Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Balko has two stories about the police serving warrants at the wrong address, something that happens regularly and often with fatal results. Here's the first one, from Indiana (and a link to the original article):
Marye Minton, 70, and her 72-year-old husband were awoken early Thursday to officers banging on the door of their home...Marye Minton said she is upset that the officers came inside and ordered her husband, who is in poor health, onto the ground.
"They said to him, 'Get on the floor,' like that, and see my husband's had four strokes, and he can't whoop anybody, he can't do anything," she said. "I'm very mad and I don't want it to happen to another citizen."
Officers were trying to serve a warrant for a man wanted on drug charges. The address listed on the paperwork was 4042. The Minton's home is 4048, with both house numbers clearly marked.
But Major Mark Robinett of the Marion County Sheriff's Department, who is in charge of warrant sweeps, said he was told that officers had a difficult time reading the addresses because of overcast skies.
And the second one (original article):
Kenyan immigrant Nancy Njoroge had been living in the United States for a year when a Montgomery County SWAT team burst into her Gaithersburg apartment at 4 a.m., handcuffed her and her two teenage daughters, and searched her apartment, court records show.Police found nothing.
The reason: Njoroge lived in No. 202 of her apartment complex. The police had a search warrant for apartment 201.
After rejecting an offer from the county's claims adjuster of a "couple of movie passes," the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the county on the family's behalf for unspecified damages, according to ACLU records filed in court.
The ACLU said the purpose of the lawsuit was to hold the police department accountable for its mistake.
"Officers had but one apartment to locate, in a quiet and well-lit hallway in the dead of night, without distraction and with clearly marked doors and numbers," ACLU lawyer Fritz Mulhauser said in a letter to the county...
Court records don't give a clear reason why the police raided the wrong apartment, and the county attorney assigned to the case did not respond to inquiries for the story. But in court records, a SWAT team leader indicated that it was an isolated incident.
But it isn't isolated at all. Hardly a week goes by that Balko doesn't have a link to at least one wrong address raid, which often have horrible endings. Dogs and people get killed by trigger happy cops,houses get burned down by flash bang grenades thrown through windows - and usually without so much as an apology from the police, much less paying for the damage.
If you had a pizza delivery guy who delivered pizza to the wrong address as often as cops do, you'd fire him.
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Comments
What an overreaction here Ed!
This isn't a single cop or group of cops making this same mistake over and over again. Balko finds 1-2 a week, out of all the police raids performed across the country.
While I'm sure we'd all agree that 100% accuracy would be preferred -- especially since innocent lives are at stake -- 99.8%+ accuracy isn't all that bad either.
Posted by: doctorgoo | June 29, 2009 9:28 AM
Well when there are overcast skies, I typically switch house numbers with my neighbors just in case God wants to smite me with lightening.
Posted by: Odie | June 29, 2009 9:29 AM
doctorgoo, I'm sure Ed knows that these are a few isolated cases compared to the millions of good policemen across the country. I think his point is that he wants a nationwide system to crack down on bad cops to get that percentage as high as possible.
Posted by: Brandon | June 29, 2009 9:55 AM
"But Major Mark Robinett of the Marion County Sheriff's Department, who is in charge of warrant sweeps, said he was told that officers had a difficult time reading the addresses because of overcast skies."
Really? Couldn't see because of overcast skies? Aren't cops issued some sort of device to illuminate dark areas? What's that thing called again? Oh, yeah! It's called a flashlight!
Posted by: jla1125 | June 29, 2009 9:59 AM
doctorgoo stated:
That's the type of perspective that allowed Japanese manufacturers to surpass American manufacturers back in the 1970s through 1990s in terms of quality and reliability. A better rate to consider is Defects per Million (DPM), which leads to more opportunistic thinking and an increased willingness to drive defects closer to zero. 99.8% is equivalent to 2000 DFM. Perspective is important and the pyschology of taking action to reduce your 2000 rate is significantly more powerful then improving a 99.8% rate in spite of their equivalence. My experience transforming manufacturing plants to DPM from percentage rates was validated 100% of the time with dozens in the population. The industry I operated in and related industries also experienced a sea change switching as well, especially the auto industry. A good example was one auto manufacturer who when they switched had an acceptable incoming rate of 50,000 DPM (95% good parts coming from suppliers) relative to Nissan who was at 11 DPM, which translates to 99.9989% good parts (for electronic modules).
