Trying to make broad assertions regarding who is financially responsible for the lawful execution of police power seems useless.
In this case, it seems obvious that the police should have to pay if the accessing of a device from a given IP should be enough to escalate a search warrant to that of a destructive one.
How did they make the trace? Is it possible the suspect was using a VPN? How did they verify they were never actually at that address? Has this police department executive destructive search warrants based on IP address traces that ended up being incorrect, and then they continued doing so knowing it can likely be inaccurate?
This is something your insurance should be required to cover or should be part of a standard homeowners insurance package, and the insurance company can sue the government and try to get those questions answered from the city.
The attempt to blame this on excessive policing in a broad stroke seems to be the wrong angle that doesn’t address the nuance of these situations.
> The attempt to blame this on excessive policing in a broad stroke seems to be the wrong angle that doesn’t address the nuance of these situations.
I don’t really understand how any of these outcomes can be the result of anything except excessive policing. What kind of crimes warrants police turning up with enough fire power to destroy an entire building?
In the case of a search warrant, what was wrong with just knocking on the door and looking around inside?
For a criminal barricaded in a building, what wrong with surrounding the building and waiting them out? They’re gonna need food, water, sleep eventually.
If there isn’t a clear immediate risk to life, what’s the justification for turning someone home or business into a war zone?
> For a criminal barricaded in a building, what wrong with surrounding the building and waiting them out? They’re gonna need food, water, sleep eventually.
Often the claim is that would give time to alter or destroy evidence.
> Not all of which the government should be responsible for paying out.
On the contrary, if the government was always on the hook for the damage they cause, even if the victim had committed a crime, then police would cause less property damage.
>This is something your insurance should be required to cover or should be part of a standard homeowners insurance package, and the insurance company can sue the government and try to get those questions answered from the city.
Then the city would have to charge the taxpayer. It's more fair to just revoke police personal immunity and have the incurence company sue the individual police officers involved. This way the police will be incentivized to not wreck people's homes, no?
While that may or may not be my belief as well, it’s a broader question than this specific article is addressing.
An individual citizen should not be bringing these complex issues to court for a $16k payout. Obviously their insurance companies should be covering victim compensation and then suing the city.
>In this case, it seems obvious that the police should have to pay
Do they ever? Even if they were guilty, wouldn’t it be on taxpayers to pay?
If it is so, then any investigation about potential wrongdoing should be separate from reimbursing the victim - they suffered damage by a public entity without personal fault, and that should be covered whether protocol was followed or not.
That way, there is no public economic incentive to declare police innocent, which is an extra plus.
>I explicitly stated that insurance should reimburse the victim and then the insurance company can pursue damages for police wrongdoing after.
I meant public funds, regardless of insurance. As in, if you (or the insurer) need to pursue damages then state payment is tied to wrongdoing. My point was that if public action results in a loss it should be reimbursed period.
A citizen doesn’t care (only) that protocol was followed, they care about a broken house either way.
What makes this case particularly egregious is that the criminal was never inside the premises. The police were apparently so cowardly that they were too afraid to enter and search, without first lobbing 30 tear gas canisters through the walls that they tore down.
Seems like they could have used some mm-wave radar, or other means to sense whether or not somebody was inside, before destroying somebody else's house.
> Trying to make broad assertions regarding who is financially responsible for the lawful execution of police power seems useless.
No. Most people are distracted by qualified immunity, but this is exactly where the rot starts - poor incentives from damaged caused by "government agents" just being waved away as if it is nobody's fault, like it was some kind of natural disaster.
The primary reform we need here is that any damage caused by government agents should start off being the responsibility of the government itself. If the government wants to shift that liability (eg your stuff was damaged because you committed a crime and were found guilty, or as part of a plea), that's fine. If the government successfully subrogates (you were hit by a cop during a high speed chase, so the government and the criminal that necessitated the high speed chase are jointly liable, and the criminal's insurance company has paid out), that's fine. But the basic default should be one of making the victims of policing whole. To do otherwise is to fail to account for the full cost of policing, taking the extra from its victims in a perverted reverse-lottery.
My point is that it makes far more sense to have insurance lawyers deal with this. It’s a much better way of aligning incentives to have large insurance companies pressure the government to operate better than individuals.
Attorneys did deal with this. Courts decided against the victim. Courts have decided against the victims in much larger cases, where even more money would have been spent on attorneys. Fundamentally, there has to be a cause of action in order for insurance companies to apply any "pressure".
The attorneys you buy, and the hours and angles they’re willing to explore for a single $16k payout is very different than the attorneys your insurance company buys for 50 $50k payouts.
