A SWAT team in Denver, Colorado, messed up huge. It happened back in January but the victim has a fresh lawsuit. Police weren’t tricked into going there on a bogus tip, they dragged an innocent grandmother from her home, based on one sketchy clue. After that, they broke down doors and cut locks with wild abandon, not bothering to ask the fully cooperative resident for keys. The judge who signed the warrant isn’t happy with the cops who tricked him using lazy “cut and paste” intelligence in their application.
SWAT targets innocent grannie
The SWAT team for Denver Police Department didn’t seem to understand the technology they used as evidence. Based on a “Find My iPhone” ping, they dragged 77-year-old Ruby Johnson from her home. The whole thing was caught on bodycam.
As she was interrogated by officers outside, cops smashed their way through her home, only to come out empty-handed. “Did any of your grandkids recently visit?” was the best they could come up with, after they realized they botched it.
Bodycam footage is going to feature prominently in the lawsuit filed by Ms. Johnson. Today’s cops use cell phones as personal tracking devices. While they do have high tech equipment to track a particular phone pretty accurately, they didn’t use any of it.
Ruby Johnson, a 77-year-old grandmother, heard a loudspeaker call from outside β it was Denver SWAT in full kit with an MRAP.
They broke down her garage door, ripped her attic door off, & ransacked her home. Nothing connected to any crime was found. #tyranny pic.twitter.com/rrzpBCsTCe
— πΏππ πΏπππ (@RickFerran) December 6, 2022
They relied on the phone’s owner who gave them a tip the phone pinged out from a certain address. Cops at least looked it up on their own and saw the same thing the owner did. A blue dot with a circle around it. All SWAT saw was the dot. That mean’s target to them, even if it isn’t the red laser kind.
What the SWAT team didn’t realize is that the circle around the dot is important. It’s an estimate of accuracy meant to signify the device could be anywhere inside the ring. In the real world, that means the phone they were looking for was in an area “spanning at least six different properties and parts of four different blocks.”
The phone was NOT where the dot was. They were looking for more than just the iPhone but they could have been a little more polite about it. All they had to do was ask where the keys were. They didn’t bother, they have a battering ram and bolt cutters.
Misleading affidavit
Before they could terrorize an innocent grandmother in her bathrobe, the SWAT team had to get a warrant. Her lawyer alleges “they used a ‘hastily prepared, bare-bones, misleading affidavit‘ to obtain the warrant for her house that has left her suffering anxiety.”
They weren’t just looking for a phone. A truck had been stolen. Inside were guns and $4,000 in cash, along with the phone. Cops just waited for the device to tell them where it was, and believed it.
Reports tend to suggest that cops broke down her front door but that’s not accurate. They showed up in force with a megaphone. Eight members of the SWAT team lined up with assault rifles ready as they shouted through a bullhorn, “If anyone is inside… this is Denver Police Department with a search warrant, can you come to the door with your hands up.”
A detective relied on flawed information provided by the Find My app for a warrant that led the police to raid the home of a 77-year-old Denver woman, a lawsuit says. https://t.co/emZrdvmhSx
— NYTimes Tech (@nytimestech) December 6, 2022
Ms. Johnson put on her robe and answered the door. She was instantly dragged out to the Swatmobile and interrogated. No, nobody else was inside and No, she didn’t have anything she shouldn’t.
The door they broke down with a battering ram was an interior room, which had nothing of interest inside it, especially no phone. The shed in the backyard didn’t have any contraband either, after SWAT snipped the padlock off it to find out. That’s when they came back to quiz her if “she has any grandchildren who may have visited her recently.”
It’s pretty clear to her lawyer that “the police violated her right toΒ ‘free of unreasonable searches and seizures‘ and that the affidavit the Denver police had ‘lacked probable cause that evidence of crime could be found.‘“