I speculate that police administrators may very well unconsciously use the framework doctorgoo uses when considering the number of wrong addresses served while I also speculate that police administrators unconsciously use a framework similar to DPM when considering the number of cops killed in the line of duty, i.e., even one cop killed is unacceptable. We've seen great advancements in the process used for traffic cops to approach a car they stopped to better protect cops' lives. We should expect nothing less when it comes to the castle doctrine (a man's home is his castle).
BTW, I don't mean to pile on to doctorgoo's point too harshly and am cognizant his value was for illustration purposes only. His general point that we need to consider the number of wrongly served warrants relative to the total population is a correct one. My point is that I'm skeptical that law enforcement is sufficiently committed to reducing their rate of defects on this issue or even properly framing the issue that would help prioritize this issue's importance to those who fund their paychecks.
Posted by: Michael Heath | June 29, 2009 9:59 AM
Posted by: Eric | June 29, 2009 10:17 AM
@doctorgoo
With 99.98% - innocent people die or get traumatized. But your comment also points out another flaw - why all the raids? Most of these raids are not even justified to begin with. Police teams throughout the country are using SWAT teams for arrests they used to just knock on the door for - all under the guise of "keeping the cops safe". And time and time again - SWAT teams get off the hook with no more than a slap on the wrist if that.
We had a wrong door swat raid in Minneapolis a couple of years ago. On the positive side - they at least apologized. On the negative side - the officers that were part of the raid eventually got rewards for executing the raid in a "professional manner."
Posted by: yoshi | June 29, 2009 10:23 AM
Granted the cops didn't barge into my home, but once some rather incensed cop called me and told me he was finally glad he tracked me down, after I was on the lam for so long ... and called me by the wrong name. After hanging up, I called a lawyer friend who managed to get things straightened out before some officer in blue came to haul me off to the pokey.
I never found out who the cop thought I was, and why he assumed calling his suspect at home would make catching that suspect any easier.
Considering how scared shitless I was at the time, I can only imagine how these folks felt when the boys in blue came banging at their doors, guns drawn, like some scene from Law & Order. I don't blame them for suing the PD.
Posted by: wheatdogg | June 29, 2009 10:28 AM
Posted by: Taz | June 29, 2009 10:43 AM
It seems like many of these cases are grossly mishandled. The cops are not under threat. They lack focus.
1. They assemble their paperwork and team.
2. They plan the assault.
3. They arrive at the location on their paperwork.
4. They execute their trained raid technique.
No one checks that third step?
Every cop checks his weapon, his radio, his vest, his backup equipment, knows who is on the raid and roughly where they'll be.
Couldn't they all check the stupid address, the easiest of jobs? If it affected their lives like the other pre-raid tasks, you bet they would. But busting the wrong door has almost no negatives. Damned sad.
Posted by: MikeMa | June 29, 2009 11:01 AM
My employer is in the extreme low-cost end of our industry. Our products often sell for less than 1% of the high-end stuff, but I can guarantee you that a 2000 ppm undetected field failure rate would have Management shutting down lines and running out of pikes for mounting heads.
Hell, we catch grief at 5 ppm. And our stuff doesn't cost people's lives when it fails.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | June 29, 2009 11:30 AM
I'm actually with doctorgoo in the sense that an occasional mistake of this nature -- even an occasional fatal mistake of this nature -- is sadly unavoidable. A result of the human condition is that all of the people who we hire as cops share 98+% of their DNA with chimpanzees and have brains evolved for dealing with Stone Age problems. Mistakes will be made.
What makes my blood boil is that pretty much without exception, when this kind of mistake happens, the police are completely unapologetic and unrepentant, and unwilling to offer any kind of compensation. That is morally unconscionable. And yet it seems to be standard operating procedure when something like this happens.
Police are human and they will make mistakes. That's not what makes me angry. What makes me angry is that they are also pompous assholes who don't ever admit their mistakes or try to make it right.