I would say victims of erroneous policing. No compensation is due if the person who suffered the loss is convicted, or the person who was convicted had ongoing permission to access whatever is involved even if they didn't own it.
But I would apply this to all such victims. You spend a night in jail and are not convicted, you are owed some statutory compensation which I think should at a minimum be your annual earned income/365.
> No compensation is due if the person who suffered the loss is convicted
I already included how I propose this is handled - explicit law outlining that the liability falls to someone convicted of a crime.
> or the person who was convicted had ongoing permission to access whatever is involved
I don't see why this needs to be an exception, and also if it was an exception why it wouldn't just form another avenue of unaccountable abuse (eg imagine roommates. Let's say the police bust up a whole apartment for fun - the innocent roommates really should be getting compensated for that (they're innocent, remember?), and if that damage was necessary to effect the arrest/search, the govt can then recover from the criminal.
Agreed. I think most people would agree the outcome here is profoundly unjust: this woman had her house destroyed with no compensation, and as a result police have no incentive to not go ballistic when a more constrained approach would suffice.
People can only be fucked over so much before they start to consider that the whole system is corrupt, including the courts. The only reason this hasn't been decided the other way is that it affects relatively few individuals, so it's not a rallying cry for most people.
> They were searching for a suspect, John Parnell Thomas, who they believed, based on his IP address, had accessed the internet from Hadley house.
Setting aside politics here...
Was the IP address recycled? I used to see this all the time with my old home providers but much less often now. However I go through about 40 IP addresses a week on my mobile data.
They should have tried the negligence angle. Why did the police make this mistake? Somebody didn't do their job correctly. The city is responsible for that.
This other case, referenced in the same article, is even more deranged. For police to feel justified by such absurdly small reasons to mount a full blown militarized assault that they're entitled to offer no compensation for, corrupts every part of the decision-making systems above and below them. It's blatantly disturbed and sick. https://reason.com/2025/10/10/this-indiana-city-doesnt-have-...
Let's face it. We live in a police state -- where the police have absolute power and zero liability. Now what. The best thing to do is to pay fewer taxes in every way possible. This applies particularly to businesses. Already we're paying tariff taxes too now. In many ways, the more people pay in aggregate, the more militarized the police get, and the more the people get abused.
This assertion stood out the most to me and shows how much of our court system is utter bullshit:
> As a reminder, Hadley urges us to hold that: “innocent
homeowner[s] with no connection to the sought-after sus-
pect[,] whose property the [government] intentionally and se-
verely damage[s] through a military-style assault … to exe-
cute a warrant to apprehend [a] suspect … when the property
otherwise would not have been damaged” are owed compen-
sation.
> Mindful of our decisions’ precedential effect on future
cases, we have concerns about the administrability of Had-
ley’s proposed holding. It raises difficult questions, not least
of which is, how does one determine innocence? For example,
must an ancillary criminal proceeding conclude to show in-
nocence before proceeding with a takings claim? Does having
“no connection” with a suspect—as Hadley asserted herself—
render the landowner “innocent”?
Like come on, this seems like a nonsensical rebuttal. We know she was innocent and that the police wrongfully raided the wrong home. Our court system is supposed to be built on the presumption of innocent until proven guilty. The judge argued that she should've instead brought a case against the police to try and surmount the qualified immunity defense but they're just kicking the ball down another losing court decision.
Sounds messed up but clearly there’s an opportunity to sell insurance for this type of event. Sort of unbelievable existing insurance doesn’t cover it.
Do doctors, contractors and everyone else have qualified immunity? That's probably the culprit. When you have that, you get used to not having any responsibility.
Trying to make broad assertions regarding who is financially responsible for the lawful execution of police power seems useless.
In this case, it seems obvious that the police should have to pay if the accessing of a device from a given IP should be enough to escalate a search warrant to that of a destructive one.
How did they make the trace? Is it possible the suspect was using a VPN? How did they verify they were never actually at that address? Has this police department executive destructive search warrants based on IP address traces that ended up being incorrect, and then they continued doing so knowing it can likely be inaccurate?
This is something your insurance should be required to cover or should be part of a standard homeowners insurance package, and the insurance company can sue the government and try to get those questions answered from the city.
The attempt to blame this on excessive policing in a broad stroke seems to be the wrong angle that doesn’t address the nuance of these situations.
> The attempt to blame this on excessive policing in a broad stroke seems to be the wrong angle that doesn’t address the nuance of these situations.
I don’t really understand how any of these outcomes can be the result of anything except excessive policing. What kind of crimes warrants police turning up with enough fire power to destroy an entire building?
