This is as unsurprising as it is egregious. Greenwood Village has a golden stick up its ass. When voters legalized marijuana, they quickly moved to ban med or rec shops in their town. That wasn’t good enough, so they tried (and failed) to make it illegal to drive on their city streets with marijuana in the car. They own the streets, after all. Another sign of their entitled neanderthalism was that they banned staying in motels more than three weeks because too many Mexicans were living in their low-end properties. Great place, Greenwood Village.
8 Likes
I guess this is like the military doctrine of destroying a village in order to save it. Thanks, Fascism!
2 Likes
Then it sounds like the just ruling from the court would be to side with the homeowner, for the unreimbursed amount to the contents of the house, not all the extra expense of rebuilding it. Instead, they created a dangerous and stupid precedent of a case that further imperils the public from the police.
5 Likes
I thought it was a bit bizarre that they would destroy a house to that degree to catch a shoplifter. It made more sense when they said in the video that he shot at police. They destroyed the house to catch an attempted murderer, not just a shoplifter.
The homeowner should be compensated by the police for the difference between what his home was worth and what insurance paid (plus something for his trouble), but he spent way more than his house was worth when he rebuilt. If he’d stayed a bit closer to what he got from insurance, it wouldn’t be so bad for him.
1 Like
I agree with my heart, if that makes sense. But if that precedent gets set, police departments will have an additional layer of perverse incentive to consider when making choices that involve life or death. Hypothetical: A small-town police chief is in a situation where he needs to direct the destruction of, say, a strip mall to get at a guy holding someone hostage. He could put officers in danger, or he could punch through a few walls with a tank. If he uses a tank, everyone survives but he will bankrupt the department and have to lay off 20 officers/friends because he’ll be on the hook for the structure. Or he could, perhaps rashly, just storm in and get a couple people shot for free. It’s sticky.
1 Like
Not really. First off, Chicago PD and New York City PD shouldn’t have tanks, much less a small town sheriff. Second, hostage situations call for patience and de-escalation, not storming the castle.
If it’s important enough to cause destruction, then it’s important enough to pay for the damage.
14 Likes
Okay. You’re nitpicking hypotheticals apart from the point but I get it. How about this: Guy loses his job, gets depressed and suicidal. He’s about to lose his house and his marriage/family life is shit. He decides to commit suicide by cop, goes and shoplifts from Walmart, and does everything in his power to recreate the exact scenario that happened here, since he now knows the playbook. Things play out as expected, the remaining family flips their brand-new house for huge profit, and now the police are a life-insurance policy for the families of depressed homeowners nationwide, who now have very real monetary interest in considering an option they might not have had available. Perverse incentives. It introduces too many weird variables that you can’t solve for.
1 Like
It does also mention that the city condemned his home. He couldn’t repair it. Yes, he might have spent more than it would have been worth to build the exact same home, but $5,000 was an insult.
As for the police, they could have waited. They could have stopped chasing someone over a shirt and belt. They did not have to smash holes in all the walls and destroy a home to get at one man, no matter that he was shooting out the windows. One man, not an army. This was a clear case of vast overkill.
9 Likes
Condemned means nobody can live there until it is repaired. Not that he wasn’t allowed to repair it.
3 Likes
I don’t mean to nitpick. I mean to criticize the mentality that police have to use the maximum available force every damn time.
Want to talk about perverse incentives? Hey, Greenwood Colorado! Here’s a subsidized tank. Don’t use it for anything I wouldn’t! *wink
Between the militarization of the police and the recruitment and encouragement of gung-ho paramilitary wanna-bes for the police force, the biggest perverse incentive is having all those toys sitting at the station and no real reason to use them.
7 Likes
OK, let’s separate the problems here.
First - all this post-rebuild bitching about what the owner did (teardown) is irrelevant. The question is what reimbursement should a government provide when a government needs to destroy property (or doesn’t need to but does so anyway). IMHO a just government would pay up no questions asked.
Second - why are the police in this incident (1) not much better trained and controlled , and why are they not currently suspended without pay for gross misconduct?
7 Likes
If cops were truly deterred by costing the city money, we wouldn’t be reading about all the successful excessive force lawsuits that cost cities millions (billions across the board?).
No, it doesn’t come out of their paycheck. Other than a possible free vacation there is no downside.
And even if it did deter them, that would be a good thing. They should consider the effects of bankrupting a city just as much as they should consider the effects of bankrupting a family. Externalizing the costs on random people doesn’t make them go away.
5 Likes
Depends on the jurisdiction. In many places, it means “tear it down.” Which is the case here. They condemned it and marked it for demolition, which didn’t afford him the luxury of repairing it, he was required to demolish it.
3 Likes
I guess using tear gas through a couple of windows never occurred to the police department. A few window panes would need replacing and a bit of floor repair for the grenade scorch marks and fumigating to get the CS out of the carpet, drapes and furniture. All in all, a hell of a lot less damage than plowing into a house with an armored vehicle.
3 Likes
condemned can also mean “we’ve decided that amazon’s new warehouse can bring in more cash. the bulldozers will be there next monday. thanks for your contribution to society, citizen.”
3 Likes
its the american way, isnt it?
5 Likes
from the article:
“The case turns on legal technicalities about whether police acting in their official capacity can ever be seen as exerting eminent domain — when the government seizes private property for public use.”
Or, as one local paper reported it*:
“The Lech family sued police in Greenwood Village after the 2015 ordeal, claiming the damage from the operation amounted to a taking of their property for public use, entitling them to fair compensation. However, the Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld a lower court’s ruling that the government was acting within its police powers, not its eminent domain authority, and didn’t have to provide compensation.”
So the question before the courts was ‘did the police use eminent domain (and therefore govt needed to provide compensation), or did the police use police powers?’ And the court found it was not eminent domain.
Personally I think there is a big hole in our laws, but it doesn’t seem that Eminent Domain was the issue here, as Mr Lech’s lawsuit seems to claim.
1 Like
so, cops blowing shit up = “due process of law,” then? what the actual fuck?
2 Likes
It’s been a while since I suggested that America read some fucking Robert Peel. We’re probably about due.
2 Likes