True, but I'm sure once or twice a week a cop forgets to check if his gun is loaded before a raid, leaves his radio in the car, forgets to wear his vest, etc. Mistakes happen.
The problem is that when a cop dies because he forgot to wear his vest, it's a tragedy; but when a civilian dies because a cop forgot to check the address, it's a procedural error.
Mistakes like this are unavoidable, but when they happen, the PD should be on their hands and knees begging forgiveness, not circling the wagons and insulting the victims.
Posted by: James Sweet | June 29, 2009 11:33 AM
The seriousness of serving a warrant and the simplicity of locating a house or apartment leads me to believe a 100% success rate would be a reasonable expectation.
Posted by: Owen | June 29, 2009 11:36 AM
I think doctorgoo just made up the 99.8% success rate number.
However, this brings up an interesting point: What is the error rate? I said above that I think the problem is the police response to this tragedy, not that it happens at all. But that only applies if the error rate is extremely low. It would be interesting to know in what percentage of raids the cops get the wrong address... I agree that 0.2% would be waaaay too high. So what is the real number, I wonder? And what would we consider acceptable?
Posted by: James Sweet | June 29, 2009 11:37 AM
But your comment also points out another flaw - why all the raids? Most of these raids are not even justified to begin with. Police teams throughout the country are using SWAT teams for arrests they used to just knock on the door for - all under the guise of "keeping the cops safe".
That's the point, here. There has been a 1,500 percent increase in the use of SWAT teams since the early 1980s, almost entirely driven by the drug war. The vast majority of these raids are on nonviolent drug offenders. Even if these SWAT teams never made a single mistake, it's the image of a team of cops dressed like soldiers kicking down the door of someone suspected of no more than a consensual crime that's the problem. That they occasionally get the wrong house, or accidentally shoot someone only makes it worse.
And even a very low error rate ends up affecting a lot of people when you're talking about 50,000-60,000 raids per year across the country.
To put it another way, we could start sending SWAT teams to arrest parking ticket scofflaws, and I'd imagine the error rate would be about the same -- less than once percent. That doesn't mean it's an appropriate use of SWAT teams. Nor would pointing out that cops got the right address 99.5 percent of the time be of much comfort for the families of the 5-6 people each year who get killed because the PD sent a SWAT team to collect on a parking ticket.
Posted by: Radley Balko | June 29, 2009 11:38 AM
Planes have crashed and killed hundreds of people due to much stupider mistakes than misreading a house number. 100% success rate is impossible in any endeavor involving humans, unfortunately.
Of course, when a plane crashes, airlines actually apologize and attempt to compensate the victims. If airlines were run by cops, they would just say it was the passengers' faults.
Posted by: James Sweet | June 29, 2009 11:41 AM
I also agree with Radley Balko's comments about inappropriate use of SWAT for nonviolent drug offenders. (And for that matter, the tendency of the ill-advised drug war to create a lucrative market for exploitation by violent gangs, so that even legitimate usage of SWAT is most likely increased unnecessarily)
Posted by: James Sweet | June 29, 2009 11:46 AM
There's another issue here.
Imagine the following:
Cop shows up at my door. I answer the door and he wants to search my house. Says he has a warrant. I ask (in a reasonable voice) "May I see the warrant please?"
Cop says "Here it is."
I say "But this says 12345 Main Street. This is 12347 Mian street."
Cop says "So it is. Sorry to have bothered you."
I understand that this scenario calls for exceptional qualities (IOW, rationality) on the part of the cop as well as on my part, but isn't the outcome ever-so-much better than if I try to fight him?
You have to remember that it's the cop's job to win fights. It's not his job to get beat up.
Posted by: BaldApe | June 29, 2009 12:00 PM
The existence of the SWAT teams may be due to the drug war, but I bet the excessive use of them is due to the fact that if you got 'em, you use 'em. Gotta justify those budgets.
If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Posted by: BaldApe | June 29, 2009 12:05 PM
I think the lesson that needs to be learned from these incidents is that there should be serious sanctions against the police officers/force involved in such serious mistakes. If you know that you are likely to be fired and heavily fined for making such a dumb mistake, then you are much more likely to double and triple-check the details of the raid before executing it.
