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iPhone X Purchase Leads To Police, Battering Ram, and Handcuffs (cbslocal.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CBS SFBayArea:
On one recent morning, Rick Garcia and his wife Shannon Knuth woke up to a posse of San Francisco police officers at their front door. "I peered through the peephole and I saw a police officer and a battering ram," Garcia said. "We heard 'SFPD' and 'warrant,' and I was like 'what's going on?'" Knuth remembers. It felt like a nightmare yet it was real. Garcia says that within seconds he was dragged into the hallway of his apartment complex, handcuffed, then whisked away to the Taraval Station.... Meanwhile Knuth, who had just got out of the shower, was ordered to sit on the couch... After rifling through the apartment Knuth says the officers finally told her what they were looking for: Her husband's iPhone X.
According to the warrant, it was stolen but Knuth showed them the receipt which proved her husband bought it. Once the officers realized their mistake they called the police station and a squad car brought Garcia home. "They gathered their pry bar and their battering ram and they left," he said. So how could a mistake like that happen? It's still unclear but it turns out Garcia and Knuth bought the iPhone at an Apple store at Stonestown Galleria just a few weeks after 300 iPhone Xs were stolen from a UPS truck in the mall parking lot.
One former police chief says the way it was handled "kind of boggles the mind...
"This was clearly an incident that should have just been a knock and talk, a couple detectives come to the door, knock on the door and they would have gathered the same info that they gathered after they put him in handcuffs and hauled him off to jail."
According to the warrant, it was stolen but Knuth showed them the receipt which proved her husband bought it. Once the officers realized their mistake they called the police station and a squad car brought Garcia home. "They gathered their pry bar and their battering ram and they left," he said. So how could a mistake like that happen? It's still unclear but it turns out Garcia and Knuth bought the iPhone at an Apple store at Stonestown Galleria just a few weeks after 300 iPhone Xs were stolen from a UPS truck in the mall parking lot.
One former police chief says the way it was handled "kind of boggles the mind...
"This was clearly an incident that should have just been a knock and talk, a couple detectives come to the door, knock on the door and they would have gathered the same info that they gathered after they put him in handcuffs and hauled him off to jail."
I wish the police would put this kind of effort in to recovering my stolen bike rather than a multi-billion dollar companies product.
But I guess that doesn't fit their mandate of protecting large corporations profits.
It is sad to see such mistakes, and defence lawyers should highlight them in court when police evidence is supposed to be taken seriously. There is a serious problem with the police; it requires a certain type of personality to spend one's life confronting bad guys, and the culture of many police departments is toxic. However in this case there is the added element of a warrant being issued: someone made a false statement to the judge who issued it, and that should also be investigated.
many militarized city police forces in the USA are now purposely using excessive force to instill a compliance mindset through fear. Sometimes the younger officers get a little too hyped up and gun down innocents. they are disciplined but the order cops still get the benefit of obedience of the terrified masses
Any relation to Donald Knuth?
I've really learned a great deal from TAOCP. I've gotten to page 10 of book 1.
It will be interesting to see what the cops claimed in their application for a search warrant, such as their reason to suspect the phone was stolen. Somebody screwed up royally here.
... blue uniforms are real, cops are social fiction." - Robert Anton Wilson
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Instead of being trained not to over-react in situations, it appears as if police are being trained to over-react in situations.
FREEDOM!!! The BEST country on EARTH.
In the US, you are FREE!
Wrongful arrest, and a laundry list of other complaints,
This is SO blatant, it will settle out of court, for a lot of money.
Some anonymous informant told the cops he was too poor to afford an iphone and suddenly had one?
I guess the SWAT type tatics were used because the more you use it the easier it is to justify the cost?
Do this for my wrangler.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
The UK sounds like such a police-state shithole.
"Nobody's got beaten over an Android"
Table-ized A.I.
Sue the department back to the stone ages. It's the only way they'll change their "M.O."
Yes because omg this happens everyday and only in America!
Somehow I wouldn't be too surprised if this particular thing actually did. Other places have their own problems, too, but usually with other things than policetary asaults on the population. In most other places, cops don't have enough money for such exercises.