In the case of a search warrant, what was wrong with just knocking on the door and looking around inside?
For a criminal barricaded in a building, what wrong with surrounding the building and waiting them out? They’re gonna need food, water, sleep eventually.
If there isn’t a clear immediate risk to life, what’s the justification for turning someone home or business into a war zone?
> For a criminal barricaded in a building, what wrong with surrounding the building and waiting them out? They’re gonna need food, water, sleep eventually.
Often the claim is that would give time to alter or destroy evidence.
As if destroying someone’s house couldn’t also destroy evidence!
The examples given are a subset of all circumstances where property damage occurred as a result of legal police power.
Not all of which the government should be responsible for paying out.
> Not all of which the government should be responsible for paying out.
On the contrary, if the government was always on the hook for the damage they cause, even if the victim had committed a crime, then police would cause less property damage.
>This is something your insurance should be required to cover or should be part of a standard homeowners insurance package, and the insurance company can sue the government and try to get those questions answered from the city.
Then the city would have to charge the taxpayer. It's more fair to just revoke police personal immunity and have the incurence company sue the individual police officers involved. This way the police will be incentivized to not wreck people's homes, no?
While that may or may not be my belief as well, it’s a broader question than this specific article is addressing.
An individual citizen should not be bringing these complex issues to court for a $16k payout. Obviously their insurance companies should be covering victim compensation and then suing the city.
The insurance companies specifically do not cover government actions.
It makes perfectly good sense when the police are right, but when an innocent gets caught up in it compensation should be due.
>In this case, it seems obvious that the police should have to pay
Do they ever? Even if they were guilty, wouldn’t it be on taxpayers to pay?
If it is so, then any investigation about potential wrongdoing should be separate from reimbursing the victim - they suffered damage by a public entity without personal fault, and that should be covered whether protocol was followed or not.
That way, there is no public economic incentive to declare police innocent, which is an extra plus.
What?
The incentive issue of police mishaps being paid from taxpayer funds is entirely independent.
> any investigation about potential wrongdoing should be separate from reimbursing the victim
I explicitly stated that insurance should reimburse the victim and then the insurance company can pursue damages for police wrongdoing after.
>I explicitly stated that insurance should reimburse the victim and then the insurance company can pursue damages for police wrongdoing after.
I meant public funds, regardless of insurance. As in, if you (or the insurer) need to pursue damages then state payment is tied to wrongdoing. My point was that if public action results in a loss it should be reimbursed period.
A citizen doesn’t care (only) that protocol was followed, they care about a broken house either way.
What makes this case particularly egregious is that the criminal was never inside the premises. The police were apparently so cowardly that they were too afraid to enter and search, without first lobbing 30 tear gas canisters through the walls that they tore down.
Seems like they could have used some mm-wave radar, or other means to sense whether or not somebody was inside, before destroying somebody else's house.
> Trying to make broad assertions regarding who is financially responsible for the lawful execution of police power seems useless.
No. Most people are distracted by qualified immunity, but this is exactly where the rot starts - poor incentives from damaged caused by "government agents" just being waved away as if it is nobody's fault, like it was some kind of natural disaster.
The primary reform we need here is that any damage caused by government agents should start off being the responsibility of the government itself. If the government wants to shift that liability (eg your stuff was damaged because you committed a crime and were found guilty, or as part of a plea), that's fine. If the government successfully subrogates (you were hit by a cop during a high speed chase, so the government and the criminal that necessitated the high speed chase are jointly liable, and the criminal's insurance company has paid out), that's fine. But the basic default should be one of making the victims of policing whole. To do otherwise is to fail to account for the full cost of policing, taking the extra from its victims in a perverted reverse-lottery.
There is nothing you said that we disagree with.
My point is that it makes far more sense to have insurance lawyers deal with this. It’s a much better way of aligning incentives to have large insurance companies pressure the government to operate better than individuals.
Attorneys did deal with this. Courts decided against the victim. Courts have decided against the victims in much larger cases, where even more money would have been spent on attorneys. Fundamentally, there has to be a cause of action in order for insurance companies to apply any "pressure".
The attorneys you buy, and the hours and angles they’re willing to explore for a single $16k payout is very different than the attorneys your insurance company buys for 50 $50k payouts.
Why are you putting so much faith in an idea that more attorneys will necessarily prevail? This seems in the neighborhood of the just world fallacy.
This article references an earlier event where a $500k house was destroyed - one and a half orders of magnitude larger - with the same legal outcome.
Is it that hard to believe that the state has excepted itself (and its agents) from legal liability?