It would also likely reduce the overall number of raids too, as the police become more reluctant to put themselves in potential harms way of punitive action should they get something wrong.
Posted by: tacitus | June 29, 2009 12:05 PM
@ #16
In my experience, serious commercial plane crashes are generally the result of a chain of very minor factors that align sufficiently to result in an accident.
The apologies an compensation for the victims is certainly the decent thing to do, but the more telling difference here is that there is an enormous effort made by the airline, manufacturers and government to determine what caused the crash, and (often very expensive) remedial steps to prevent that problem from ever happening again.
If police departments took this approach whenever they screw up and cause injury or death to innocent people, I would find it a lot easier to cut them some slack.
I'm thinking that a good analogy here is the difference between private and commercial aviation. The accident rates for commercial carriers are so low that they are almost statistically insignificant, and are still trending down. The accident rates for general aviation (that is, amateur pilots like me) have been pretty static for many years. The sad thing is that the private pilots still regularly kill themselves because of rookie mistakes like failing to properly preflight an aircraft, or stalling and spinning from a low altitude. These would be analogous to the kinds of mistakes we're seeing the police make on these raids.
In my opinion, law enforcement agencies in North America are still acting like amateurs despite the years of experience they should have amassed by now. If they took an approach that was more like commercial aviation, we would all be a lot safer, and probably more likely to trust police officers we interact with day to day.
Posted by: GXT | June 29, 2009 12:12 PM
They do now. There was a time, back in the 50s, when US airlines pretended they were perfect. A court case that changed liability rules, and the extremely bad publicity surrounding the 1956 Grand Canyon mid-air collision, turned things around.
Posted by: william e emba | June 29, 2009 12:15 PM
Baldape,
Do you really think that the guy who ordered a frail 72 year old onto the ground would go along with that script?
Police are often pumped up when they are about to make a raid. That only makese sense, if you are going into a dangerous situation, that you would want that adrenaline pumping. The problem comes when they are faced with a situation that is not dangerous.
Posted by: Kelly | June 29, 2009 12:22 PM
it was too overcast to accurately read the house numbers, but not so overcast the cops had any difficulty walking up to the door and barging in... yet it seems it was too overcast for them to walk up to the house number in order to verify it, first?
methinks this overcast was not in the skies, but rather somewhere between the cops' ears.
Posted by: Nomen Nescio | June 29, 2009 12:24 PM
ugh, my html went crazy - sorry about that!
Posted by: Kelly | June 29, 2009 12:25 PM
Yes, I should have written "99.8%+" so that it was more obviously meant as an approximation.
If people are complaining about the typical official response of the police to their own mistakes (e.g. ignoring the problem), then that's one thing. But the way Ed phrased his concluding paragraph, he's complaining more about the fact that these mistakes happen at all -- even though such mistakes are a rarity -- instead of complaining about any inappropriate (non-)response from the police.
Radley:
That's the point, here. There has been a 1,500 percent increase in the use of SWAT teams since the early 1980s, almost entirely driven by the drug war. The vast majority of these raids are on nonviolent drug offenders. Even if these SWAT teams never made a single mistake, it's the image of a team of cops dressed like soldiers kicking down the door of someone suspected of no more than a consensual crime that's the problem. That they occasionally get the wrong house, or accidentally shoot someone only makes it worse.
Let's look at the situation where non-SWAT police are performing routine raids involving, to use your phrasing, "consensual crimes"... How many police are attacked/killed because they unknowingly went into a house unprepared for a ultra-violent response? Is it around the 0.2% that I approximated before?
My point here is that an appropriate level of response by the police is required at all times. But this is usually something can be calculated after the fact, and is mostly unknowable beforehand... and here lies the conflict. The police cannot control how the (alleged) criminal will react to the raid, so logic dictates they should take every reasonable precaution to keep themselves and everyone else safe. Yes, mistakes will be made, but the police are (allegedly... lol) trained professionals who can adjust their procedures to minimze these mistakes. This is something they can control, unlike the ability to foretell when exactly overwhelming force (e.g. SWAT) is required to control a volatile and violent situation.
