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Denver PD Sued After SWAT Team Raid Of 77-Year-Old Woman’s House Based On Nothing More Than Phone Pings
from the lots-of-enthusiasm,-zero-due-diligence dept
Once again, law enforcement’s enthusiasm for violent warrant service has combined with its disinterest in responsible policing to result in a civil rights lawsuit. Here’s how that all played out, as reported by The Denver Post. (h/t BestNetTech reader BentFranklin)
Ruby Johnson, 77, is afraid to be alone in the house where she’s lived for 40 years because of Denver police.
Denver police officers dressed in military-style SWAT gear on Jan. 4 descended on Johnson’s Montbello home to serve a search warrant. Johnson, in her bathrobe, opened her door when an officer on a bullhorn told anyone inside to come out. Officers carrying rifles stood on her lawn next to an armored tactical vehicle. One officer held the leash of a German shepherd K9.
Once inside her home, Johnson said, they smashed a door to her garage with a battering ram, broke apart a ceiling panel, broke the head off of a beloved collectible doll and left the house in disarray.
They were looking for a stolen iPhone that had pinged near her home. The iPhone was believed to be inside a stolen truck along with several guns. But police found nothing inside Johnson’s home.
The Denver Police Department — like plenty of other police departments around the nation — has its problems. This is only one of them.
The raid was predicated on “Find My iPhone” pings reported to the police by the cell phone’s owner. The location data provided by these pings is coarse, at best. As is pointed out in Johnson’s lawsuit, the ping radius covered several properties in the neighborhood. Yet the police believed Johnson was housing stolen goods and pulled the trigger on a search warrant.
That’s not the only problematic aspect of this so-called investigation. Prior reporting on the raid by KUSA exposed other issues with the events leading up to this raid — issues that are definitely going to cause problems for the Denver PD as it defends itself against this lawsuit.
The theft victim who delivered the “Find My iPhone” data to the PD felt officers weren’t taking the investigation seriously, despite him reporting stolen guns in addition to the vehicle and iPhone.
[Jeremy] McDaniel said he didn’t think police treated his case with urgency, even after he told them about the stolen guns. He said he was on hold with DPD for 45 minutes and had difficulty getting them to check possible leads on the day his truck and guns were stolen.
[…]
He said he alerted police multiple times about other opportunities found through Find My iPhone to look for the stolen truck, but he felt police “blew us off,” even after he told them the guns that were inside the truck. The iPhone stopped for an hour at a McDonald’s and a 7-Eleven, but police did not go look for the truck.
“They said ‘Sorry, we just don’t have the manpower to check it out,’ even though there’s guns in it and all kinds of stuff,” McDaniel said. He said the police didn’t seem to care after he notified them of the theft.
So, cops spent a day doing nothing before suddenly deciding a warrant needed to be sought and executed. No further surveillance of the property occurred before the warrant was executed. Despite having a day to determine whether this home was the best potential target for a search (given that the location data provided by McDaniel covered several nearby homes), the Denver PD performed a SWAT raid that involved cutting locks, bashing in a door, and the tossing of several rooms, despite having full compliance of the 77-year-old homeowner, as well as instructions on how to unlock and open the doors officers later destroyed.
The lawsuit [PDF], filed with the assistance of the ACLU of Colorado, provides more details on the lack of due diligence performed by the PD prior to the search, as well as the swearing officer’s misrepresentation of the “Find My iPhone” data provided by the theft victim. The affidavit presented the data as identifying Johnson’s home as the source of the pings, despite the included screenshot showing an area encompassing six different homes and two city blocks. The affidavit also, for some reason, failed to mention the $4,000 McDaniel said was in the stolen truck, instead referring solely to the guns, phone, and other items listed by the vehicle owner.
The PD can’t have it both ways. It can’t blow off a theft victim for nearly a day and then spend less than four hours securing a warrant and engaging in a SWAT raid. At some point, the PD needs to perform some actual investigation, something that might have made it clear Johnson’s home was not the only potential target and possibly might have eliminated her residence as a target altogether.
Hopefully, the city and its officers won’t be able to escape this lawsuit. A hasty and careless “investigation” resulted in the partial destruction of a person’s home and a complete destruction of their trust in their public servants. When citizens are in the wrong, they’re expected to make things right. But when cops get things wrong, it’s the people they serve who are expected to live with the results of their errors.
Filed Under: denver, denver police department, find my phone, location info, ruby johnson, swat team
Comments on “Denver PD Sued After SWAT Team Raid Of 77-Year-Old Woman’s House Based On Nothing More Than Phone Pings”
I await the fantastical tale the court will spin to award QI.
Re:
It is positively sickening how trivial the effort needed is to think of how a court could spin the situation in order to grant QI to the thugs who trashed the house just because they could.
‘While the officers involved may or may not have been slightly more enthusiastic in their searches than some parties might wish it is a fact that searches for stolen property are a part of police duties and this can at times result in damaged property in the process. With no previous ruling on the books describing this particular situation and method of search as unacceptable it is therefore unreasonable to expect that the Denver police would have had reason to believe that such actions were violations of the homeowner’s rights and therefore QI applies.’
Did they ever find the iPhone?
