It probably doesn't help that they later mistook something else for being shots too.
Yes but for a shirt? Capturing a shirt shoplifter is worth the same effort and potential damage to innocents as a murderer? Or a bank robber? Or an organized group hitting electronics retailers? If someone refuses to pay a parking ticket, how much collateral damage is worth getting them to pay their ticket?
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.
>Trying to evade arrest and capture is extremely dangerous and if police were to say "well he ran I guess we'll just let him go" crime would skyrocket because thieves would know all you have to do is run and you're home free.
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...
>The homeowner deserves to be made whole and I think that should be the police departments responsibility...
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.
> 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."
Plus down voting to censor truth rather responding or acknowledging the fact the home was insured and the Police paid the insurance deductible.
The article just said they offered $5k total to go toward the deductible and temporary housing. It says nothing about how much that actually cost, which was surely more. That wouldn't even cover fairly modest housing for a family during the time it'd take to tear down, clear the lot, and rebuild. The homeowner claims he's out $400k total for various reasons, beyond what insurance covered. Even if he was underinsured (likely), sure, that's on him, but the police did choose to do an absurd amount of damage to the house with all their fancy toys rather than just shutting off utilities and waiting. It's not like the guy took hostages, and there's no indication they even thought he had. For attacking the house to make sense in such a time-insensitive situation they must have thought they had a pretty solid perimeter set up. They chose to wreck the house.
>The homeowner claims he's out $400k total for various reasons, beyond what insurance covered.
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.
Ah, good point, I read those were his expenses and didn't catch that was before insurance reimbursement. Looks like the actual damages beyond that are just loss of personal property in the house and whatever it cost to deal with the whole, you know, police-blew-up-my-house situation, which is surely non-trivial but likely well under $400,000.
I agree that armed robbery is not shoplifting and shouldn't be portrayed as such. But I don't see how that hypothetical changes things; from the article timeline, the boy had left the house before the cops even got there. It's not like he decided to let him leave due to the bombardments.
Before the police used force the gunman opened fire on the police.
> Consider the guy blindly opened fire on the police, things could have been a lot worse had he kept the boy.
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.
If the gunman kept the boy the Police would not have been so indiscriminate in their use of force. However, the gunman being alone in the home permitted them to be as indiscriminate as they were, presumably to keep the police out of harms way of entering the premises.
>This story is insane and infuriating. The police had no need to destroy the house. They could have "sieged" the house and waited for him to come out when he ran out of food.
That's how it was done in my country at least in a famous case back a couple decades ago...
In case someone didn't read the article cough
- 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.
"but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whoever is damaged by their actions along the way."
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.
America doesn't care about the little guy.
The solution is probably to buy huge amounts of insurance, and let your insurance argue it out with the police.
I'm not certain whether or not either of you are aware, but most home insurance policies specifically preclude any claims precipitated by certain circumstances. Industry wide, a few of the standard circumstances that you would have to specifically add coverage for would be things like, acts of war, or, for instance, police actions.
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?
Also flooding is not covered in the vast majority of home owners polices.
Insurance is only economical for unpredictable, rare circumstances. Flooding is basically guaranteed in certain areas, so it would be crazy to offer insurance for it, as it would simply turn into a payment plan for a future expected expense. Much like health "insurance" exists in the US.
No it will be largely confined to property damage. Shooting random bystanders for example would be still be an unreasonable use of force against that person.
Not in the US. The police just have to claim they felt threatened. And property damage is just as bad if you've now made a person homeless and bankrupted them through no fault of their own. The judge was wrong here. The government cannot just take property and provide no recompense. This is effectively the same as eminent domain.
Yup— "I feared for my life" is a pretty much ironclad get out of jail free card:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22feared+for+my+life%22+pol...
Sadly civilians can't claim the same defence if they shoot an officer, even if they had an actual reason to fear for their lives.
The solution to how egregious this defense is isn't to allow citizens to use it as well, it's to no longer allow cops to use.
It's definitely bad but not that broad. See this Myrtle Beach raid where they're stripped of qualified immunity even though he was holding a gun at the time because the police were out of uniform, did not announce themselves, and didn't issue commands.
Also that's something the US is starting to turn the corner on in some places.
https://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/news/local/article23526048...
Except police by law are not required to do any such thing
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
"goes home"...he didn't think about that. Presumably the guy whose home that he blew up, isn't part of the "community" because he has no home to go to.