Mr Heath points out the fact I (and possibly the police too) am looking at the statistics of small numbers in one particular way when it comes to police mistakes. He then points out that the police are looking at these statistics differently when it comes to police killed on duty (his exact words: "even one cop killed is unacceptable").
But as I alluded to in my response to Mr Balko, there is an important difference here: The police cannot guess the criminals' response or determine which of the very small percentage of police raids when overwhelming force actually IS required.
For that reason, I find myself unable to condemn the police for, generally speaking, erroring on the side of police and public safety during these raids.
Posted by: doctorgoo | June 29, 2009 12:29 PM
Heh, actually I have a weird morbid obsession with learning about the causes of air crashes over the decades. I've spent more hours click around this page than I care to admit.
Anyway, generally it takes an incredibly unlikely sequence of both technical failures and human errors, but not always. Every once in a while, it's just one person's really really dumb mistake -- and the existence of even one incident like that is all I need to support the point I was making, namley that 100% success in any endeavor involving humans is just not achievable.
The Tenerife disaster comes to mind as something particularly boneheaded, although granted there was a whole bizarre chain of events that had to occur to allow the pilot's boneheadedness to go uncorrected.
Another example would be the recent ComAir Flight 191. Actually, come to think of it, the error in that case was quite similar to a failure to check the correct address. And you know, not to speak ill of the dead (or just maimed in the case of the first officer), but the moment on the cockpit voice recorder when the pilot and co-pilot are discussing how unusual it is that the lights would be off on an active runway is a facepalm of epic caliber.
Anyway, these are nits, because I totally agree with your next point:
Definitely. I didn't think about that difference, but yes, that is another really offensive thing about the way that police departments tend to respond to this sort of error. They just don't seem to care...
Posted by: James Sweet | June 29, 2009 12:33 PM
I agree with this entirely. The fact that most departments are underfunded and/or poorly run results in these sorts of mistakes not being corrected.
It seems to me that a bureaucratical change such as forcing a second officer to verify (and apply his signature) to confirm such addresses could cut down on these kinds of mistakes. Of course, for those who loathe any and all sort of bureaucratic oversite, they would be unlikely to take such a change seriously.
Posted by: doctorgoo | June 29, 2009 12:48 PM
I really think it's reasonable to expect the police to be able to find an address properly, even if the skies are overcast.
If I obey the speed limit 99.8% of the time, I am still liable for corrective action the .2% of the time. Why shouldn't the police be held to that standard?
Part of the problem here is that the excuse given (overcast skies) is so pathetic. If somebody had made a typo that would be more understandable.
Posted by: RickD | June 29, 2009 12:56 PM
Posted by: llewelly | June 29, 2009 1:23 PM
IM(ns)HO, this is very similar to the case recently where a construction company tore down the wrong house. In that case, a mistyped address caused quite a bit of damage. I guarantee that *somebody* got fired for that one.
Is it really so unreasonable to insist that *all* police raids are on the right address? And when the inevitable mistakes are made, that some responsible party pays the price?
Inability to correctly read a street address or apartment number should be grounds to fire a police officer. Do they not perform reconnaissance? At least drive by once to make sure that they know where they are going?
Does not seem unreasonable to me.
Posted by: LanceR, JSG | June 29, 2009 1:45 PM
Imagine the following:
Cop shows up at my door. I answer the door and he wants to search my house. Says he has a warrant. I ask (in a reasonable voice) "May I see the warrant please?"
Cop says "Here it is."
I say "But this says 12345 Main Street. This is 12347 Mian street."
Cop says "So it is. Sorry to have bothered you."
I'm not sure how much experience you've had with police officers, in my experience I cannot imagine a conversation with a police officer EVER going that way.
Posted by: Owen | June 29, 2009 2:00 PM
Let's see a show of hands:
How many of us have a hard time imagining a police department which takes "police error resulting in dead civilian" even remotely as seriously as "civilian error resulting in dead police officer?"
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | June 29, 2009 2:23 PM
BaldApe,
Do you honestly think police knock politely on the door when they're doing a swat-style raid? When they knock the door down, storm in shouting at everyone to get down on the floor, etc., they're not going to politely show you the warrant and discuss house numbers.