I would say victims of erroneous policing. No compensation is due if the person who suffered the loss is convicted, or the person who was convicted had ongoing permission to access whatever is involved even if they didn't own it.
But I would apply this to all such victims. You spend a night in jail and are not convicted, you are owed some statutory compensation which I think should at a minimum be your annual earned income/365.
>> I would say victims of erroneous policing. No compensation is due if the person who suffered the loss is convicted
Call me crazy, but committing a crime doesn't mean you potentially forfeit everything you own, implicitly.
> No compensation is due if the person who suffered the loss is convicted
I already included how I propose this is handled - explicit law outlining that the liability falls to someone convicted of a crime.
> or the person who was convicted had ongoing permission to access whatever is involved
I don't see why this needs to be an exception, and also if it was an exception why it wouldn't just form another avenue of unaccountable abuse (eg imagine roommates. Let's say the police bust up a whole apartment for fun - the innocent roommates really should be getting compensated for that (they're innocent, remember?), and if that damage was necessary to effect the arrest/search, the govt can then recover from the criminal.
If the government can accidentally wreck your home and not pay for it, they can intentionally do it too.
They can also seize any amount of your property at any time and nothing short of a state supreme court can do anything about it
Ridiculous but doesn't even scratch the tip of the iceberg anymore.
We've completely lost the plot with our courts "strict" interpretation of laws.
Agreed. I think most people would agree the outcome here is profoundly unjust: this woman had her house destroyed with no compensation, and as a result police have no incentive to not go ballistic when a more constrained approach would suffice.
People can only be fucked over so much before they start to consider that the whole system is corrupt, including the courts. The only reason this hasn't been decided the other way is that it affects relatively few individuals, so it's not a rallying cry for most people.
[flagged]
> They were searching for a suspect, John Parnell Thomas, who they believed, based on his IP address, had accessed the internet from Hadley house.
Setting aside politics here...
Was the IP address recycled? I used to see this all the time with my old home providers but much less often now. However I go through about 40 IP addresses a week on my mobile data.
This can easily be changed - just ask your representatives to vote for laws on this.
Wouldn't have been cheaper for the city to make an ex-gratia payment?
It's important for the victim not to get anything, I guess.
They should have tried the negligence angle. Why did the police make this mistake? Somebody didn't do their job correctly. The city is responsible for that.
It’s not the fault of the individual trying to secure a $16k payout from a multi billion dollar institution for not acting optimally.
Insurance company should do that.
This other case, referenced in the same article, is even more deranged. For police to feel justified by such absurdly small reasons to mount a full blown militarized assault that they're entitled to offer no compensation for, corrupts every part of the decision-making systems above and below them. It's blatantly disturbed and sick. https://reason.com/2025/10/10/this-indiana-city-doesnt-have-...
Let's face it. We live in a police state -- where the police have absolute power and zero liability. Now what. The best thing to do is to pay fewer taxes in every way possible. This applies particularly to businesses. Already we're paying tariff taxes too now. In many ways, the more people pay in aggregate, the more militarized the police get, and the more the people get abused.
This assertion stood out the most to me and shows how much of our court system is utter bullshit:
> As a reminder, Hadley urges us to hold that: “innocent homeowner[s] with no connection to the sought-after sus- pect[,] whose property the [government] intentionally and se- verely damage[s] through a military-style assault … to exe- cute a warrant to apprehend [a] suspect … when the property otherwise would not have been damaged” are owed compen- sation.
> Mindful of our decisions’ precedential effect on future cases, we have concerns about the administrability of Had- ley’s proposed holding. It raises difficult questions, not least of which is, how does one determine innocence? For example, must an ancillary criminal proceeding conclude to show in- nocence before proceeding with a takings claim? Does having “no connection” with a suspect—as Hadley asserted herself— render the landowner “innocent”?
Like come on, this seems like a nonsensical rebuttal. We know she was innocent and that the police wrongfully raided the wrong home. Our court system is supposed to be built on the presumption of innocent until proven guilty. The judge argued that she should've instead brought a case against the police to try and surmount the qualified immunity defense but they're just kicking the ball down another losing court decision.
[flagged]
That has started already
[flagged]
Sounds messed up but clearly there’s an opportunity to sell insurance for this type of event. Sort of unbelievable existing insurance doesn’t cover it.
That’s what I was wondering too. Should be a really cheap premium, no?
Perhaps professional insurance for the police like what doctors, contractors and everyone else has to cover damages they do?
Do doctors, contractors and everyone else have qualified immunity? That's probably the culprit. When you have that, you get used to not having any responsibility.