[code_duck]

Yes, starting with (from another article)

>The incident started when an Aurora police officer attempted to lead Seacat into an office at a Walmart, where he was suspected of shoplifting. But Seacat ran to a Lexus in the parking lot, jumped in and fled.

So they caused $670,000 of damage to protect Walmart from shoplifting. Not great ROI for the community.

All of that is beside the point, anyway. The point is that the government should be paying for that house.

[alharith]

Caused 670,000 to uphold the law and prevent us from inching that much closer to anarchy. That's the invisible benefit to most. Soon as criminals can figure out the law enforcement's cost-benefit ratio, they will start exploiting it, and there's too many examples of this to count.

[ljm]

I'm sure the homeowner who had their entire house destroyed to catch a petty thief appreciated the police's efforts to save him from anarchy...by essentially being anarchists themselves.

Even if you follow this logic and believe it to be true, the police decided that putting an innocent homeowner out of a house and over half a million bucks, plus the cost of all the officers spectating, and the cost of rolling out a tank, was worth it to recover a few dollars of lost income for Walmart.

[acdha]

You don’t see any possible middle ground between “let criminals run rampant” and “LARP your favorite action movie”? No room to, say, wait the guy out or talk him down before you systematically destroy someone’s house? Even though not immediately resorting to military-levels of violence works better and cheaper in most other countries?

[coffeecat]

A gang of guys with weapons and a tank destroyed the home of a family who did nothing wrong, offering no compensation or apology afterward. And the shoplifter is the bad guy who society needs to be protected from?

[TallGuyShort]

If "upholding the law" means we create yet another innocent victim who is actually worse off than any of the previous victims, what's the point? If the government is that unaccountable, isn't that essentially anarchy? They're only getting away with it because you can't win a fight with them, right?

[blisterpeanuts]

As soon as the suspect fled, it became a case of resisting arrest and disobeying a police officer and probably several other charges (home invasion too?).

Arguably the police officer did his job, perhaps even bending over backward to protect the suspect's rights. Though, a more traditional "alright, buddy, put your hands up, you're under arrest!" at gunpoint might have forestalled the ensuing situation.

Absolutely agree that the homeowner should get some kind of redress for what was done to his home.

[ljm]

Don't get me wrong, but this kind of point is something I've only ever seen on the internet, and typically from an American point of view. It makes the cops look like infallible overlords or, dare I say it, tyrants, and the criminal as someone completely undeserving of any understanding, benefit of the doubt, or compassion.

> resisting arrest and disobeying a police officer

Mercy me, how dare he. He definitely deserves the electric chair for that.

> probably several other charges (home invasion too?).

After being identified as a criminal because of the original shoplifting attempt, it's now okay to concoct a laundry list of potential new crimes just to make sure the cops can really throw the book at this degenerate. They're now entirely justified in ramming a military tank through a house while a hundred other cops watch the show.

I presume that an officer doing their job would have been able to let the shoplifter run off and, because they'd identified him and the stolen car, they could issue a warrant and pick him up later.

[ttraub]

> I presume that an officer doing their job would have been able to let the shoplifter run off and, because they'd identified him and the stolen car, they could issue a warrant and pick him up later.

Let him run off? That's not really how policing works, at least not in the U.S. The police see someone commit a crime, they're obligated to pursue him, unless ordered to stand down or they're forced to triage because another's life is in danger etc.

It seems to me that there's one wrongdoer here and that's the shoplifter/home invader/gunman. That said, yeah, perhaps they shouldn't have called SWAT but on the other hand, according to the article they tried to negotiate for 5 hours, then he fired shots. Not sure what else they could do but fire back.

[throwsprtsdy]

I don't know why everyone is eliding the gunfire here, to me that's the most important aspect of the story. If he was merely a shoplifter, there would be little harm in just issuing a warrant and looking for him later. But once he started shooting, preservation of property became a secondary concern.

[ljm]

It's still incredibly hard to justify the use of a tank (and a hundred cops) against a single shooter, demolishing a house to reach him. This is the same country that wishes away the many mass shootings every year with thoughts and prayers.

The entire saga screams incompetence and "he had a gun" is a terrible excuse. The whole point is to de-escalate, not one-up them.

The police in the US have a deep, institutional problem with how they serve their communities, and it infests (if indeed it isn't fed by) many aspects of the wider country's culture. It's both sad and infuriating to read about when you see that we don't have any of these issues in other western countries.

[ttraub]

He shot at the police. They discovered narcotics needles in the house. This guy was likely on drugs, definitely armed and dangerous. How exactly were they supposed to de-escalate? If they backed off, he could have maybe slipped out the back door, stolen the Lechs' car, maybe went into a neighboring house and held someone hostage or shot them. He was at that point a public menace. Also he had multiple past felonies or felony charges (I don't remember which).

But we're kind of off the main topic which is Google tracking and geo-fencing :)

[ljm]

and you would still run a tank through a house to solve that problem, and then refuse to pay for it, leaving the innocent homeowner to face the same police force in the courts?

there is not a single situation where the police acted in good faith here.