I've always enjoyed your comments here, so I'm hoping the answer is that you hadn't yet had your coffee today
Posted by: James Hanley | June 29, 2009 2:31 PM
@doctorgoo:
If the .2% sued the offending agencies 100% of the time, that figure (which I think you pulled out of your ass) would approach 100% REAL QUICK.I remember watching "Miami SWAT" on the Discovery Channel years ago. One of the supervisors of that Team said they have their undercover informant go along with them in a mask, actually place their hand on the door of the suspect residence, and THEN they go in. Of course (I'm sure Ed would agree), this presumes you HAVE an informant, and you're not just acting on an anonymous tip or making it up out of thin air...
Posted by: Paul Lundgren | June 29, 2009 2:39 PM
IIRC such suits haven't done all that well. It's pretty rare for the police to make this kind of mistake with people who have deep pockets, so getting an attorney to take the case is not a simple matter.
Getting your home burned down when the police toss an incendiary device through the window can be a real bummer, especially when the fire destroys the evidence of your innocence. Just because they went to the wrong address doesn't mean that you weren't guilty, remember.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | June 29, 2009 3:21 PM
@doctorgoo
The accuracy rate isn't the problem- 0.2% is still too many. It's the fact that many (if not most) of these raids are part of the failed war on drugs. There are instances where the police aren't even in the right part of town, and innocent people get murdered (yes, murdered) by gung-ho, paramilitarized local cops who now buy their kit from army surplus. It could happen to you, or anyone reading this, all in the name of some holy quest to keep people from getting high.
Here's a site by law enforcement folks, former and current, who have seen the "war" first hand, and know it to be causing far more trouble than it's solving. Mistaken raids are just the tip of the iceburg.
http://www.leap.cc/cms/index.php
@James Hanley
It's the fact that local cops are doing paramilitary style raids *at* *all* that is bothering many people.
----
My point here is that an appropriate level of response by the police is required at all times. But this is usually something can be calculated after the fact, and is mostly unknowable beforehand...
But that's Bradley's point. Many of the SWAT callouts were for instances where there was no reason to expect the level of violence to requite a freaking strike force. The whole idea that you gotta get the guy right then and right there and RIGHT NOW (!!!) just because there's a warrant is stupid. What, they can't stake the place out and grab the guy when he goes out for some smokes?
They are doing the same thing with (gasp!) the EVIL gamblers! Oh no! Gamblers! Save us, daddy!
Balko again: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5439
---
I'm actually with doctorgoo in the sense that an occasional mistake of this nature -- even an occasional fatal mistake of this nature -- is sadly unavoidable.
Then you are an enabler of murder. Search out and read the cases and accounts. Many are just serving warrants. They aren't raiding heavily guarded, organized crime drug labs. It's only "unavoidable" because you blindly accept the pseudoreligious drug war, and allow the government to carry out paramilitary action against its own citizens so they don't get high. My God! The Earth will spiral into the sun and the false vacuum of the Universe will collapse if Bubba Smith over in Hooterville takes a bong hit! Won't someone think of the children?!
Posted by: Bog | June 29, 2009 5:44 PM
His general point that we need to consider the number of wrongly served warrants relative to the total population is a correct one.
If we're talking product defects? Yes. When we're talking the lives of innocent citizens murdered by careless, militarized cops? Absolutely *FUCK* NO!
Some of this defense of the cops is wandering way to close to the old Stalin quote about one death being a tragedy and a million deaths being a statistic. There people are not statistics, you miserable jackasses.
Posted by: Richard Toff | June 29, 2009 5:51 PM
If banks had that kind of a failure rate their computer systems would never be up. It's simply inexcusable, considering that anyone who is not legally blind can read an address. Perhaps the police services board in each city should post several bonds of $500,000 each with the municipality for compensating citizens whose homes, legally sacrosanct, are broken into and their persons assaulted by law enforcement personnel, by mistake. And perhaps three million for each person shot by accident. The money could be put in escrow, in advance, to be disbursed as needed. Investment interest from the money could be returned to the PSB as long as the money wasn't needed, and could be used to fund police picnics, parties, and salary bonuses. If it was disbursed, the police would forgo those perks for the year.