They aren't even "burdened" with the duty to actually protect people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
I think it is always good to remember that police are law enforcement. That is their reason for existence. Protection is not necessarily part of the description. If you want to be saved, you call a firefighter. Police are there to punish.
Your last sentence is incorrect. Police should not be dealing out punishment. Police are not allowed to assign guilt or innocence. That falls under the courts.
That's the theory anyway. There's ample evidence that that's not how it works in practice.
Police level of response needs to be appropriate based on the given situation. Seems like this police department just had a bunch of toys they really wanted to play with.
The way judges expect normal people to, within reason, use good judgement and will hold them accountable if they didn't, but will take police at their word that whatever dumb shit they did was totally necessary and appropriate and they can't possibly be blamed for it, is really frustrating.
The "reasonable person" standard [0] is deeply interwoven into our legal infrastructure. Yet as you say, courts/judges seem deeply reluctant to apply this standard to the police (there may be selection bias at play; we don't hear about the instances where unreasonable police actions are held to account).
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
Exactly. Why doesn't the police dept carry insurance for _exactly this_? Yes it will be expensive, but it's a leveraged bet that allows them to do what they need to but have some consequences for doing things they don't.
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.
Especially when it sure seems like they had a good or superior alternative. If the situation/area was sufficiently under control that advancing with siege equipment didn't involve excessive risk of harm to officers or of the suspect escaping in the commotion, then staying put and holding the perimeter was at least as safe and would have kept him contained, surely. No mention that they believed he had anyone else in there with him or anything, so why on Earth did they choose to assault the house?
The decision wasn't based on the word of the police.
"Police decide what's reasonable" seems to be so at least implicitly. And I assume part of their argument was precisely that this was reasonable.
> And I assume part of their argument was precisely that this was reasonable.
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.
I assume a simple "they didn't have a good reason to wreck my house and should pay for it" was a legal non-starter, then, hence the plainly longer-shot (all else being equal) eminent domain argument?
Of course the state should reimburse the family, whether they have to by law or not (though if they don't your laws are fucking stupid).
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.
There is an ever growing boundary between ordinary citizens and government officials. Unless there is a drastic shift, this does not bode well for the U.S. as a country.
In Denver there are "Civilian Crash Investigation" cars which drives me crazy. Police and government officials are also civilians. The distinction on the car is such an "us vs them" mentality and very out of touch.
Police use military terminology when talking among themselves. Many current police officers come from the military before becoming police. Officers refer to non-LEO as "civilians". If the police are supposed to be a civilian agency, someone forgot to tell them. The "us v. them" mentality comes from both sides. Though my personal opinion is: the police (and the government they serve) started it and actively encourage it.
The distinction is longstanding, from a simpler time. The problem is that the police are taking more and more advantage of it.
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 answer is simple. Initiate a high speed chase directly to the homes of your local judges and see how they like it when the police destroy their homes.
This ruling is only on the Takings Clause question: whether the police actions violated the constitutional prohibition against the government taking private property for public use without adequate compensation. Here, the 10th Circuit affirmed the trial court ruling that the Takings Clause did not apply. That decision seems reasonable because this case is not like other Takings clause cases, for a variety of reasons.
The defendants may still be liable under negligence or some other theory. But this ruling doesn’t address those possibilities.
People react to what they wish the law was, rather than what it is.
Cops in America are thugs. Not sure what we can do to fix it at this point
America has become a crazy place. It's like a movie.
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.
Shirt: $10
Belt: $20
Grenades: $1000
Destroying your home: priceless.
Total loss to Walmart was probably like $10, wholesale, shipping, and stocking. That they pursued him more than about 100 meters is kinda nuts. The "high speed chase" that seems to have preceded this was dumb as hell, too.
Armed robbery is serious regardless of the amount stolen. Not that it justifies what the cops did, though.
I didn't get the impression they found out he was armed until later. But the article's not especially clear on that point, among others.
It seems you're right, but he had tried to run over a cop, according to their affidavit: https://www.greenwoodvillage.com/DocumentCenter/View/13916/A...
> we use APC's, grenades, and 40 mm rounds
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.
Armed suspects walking around in Walmarts have committed mass murders recently, guessing that might be informing the response to situations like this.
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.
Kinda overlooking that this guy had his home destroyed and condemned by the city after all this. Are you really saying "tough shit"?
