Originally published at: Police in Farmington, New Mexico, respond to wrong house and kill man there | Boing Boing
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yesterday there are reports of FBI raiding the wrong hotel room in a late-night raid “exercise” and now a man was killed by police for the same mistake. this is unacceptable. we need the ability to easily sue the city, police and anyone else that is involved with mistakes like this. otherwise this won’t stop. QI must go. now.
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Apropos of nothing, I surprised my wife by coming home early one day and was thankful she didn’t shoot me when I walked into the bedroom. So now I announce myself. I’m home honey; don’t shoot!
I am certain that police generally announce themselves, but who knows who can hear what. This just sucks.
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That would raise the stakes so, hopefully, cops involved would be more invested. I wonder if something similar to the checklists that surgeons often use for quality control would be of use. Maybe with a technology connected to satellite location to double/triple check.
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What if he got bad grades in high school or did marijuana one time tho?
I mean, can we really blame the police here?
/ sarcasm
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They should definitely make an effort to get the right place, but a simple rule of “don’t shoot unless you are shot at” obviates a large part of the problem.
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After reading the details of incidents like this in the Buttheads and BLM topics, this seems very unlikely. LEOs have no obligation to protect the public, or even to do a good job. Investigations tend to show these mistakes come from sloppy procedures. If cops want to stalk someone, they manage to get the right information to do so. Yet they misidentify suspects, mix up addresses, and forget to identify themselves in critical situations -probably because the consequences for that don’t really affect them.
Making municipalities pay for this is yet another problem. Instead of defunding the police, the police are defunding towns, counties, and cities that have to pay for their incompetence. We definitely need a system with some personal responsibility built in, but we have to get past the police unions first!
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Cops get the address wrong waaaayyyyyy too often. And we have GPS mapping etc. Like, why aren’t they verifying? (Though even then they can punch in the wrong number, or have the app have an error.) It is stupid
Last week I had a Dominos pizza guy try to deliver a pizza to my house. Right house number, wrong H-named street about a block over. But given the number of pizzas they deliver, they seem to make it to the right places more often than cops.
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Not really. If you enter a huge amount of houses in the US unannounced, carrying guns, you risk getting shot at. It’d be better if they went to the right house.
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Looks like there’s enough dumbassery to go around in this story.
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Police Chief: “I’m extremely sorry that we are in this position…”
What about the dead guy, huh? 
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surgeons also have to pay malpractice premiums.
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With each statement, they make it clear who they are concerned about - themselves. When I saw the word “traumatic,” it reminded me of the cops involved in shootings who have filed disability claims because of their PTSD.
After all the funding for special education and training for officers, this is what the public is being asked to accept (and pay for).
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Yes, yes yes. This x1000. If I could build on this a bit . . . I feel like it borders on fantasy to suggest lawsuits mean anything. Because everything you’ve written ought to be etched into the cornerstone block of every police station. Lawsuits mean nothing to the individual cops, or to the effing, literal police gangs that are so well-established and accepted that they have their own Wikipedia page.
Lawsuits don’t mean shit.
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Remember the first press conference after Uvalde and they were like, “Don’t worry, all the LEOs are safe.”
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- End qualified immunity.
- Mandate malpractice insurance for individual cops.
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- Watch number of cops decrease dramatically
I keep asking where they think seniors expected to work until they drop will find jobs. Maybe instead of the military, we’ll see more of this:
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Here’s an idea; don’t answer the door with a gun?
(No this is not about how incompetent police are, or blaming the victim, or protecting yourself, it’s just common sense.)
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Then why are the laws in so many places specifically set up to allow people to protect themselves and their homes with guns?
This is one of the natural consequences of those laws. Don’t like it? Maybe make it less legal to wave guns around.
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I wonder how often this happens but doesn’t make the news. Police are often awfully sloppy, so this sort of thing could conceivably happen quite a lot - but cops also tend to lie after the fact, so there could be a lot of mistakes of this sort that the cops never actually acknowledge.
Except when they don’t.
The fundamental problem of the dynamics of gun violence is that guns only offer protection if you shoot someone before they shoot you.
Yeah, although, to be fair, it might only have been the case because he thought they were intruders trying to break into his home, or he’d had threats, etc. (I’ll never own a gun, but if I heard a noise that indicated someone might be trying to break into my home, I’d pick up something I could use as a weapon before investigating.) There are certain types of macho, gun-waving a-holes who routinely answer the door with a gun to scare people, but it’s possible that wasn’t what was going on.
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