Posted by: Monado | June 29, 2009 5:54 PM
Sorry, meant to turn off italics after "in advance":
They can afford it the same way California can afford its budget: by enforcing traffic laws until the fines levied equal the money needed or drivers learn that driving is a privilege and decide to obey the laws.Posted by: Monado | June 29, 2009 5:59 PM
A few weeks ago, my friend here in Denver was woken up (in his bed) by Police with flashlights.
Apparently, a girl in his apartment building had been arrested and complained to the police that she was being beaten by her boyfriend. She gave the police her key, and 'accidentally' told them that her apartment was actually my friend's. The key 'worked' (I suspect my friend forgot to lock his door) so they entered and woke him up.
Luckily, they gave him time to explain the misunderstanding, but of course he was shaken by the entire episode.
Posted by: Michael | June 29, 2009 6:02 PM
Getting your home burned down when the police toss an incendiary device through the window can be a real bummer, especially when the fire destroys the evidence of your innocence.
There was one case where the guy at the wrong address had measuring scales and test tubes and stuff. The cops saw that and said, yep, drug lab. The utter absence of drugs and/or the ingredients to make any didn't deter the cops at all.
Turns out the guy was a chemistry teacher. Der!
Here's one about a student with a home chemistry lab: http://mondoglobo.wftk.org/blog/qa/2008/12/jr-scientist-with-home-chemist.html
I'd hope some of these cases might resonate with ScienceBlog patrons a bit more. In the linked case, the kid, Lewis Casey, is charged with possessing things that *could* be turned into an explosive. He's going to trial for possessing common things that *could* be made explosive. What country is this again?
Posted by: TheMan | June 29, 2009 6:04 PM
What I don't understand - don't have PDs procedures to follow? I mean, how hard can it be for the raid commander to have to sign off on "target described in warrant identified by ________________" in order to execute a warrant? I mean, you can't have a tooth pulled without the doctor verifying three times he got the right one, just to get to the 5nines reliability.
But then, I read a paper describing the reasons behind "friendly fire" police death. Half of them involved officers shot during training exercise, due to the fact that while morning routine required unloading of all guns, lunch time required the cops to reload their guns, and there was no second "after lunch" unloading requirement. And since every department has their own policies, it probably takes a long time for new procedures to trickle down to every last one.
Posted by: Mu | June 29, 2009 6:26 PM
People are looking at this topic differently from what Ed and I are. Read Ed's commentary on these 2 articles, he isn't focusing on the drug war. I'm sure my opinions on this topic are the same as most on this forum (IMO... the war on drugs is waaaayy off focus on who gets targeted and for which drugs... and it's waaaaayyy too politicized for things to really change because the politicians would be labeled "weak" on crime for supporting corrective legislation).
Instead, in his blog post Ed is focusing on the fact that cops, like all humans, sometimes make mistakes with wrong addresses. He didn't comment at all on whether the raids were illegitimate to begin with because the "war on drugs" is illegitimate. Sure, he did criticize police for not fessing up to their mistakes and making appropriate amends in these two cases. But his concluding paragraph -- which is the one that I took him to task for -- is quite an overreaction.
Now I see that there are some people who are getting their panties up in a wad over perceived (in many cases, probably real; perhaps some, exaggerated) problems with the war on drugs. Comments from Bog ("enabler of murder"... "pseudoreligious" drug war) and Mr Toff ("careless, militarized cops"... accusing people of treating victims as statistics even though none have done anything of the sort...) are what I'm talking about here. There's some truth in their comments, they are just letting their emotions from preventing themselves from commenting rationally.
You two kiddies are just acting like asshats here. Grow up or GTFO! You're irritating the adults here.
Posted by: doctorgoo | June 29, 2009 6:35 PM
This happened to me about two weeks ago.
The police were banging on my door at about 4 am. Turns out that someone complained about my neighbor's dog and the police got the address wrong. Never mind the fact that both my house and mailbox are labeled with big numbers and that there is a streetlight across from my house. Even better, the numbers on my mailbox were right in front of their faces before leaving the car.
