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Monte Gruhlke
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 03 May 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 3303
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| Posted: 06 February 2012 at 12:16am | IP Logged | 1
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He never said they can't be held accountable, period. You have to read the rest of the sentence.
but do you honestly believe that police invariably "make every effort"?
Of course. Maybe I should have said "reasonable" effort, but yes. Otherwise the case gets thrown out.
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Luke Styer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 1515
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| Posted: 06 February 2012 at 6:22am | IP Logged | 2
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Monte Gruhlke wrote:
| Of course. Maybe I should have said "reasonable" effort, but yes. Otherwise the case gets thrown out. |
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Even granting "reasonable effort," I don't see how you can honestly believe that the members of any human institution "invariably" do much of anything. There are police officers, just like there are members of any other profession, who make mistakes and cut corners.
On a really basic level, it's not at all uncommon for police to raid incorrect houses.
Here's a case where they raided a house that had been sold three months earlier by the guy they were looking for. Home sales are public records. Checking to see who owns a house before you raid seems like "reasonable effort" to me.
Here's another case. This happens a lot. Seriously, more often than you might think. It even happens to judges.
That's stuff pulled off the first couple pages of a single Google search. All the links are to the website of Reason magazine, which is an outlet that pretty consistently covers the issue of wrong-house raids, but those pages, for the most part, link to coverage of each individual raid-on-the-wrong-house on the site of a news agency local to each particular incident.
And that's just one kind of police error. There's no case to get thrown out because these are innocent people whose houses are being busted into because police acted on bad information, be it a failure to check public records and see a house had been sold or just plain getting the address wrong.
At the very least these particular police departments clearly don't invariably make every reasonable effort to get their information right.
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Brian Floyd
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 07 July 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 8586
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| Posted: 06 February 2012 at 7:12am | IP Logged | 3
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What if the police bust into the wrong house and its the home of someone with a heart condition and the person has a stroke or heart attack, fatal or otherwise? Or if they bust in either unannounced or its the home of someone hearing impaired, that person pulls a gun because they think they're being burglarized, and the police shoot them dead?
The problem is that laws give the police too much leeway and protection. You break into someone's home, I don't care if the warrant is valid: someone should pay for it, either losing their life, their job or their money depending on what happens.
In some of those cases in those links, the government refused to pay for the damages. I hope the victims either went to the news media or found some legal way to make the life of whoever made the mistake a living hell.
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Monte Gruhlke
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 03 May 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 3303
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| Posted: 06 February 2012 at 9:55am | IP Logged | 4
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Awesome, use particular events to spotlight when it happens, I highly approve of it. This beats cynical overgeneralization by a light year.
But I could cite many, many more events (using more than one source website) where the guilty went to jail/the victims got justice. I'll even use your phrase; it happens more than you think. If you notice, news sources usually report when things go wrong, when abuse happens, tragedy occurs, etc – it isn't as sensational to spotlight when things go right (unless big names are involved).
Police do attempt to do due diligence - it's their job. It's like saying that you doubt firemen do much of anything. Or lawyers. Or anyone.
I do not think that people are infallible or that abuses do not happen, I just think that the consequences of failure are too high (and costly).
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Luke Styer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 1515
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| Posted: 06 February 2012 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | 5
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Brian Floyd wrote:
| What if the police bust into the wrong house and its the home of someone with a heart condition and the person has a stroke or heart attack, fatal or otherwise? |
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According to the Supreme Court, that just the homeowner's bad luck:
Los Angeles v. Rettele wrote:
| Valid warrants will issue to search the innocent, and people like Rettele and Sadler unfortunately bear the cost. Officers executing search warrants on occasion enter a house when residents are engaged in private activity; and the resulting frustration, embarrassment, and humiliation may be real, as was true here. When officers execute a valid warrant and act in a reasonable manner to protect themselves from harm, however, the Fourth Amendment is not violated. |
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That's another case where the cops busted into a house that had been sold months earlier, pulled the innocent residents out of bed naked, and made them stand naked at gunpoint for several minutes before letting them get dressed. The innocent homeowners sued, and the Supreme Court threw out their lawsuit.
QUOTE:
| Or if they bust in either unannounced or its the home of someone hearing impaired, that person pulls a gun because they think they're being burglarized, and the police shoot them dead? |
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What happens is the homeowner gets shot and possibly dies. And then the police say that they did nothing wrong:
ABC News wrote:
| “We did the best surveillance we could do, and a mistake wasmade,” Lebanon Police Chief Billy Weeks said. “It’s a very severemistake, a costly mistake. It makes us look at our own policies andprocedures to make sure this never occurs again.” He said,however, the two policemen were not at fault. |
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Brian Floyd wrote:
The problem is that laws give the police too much leeway and protection. You break into someone's home, I don't care if the warrant is valid: someone should pay for it, either losing their life, their job or their money depending on what happens.
In some of those cases in those links, the government refused to pay for the damages. I hope the victims either went to the news media or found some legal way to make the life of whoever made the mistake a living hell. |
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The media largely ignores this issue, and the Supreme Court has done what it can to close the courts to these people.
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Luke Styer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 1515
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| Posted: 06 February 2012 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | 6
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Monte Gruhlke wrote:
| Awesome, use particular events to spotlight when it happens, I highly approve of it. |
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Here are more.
QUOTE:
| But I could cite many, many more events (using more than one source website) where the guilty went to jail/the victims got justice. I'll even use your phrase; it happens more than you think. |
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As a criminal defense attorney. I know that in the vast majority of people convicted of crimes are guilty. I'd go further and say that in the vast majority of cases the police do their jobs correctly and well. I'm not anti-police, I'm just in favor of holding people and institutions who are entrusted with authority accountable for their use of that authority.
QUOTE:
| Police do attempt to do due diligence - it's their job. It's like saying that you doubt firemen do much of anything. Or lawyers. Or anyone. |
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You're apparently misreading me. I am not saying that police never attempt due diligence. I'm saying that it's not accurate to say that police always attempt due diligence.
QUOTE:
| I do not think that people are infallible or that abuses do not happen, I just think that the consequences of failure are too high (and costly). |
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The consequences for whom? |
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Topic Closed)