To foul it up this bad, it would almost have to be intentional…
Re:
Not at all.
They made their mind up they had the right place, convinced themselves of this, ignored anything that pointed anywhere else, then executed their well thought out plan to get the evil criminal they are SURE is in that house.
Then when it slowly started to dawn on them they just no knocked a 77 yr old & terrorized her over their fuckup, they started breaking her things (probably in an attempt to get her riled up and do something they could claim was assault to keep her from suing).
I mean we just had that story about the guy 2 cops put in jail for murder by forcing the actual murderer to testify against him, because they were POSITIVE their target had to have done it and refused to look at anything that challenged that idea.
I do hope they wrote a ticket to the theft victim for failure to secure a weapon.
Re:
Never mind finding the iPhone, guns and a wad of cash. What about a whole damn truck?
'You know, the break room could use a new flatscreen...'
The affidavit also, for some reason, failed to mention the $4,000 McDaniel said was in the stolen truck, instead referring solely to the guns, phone, and other items listed by the vehicle owner.
Oh look, I think I spotted the only reason they took the theft seriously enough they could be bothered to get the warrant and were so eager to start trashing a house to use it…
Pet Peeve
“One officer held the leash of a German shepherd K9.”
I have always marveled at journalists – presumably educated people – who fail to understand that “K9” is just shorthand for “dog.” If we were to take the shorthand out of the above sentence, we’d have: ‘One officer held the leash of a German shepherd dog.’ If they used K9 for clarity, they could have said that it was “…a German shepherd dog of the Canis familiaris species, a domesticated descendant of the wolf (Canis lupus).”
This is just a pet peeve of mine (pun intended). We now return you to your regularly scheduled comment thread.
Re:
In police parlance, the moniker “K9” means “a brother officer”. In their view, that elevates the animal well above the average-sounding “dog”. To be distinct, the dog is called out by breed, ’cause not every K9 is automatically a German Shepard.
Re:
K9 often refers specifically to a police dog.
Re:
““K9” is just shorthand for “dog.””
Erm, no it’s not. It’s shorthand for a dog that’s part of a police unit, specifically one that’s trained to perform certain tasks that it’s deemed more capable to perform than human officers. You wouldn’t refer to a pet dog as a K9, unless they are also employed by a police unit to perform trained activity, and only then usually when it’s working that role.
The text you quoted doesn’t mention the dog’s employment status by the precinct or its officially designated training, so the use of it there is to indicate that part, not that it’s a dog. Similarly, SWAT is mentioned to indicate the speciality of the human officers and/or equipment used, not to indicate that they are police or human.
Do any of your other pet peeves involve things that are clearly false if you think about it for less time that it takes you to type out a complaint?
Best practice
It is an important part of police work to minimize the danger officers are exposed to, so it is perfectly understandable that they waited until a safely raidable property (that of a septuagenarian) was in the vicinity of the phone signal.
It would have been negligent not to make use of that opportunity for exercising the SWAT equipment and thus demonstrate the willingness to predicate police activity on the theft report.
Is this the a new form of swatting?
1) abandon cell phone at target location
2) provide authorities with find my phone info
3) watch cops destroy stuff
4) ??profit??
Re:
Yeah but until the 5th or 6th time a court rules on it you can’t get paid because QI
Limo service
“The detective did not have the facts needed to justify a search,” Mr. Silverstein said. “His supervisor should have vetoed it. The district attorney should not have greenlighted it. The judge should not have approved it, and the SWAT team should have stayed home.”
Re:
This. The error range of those pings is just over 200 feet. They lacked the specificity required to get a warrant, because probable cause is needed for a warrant, and every house on the block was within that ping. A one in six or worse chance of guessing right doesn’t meet the 51% test for probable cause.
Fun isnt it.
He could track his phone as the vehicle wondered around the streets.
COOL.
But he didnt and the police DIDNT, keep tracking it until they decided to hit 1 of Many locations it had been to? Just 1?
The Owner couldnt Just go out and track it himself, then call the cops on the stolen vehicle, as he was following it?
HOw much damage was done to the vehicle? Window broken? Security torn apart?
Re:
Well they stole his truck so tracking it on foot is a bit challenging.
Not everyone owns multiple motor vehicles.
Re: Re:
No, but most of us have friends who own vehicles, so…
Re:
Given how inaccurate those pings are, he had tracked it to somewhere in a two block area, not a specific house, and had no means of pinpointing the house.
Define 'busy'?
“We got a reported theft, anyone wanna investigate”
“Nah, tell him we’re too busy”
“But there are guns involved, so we can get a warrant and do a SWAT raid”
“Fuck yeah, now you’re talking. Let’s go!”
One minor, but enlightening, correction.
Find my is accurate to within 10 meters in idea conditions. The Center of the ring is the most likely, meaning extremely high probability, location.
In very very rare instances, environmental factors can cause inaccurate locational readings. Reflective or refractive (to radio signal) materials in large amounts in a single location can cause a misreading.
Any person writing at a site that starts with Tech, should do some due diligence in understanding the facts of a story they write about, not the inaccuracies of a non-tech lawyer of an even less tech-able senior’s filings.
For all the wrong here, find my was the bottom of the list.