Once the police figured out the error, they left without apologizing. I'm just glad it wasn't for some kind of bust.
Posted by: Swangeese | June 29, 2009 6:39 PM
Mu @43 has a well expanded version of what I was talking about in my comment at 28.
Posted by: doctorgoo | June 29, 2009 6:39 PM
Baldape@18
Heaven help you if somone flushes the toilet while you are "calmly" discussing things with the police officer!
Could this be a problem with the *warrants*? If the warrant has the wrong address does it invalidate the whole search? How many times are there typos in warrants?
I live on Horton Street, a few blocks down is "Horley" St. I have often wondered what would happen if they came to my address, but the wrong street.
Posted by: KeithB | June 29, 2009 6:54 PM
Then they'll have to arrest every home gardener who has a bag of urea fertilizer in their shed as well.
Posted by: Katkinkate | June 29, 2009 6:59 PM
I wonder how often the police make this type of address mistake in Atlanta, where every other street is Peachtree something-or-other?
Posted by: James Hanley | June 29, 2009 7:24 PM
I don't mean to excuse the police in this or any similar incident - but reading an address can be a non-trivial exercise. My new job (Postal Carrier) requires me to do just that a few hundred times a day, as I'm not yet experienced enough to have the routes memorized. Even assuming (as the article states) that the address is clearly marked, I've found that every house puts the address in a different place, often a location not visible from some or even most angles (blocked by vegetation, the corner of the porch, fences, whatever). Further, a nicely visible bronze numberplate (for example) in bright sun can fade into near invisibility in dark overcast. I am sure that some of the other incidents are in places where even street signs are removed or altered, let alone the house numbers.
On the other hand, I have a sharply limited timeframe to read the things, and I'm merely delivering mail. The cops are delivering something far more hazardous - themselves - and could surely afford to take an extra few seconds and pull out the binocs to double-check.
Posted by: BobApril | June 29, 2009 8:21 PM
A.) Every PD of any size has the ability to be statistically certain that an address on a warrant matches a physical location.
B.) They don't really give a fuck.
I read recently, in that unimpeachable source, "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" that the series "S.W.A.T" actually was the model for a lot of the teams that were developed.
Posted by: democommie | June 29, 2009 10:10 PM
Look, I understand that my earlier post was mostly fantasy. Cops on a domestic call are expecting the worst, and people whose doors are kicked in can hardly be expected to react with calm deliberation.
All I was saying is that it would be nice, as someone else said, if actual threat was met with appropriate force. Perhaps the irony was too subtle :-)
I'm nowhere near as optimistic as Scalia and his expectation of professionalism. I know cops have been known to violate people's rights. But I also know some guys whose every contact with the cops seems to result with them on the pavement. That never happens to me, even when the cop acts like an ass. I just have to wonder how much is the cop and how much is the guy.
Posted by: BaldApe | June 29, 2009 10:37 PM
@17 "the tendency of the ill-advised drug war to create a lucrative market for exploitation by violent gangs"
not to mention sleazy politicians, arms manufacturers, and gangs of violent thugs dressed up in robot suits
Posted by: Greg | June 30, 2009 12:58 AM
"But Major Mark Robinett of the Marion County Sheriff's Department, who is in charge of warrant sweeps, said he was told that officers had a difficult time reading the addresses because of overcast skies."
As this was the US, would it be fair to assume these officers were armed?
Guns in the hands of people who cannot read a clear house number due to "overcast skies" sounds like a recipe for success alright.
Posted by: Captain Obvious | June 30, 2009 10:47 AM
Captain Obvious - Ah - let me see if I got this right here:
Police officers, armed to the teeth with weapons, could (hypothetically) shoot dead some innocent, because they can't read street numbers from about 1-2 m away, due to "overcast skies"?
Oh I feel so much safer with
Mr Mcgoo(pardon me - I mean of course) these 'eagle-eyed officers of the law' on the beat! - :( DJPosted by: DingoJack | June 30, 2009 11:07 AM
Posted by: Paul Murray | July 1, 2009 3:27 AM