No, but I'm asking what the alternative is given that he committed armed robbery, then fired on police. Do they just wait, given that they don't know who or what is inside just to avoid property damage? How would you feel if someone's family was killed while the police were "waiting to avoid hurting the house". Also bear in mind that while the suspect is shooting at the cops, he could have walked out anytime. At the store, during the drive, after the first bullet, the first tear gas canister, etc. He also waited this whole time, and then wants to have the damage paid for.
I didn't want to go here given the anti-police sentiment prevalent in society right now, but your comments are begging for me to point out a few things.
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.
Home owner in this scenario != shoplifter. It was different people. Shoplifter guy posted up in a random house, which was subsequently bombed. Now the feds won't pay up to the rando who actually owned the place. Did you _read_ TFA?
> [the police] don't know who or what is inside
> 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?
Let's see off the top of my head. Sending in an armed drone. Performing a breach of the house with multiple teams and eliminating the threat. Using optics to figure out where he was and then sniping him. All of these were options that didn't require destroying the house. If they planned on destroying the house anyways why not just bring in a tank, attack helicopter, or do it old school and set the house on fire? All of these are viable options for a single suspect in a house if we follow your logic.
Makes me wonder if this would be different if the criminal had holed up in an officer's house.
Of course it would. Just like it's different when police see another police speeding, or their relatives breaking traffic laws with their fake badge stuck on the windshield.
Pretty sure cops can follow the same rules to tear apart your car looking for drugs, and even if they don't find any, will happily return your stack of car parts and say "have a good day."
The court acknowledged that this may seem “unfair,” but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whoever is damaged by their actions along the way.
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.
Exactly, they eminent domained the dhit out of that house in pursuit of the criminal.
I am not in a position to judge the tactics they used but it’s hard to understand how the government could refuse to compensate the homeowner who had nothing to do with this and had no choice.
Their position seems to be that they don't need to compensate because he's already getting paid by the insurance company.
No mention of homeowner's insurance!
Was the house uninsured? Or did the homeowner's insurance deny the claim?
Homeowners insurance does not cover police destruction. Because there was nothing accidental about it.
For the people in the back.
AMERICAN HOMEOWNERS INSURANCE DOES NOT COVER YOU IN CASE OF POLICE ACTIVITY!
According to the article, it did cover.
Having been in insurance, I seriously doubt anything in insurance can be pithily and accurately summed up with a one liner.
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.
There's a very real chance they denied the claim. Government action is often excluded from insurance claims.
-Not in the US, but my insurance policy explicitly states that it does not cover damage caused by a government entity doing its work.
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...
> The court acknowledged that this may seem “unfair,” but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whoever is damaged by their actions along the way.
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.
IMHO, some facts of life in the US:
(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.
Jesus... Looks like a bomb went off and imploded all windows and doors in the house.
Article says the police threw grenades into every room trying to flush the shoplifter out.
I know, but they where suposed to throw flashbangs and gas. Not real granades!
Really, seens like a tatical unit with a balistic shield would be able to do the job without that much fuzz.
It's too bad that we, as a society, haven't yet found any solution to this band of insane, armed madmen roaming around destroying whatever and whoever they want, stealing whatever they want, and generally doing whatever they want with no accountability whatsoever. And then there's also the guy holed up inside the house that's a minor issue. One day, we may join other civilized countries that can actually control their police rather than letting them run rampant, terrorizing the population.
https://outline.com/MdNmTD
A lot of people are missing some key points here, and getting angry at the wrong aspects. Let me start by saying that I do believe the family should be compensated by some means. They shouldn't become the de facto victim of the crime.
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.
They used 40mm and tear gas grenades, shaped charges, and APCs. The police did their job, but the city should be paying for this. The city is the one at fault for not providing appropriate recompense.
I agree the city should pay.
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.
USA, USA, USA... no but seriously wtf?
The court found that the destruction of property was the result of the state using its police powers, and not eminent domain. Seems reasonable to me.
So the police destroyed a persons house over a shoplifter stealing a shirt and a belt? Wtf?
They feared for their safety. The only possible response was to immediately annihilate the potential threat, no questions asked. Better use the rocket launcher and be safe than sorry.
The "modern" American policing system is such a joke (a scary one).
I'm glad your comment got vouch-rescued, mtgx, so that I can tell you that you have been shadow-banned, and almost all of your comments, except those that are rescued by vouching, are invisible to almost all HN readers (except those of us who have the "showdead" setting turned on). It looks like the shadowban began about 90 days ago, after you left a very mildly disparaging comment related to John Carmack. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20582828
You were banned, but many others who say much more offensive things never get banned.
> 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.
That's not the reason.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587230
Hmm, I wonder what the ideology he's battling is? Could it possibly be the hypercapitalist ideology promoted by the sorts of people who own the site? You know, the white billionaires who own and control Google, Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, etc?
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.
The article says he was armed so maybe it’s ok. But the owners should definitely be compensated.
Wait, you're saying somebody in American has a handgun? That changes everything.
He fired at the police through the garage, according the article.
"...after __believing__ they heard Seacat fire several rounds."
Seems like that isn't even 100% certain.
I'm reminded of the many videos of police assaulting people while shouting "stop resisting".
Gee, so how much uncompensated destruction is permitted if the police are fired upon? What if they leveled the block? What if they drove a tank through the neighborhood, destroying everything they passed on the way. Or every building the shoplifter was suspected of having entered?
They have bombed an entire block:
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/14/us/police-drop-bomb-on-ra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE
Even if he's armed the danger and actual crime committed is so insignificant there's no reason to employ the tactics they used.
Gotta use those machine guns and armored personnel carriers for something...
Started as theft, moved up to attempted murder of a police officer. Use of force is justified. Not repairing the house is absolutely condemnation worthy. My local police department paid for a door broken in during a breach so it's not the same everywhere.
There are gradients of force, they could have done this without destroying this person's house, it's not like he had hostages that were in immediate danger, he was hiding in a house..
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.
Destroying a home because you want to demonstrate how hardcore you are is none.
Surround it and wait for them to give themselves up. That's what other countries do.
Shop-lifted shirts started the whole fiasco. However, the suspect was stopped for questioning, then attempted to run over the questioning officer while fleeing, then broke into and barricaded himself within an occupied home.
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.
My bad I failed miserably - and scanned the article and apparently missed this entirely.
This can't be real
Does homeowners insurance cover the loss?
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?
Making a claim, in some cases, will increase your premium costs. Additionally, there's emotional and mental costs, which home insurance may not cover.
Insurance company could raise his rates and he would still be responsible for the deductible.
Right, but the government offered to cover his deductible.
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.
They offered $5000 toward the deductible and temporary housing. No mention of actual costs involved (like, how large was the total deductible, for instance). Given how long it takes to build a house, plus extra time + expense for demo & removal in this case, I'd expect $5000 to be a small part of just the temporary housing costs.
This is prime example of what insurance should cover 100% no questions asked with no premium increase. These circumstances are way out of a homeowners' control, maybe this guy should look into suing his own insurance company.
According to the article, the city did offer $5k for rent assistance and insurance deductible coverage... not sure if that was before or after the court proceedings got underway.
It sounds like it was going to according to this [0] article. The issue is the amount offered wouldn't even cover the temporary arrangements while the insurance rebuilt the home, 5k covers a hotel for 30ish days way less than it would take to replace the house.
[0] https://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/06/10/owner-of-home-destroy...
Probably not, because it is not an "accident".
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.
https://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/06/10/owner-of-home-destroy...
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.
So far as I'm aware homeowners insurance in almost all cases will not cover government action, just like it typically won't cover floods, ground movement, and various other things. Read your fine print. In all likelihood since the criminal did not cause the damage they will reject any claims.
https://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/06/10/owner-of-home-destroy...
This says his homeowners will cover the cost to rebuild
He's lucky then.
This should be the insurance company's problem. Also, they should have filed in the criminal case with the State judge for the damages who probably would have granted them.
Why are they going after the police? It's the home intruder that should pay for the damages.
How is someone going to pay from in jail?
They garnish his wages in and out of jail for the rest of his life. Yes, it's unlikely they'll ever receive full restitution but he's the one who should pay, not the police.
Is your argument that because the perpetrator is unable to pay, someone else (the police) should?
My argument is that it was the police firing 40mm rounds blindly into the house, using shaped charges, using battering rams for a single suspect with limited ammunition is completely unreasonable. I've seen police safely breach in more dangerous situations. They could have done a number of things before making the house unliveable and should have been expected to be trained in those options. The town should be paying because their actions caused the house to be unlivable and function as essentially eminent domain of the house. The police did far worse damage and put that more people at risk than this person did though their actions.
Also he attempted to kill police officers. It's unlikely he'll get it of jail any time before retirement.
He stole a shirt and a belt. Where's this $400k coming from?
Just because he's unable to pay restitution doesn't mean they should get paid from the police. He's the bad actor here, not the police. He's the one that caused the damage by illegally breaking into their home and not surrendering.
Restitution should come from the one causing the harm, not the ones trying to protect the public from harm.
... and tried to shoot a police officer.
I'm saying in relation to where this money is coming from. If you had $400k, I can safely assume you're not stealing from Walmart
Why isn't the armed shoplifting suspect paying for this? It's his actions that were the catalyst for the damage by police.
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.
It turns out that crackheads aren't likely to have any money so how about the local government make the home owner whole and then they can sue the crackhead for part of his welfare check.
There is a high probability the guy stealing a few dollars of clothes from a friggin' Walmart doesn't have much money to take.
I think they probably could sue him for damages in civil court, but the problem is that (as I understand it) it is not possible to compel someone to pay. You can garnish wages, seize property, etc., but if you're stealing ~$10 of belts do you think you have $400k laying around?
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 suspect certainly has some responsibility. I would find him liable for loss of use while in the building / during investigation after, as a reasonable person would expect a building to be cleared for that. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the building to be destroyed because you're hiding in it, unless you're a sniper in a war zone. Gunshot damage, sure.
This is bizarre logic. I can't even follow it.
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?
A suspect would likely be liable for damage caused by the police in the course of them resisting arrest. However, they are likely judgement-proof, not having the wealth or income to compensate the homeowner. They will likely "pay" in the form of a custodial sentence, but of course that's little remedy for the homeowner.
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.
This will be an unpopular view, but if someone is armed and locks themself in a house (the contents and perons inside which are unknown), its a bit tough for the police.
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..."
No one was held at gunpoint. The article even says the guy took a nap. They could just wait.
What if you and your family were being held hostage, how do the police know "they can just wait"? They don't even know if the guy is really allowed to be in the house. Also how long do the police wait, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month? How many millions is it worth to avoid damaging an armed criminals residence, especially when he can willingly walk out at any time and avoid all that damage.
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."
Was anybody else in the building when the police were destroying it?
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?
I don't care about your fantasy. The reality is insane overreaction to a guy who stole $20 worth of clothes. Walmart writes this into their bottom line. You know what should've happened? Nothing.
Not trying to start a flame war here, but its not a fantasy. There are 36,000 gun deaths, and over 100,000 gun related injuries in the US every year (thats roughly 3000 per week). There was an armed man who lead a high-speed chase and shot at police. The odds are very high he will injure or kill another person, its not a fantasy to think the police are thinking worst case.
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 shouldn't engage in high speed chases if you're concerned for innocent's safety
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"
That 36,000 number isn't really the entire story. The majority of those are suicides. In the year that this incident took place (2015) there were 9,616 murders with a firearm of some kind. Source:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
If you and your family were being held hostage the actions by the police would have put them in far more danger if they didn't know where you were since they were blind firing launchers throughout the house. The police can shut off the power and water, could have flooded the house with tear gas, could have breached with multiple teams. You realize this was more damage than gets caused in a war zone breaching right? The house was so overly damaged it was condemned. That's so in excess of what's required to get a single suspect that they know is in a confined area. They could have sent in a drone with a grenade and caused less damage. This was willful negligence on the part of the police department who didn't use proper judgement in the apprehension of a serious criminal. They literally used military rounds over and over for 19 hours, military vehicles, explosives, grenades. The same city then condemned the house and offered $5000. Destroying the property is going to cost more than that. The city decided to take the house, the city should pay for the house.
Also he shot at the police, that's pretty much going to mean they have to assume you could kill them or someone else. You really think you can not only steal, then lead a car chase, then lock yourself in a house, then shoot at the cops, and expect them to just wait hoping you don't kill someone or yourself or them to avoid property damage? And then, if they kick in your door (or after 19 hours destroy your house), you want them to pay for it, when you could have avoided or ended the situation at any time?
Police aren't supposed to go on high-speed chases anymore, especially because they could hurt innocent people. They made the situation worse in every way.
Hard to say who caused what after certain point. Certainly police has been criticized before for risky chases, for example. Is risking lives of pedestrians worth a chase for a few dollars of stolen merchendise? Then things escalated, sure.
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.
Based on your comments you haven’t read the story. The house didn’t belong to the person police were pursuing and there was nobody in the house. They destroyed the house of a completely innocent third-party.