Ezekiel 23:20
sounds like those stolen phones were an inside job, they should be investigating apple store employees and managers
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Guess he doesn't read the news then. Just a few weeks ago it made national news where a "swatting" incident happened and an innocent man was shot dead by police after they got a call claiming that the house where he lived had a hostage situation. Cops showed up in force under the assumption the call could only be true, made no attempt to determine if there was actually a hostage situation or not, and when the owner came out they shot him dead, claiming they thought he was armed. That wasn't the first time police showed up on a swatting call and made no attempt to determine the validity of it before taking action, but the previous ones usually don't end in death of a citizen. Cops routinely shoot unarmed civilians because the cop is "scared". So the only surprise to me is not that the cops went in like this but that the homeowner is still actually alive because I'd have expected a hair trigger hyped up cop to be ready to gun anybody down at a moment's notice.
So the public can find out all the names, Judge included that authorized this for a single iPhone?
;)
;)
Everyone from the Judge, along with all supervisors in the chain of command that signed off, need to removed from public service.
But that will never happen! They are public servants protected by their unions and the most they get will be a paid week off. And a request to be a little more careful! "NOT" like that will happen
Until these individuals are removed from public service nothing will change. Paid vacations will not make a change happen.
This is especially important because we have little idiots(criminals) doing this swatting thing for cred/fun for the internet/self gratification.
Just my 2 cents
The dog is lucky it was small & cute & didn't get shot. She was lucky they allowed her a towel when she was sitting on the couch while law enforcement officers were rummaging through their home. He's lucky he was able to keep his mouth shut & they didn't knock him around a bit before taking him in. They are all lucky to be alive to tell their tale.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Mod parent up
At minimum I would sue them for a new phone as it came out for the rest of my unnatural life along with free Apple PCs etc.
And a billion dollars. They screwed up and the man is lucky the police didnâ(TM)t shoot him and his wife.
Obama is out of office now. We're OK in the short term. One or two dead SC justices and we're good for a generation or two.
The current, somewhat popular, fascists are waving hammer and sickle flags. But they're just fringe loonies, no power off university campuses.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Knuth could've just showed them some of the more cryptic pages from the collected volumes in Art of Computer Programming. They would've run away in terror. Or maybe they would've been arrested for that actually..
Post something about your Mr. Xi like what has been posted here about President Trump on your PRC government mandated man-in-the-middle'd Internet connection, and see where that gets you. Then come back and tell us something is wrong with *our* country.
REMEMBER THE MURDER OF IAN MURDOCH, creator of Debian Linux and leading member of the Free Software community, killed Christmas 2015 by the notoriously corrupt San Francisco police department.
One former police chief says the way it was handled "kind of boggles the mind..."
It's almost as if the police are power-tripping self-righteous morons whose starting assumption is that they're never wrong, and in fact can't be wrong, so the ONLY obvious course of action is to go full-nuclear in every situation. Who knew...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Apparently just politely checking first was too hard for the cops to think about.
1) Does this police department get to keep confiscated property if the person is found guilty? You know, like certain police departments whose budget relies on doing just that.
2) Was it really 300 phones? Or was it 250 phones and someone added an extra 50 to the insurance claim? This could explain how actual sold phones were mysteriously added to the list.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
...a SWAT team's like a penis. If you have one, you're gonna want to use it.
Think about it....
They wanted to make their country great again...
They had a crazy leader that everyone followed blindly...
"Crazy" and "Extremely brash and right leaning" are not the same, but regardless...
Their leader called himself a Christian but was anything but...
The same argument could be made about the majority of US presidents
They forced kids to say pledges of allegiance in school...
Requiring kids to say the pledge of allegiance is a matter of state laws (and not all states require it). Also this has been around for many decades.
They militarized their police force and knocked down doors...
Police militarization has been happening since before Trump, and includes Democrat presidents as well.
They created their own media and claimed everyone else as false...
The left is just as guilty as the right on this one. In fact media outlets in the US are far more likely to lean left than right.
They created a government rule to give him more power at his request...
Again, the same was happening under Obama, and also Bush Jr.
And somehow no one saw any of this coming... and we can't see it today either.
Plenty of people have been witnessing it and complaining, but when a Republican is doing it, Republicans tend to ignore it, and when a Democrat is doing it, Democrats tend to ignore it.
Did the store add not stolen phones to the list of stolen ones ? Just to get more money from the insurance ?
Totof
I had a friend whose laptop (Apple brand), money and passports were stolen from the car. There was at least several thousand dollars of property theft and damage.
Thanks to Apple tracking, they were able to locale the address of the burglar, and asked police to help. Did the police enter the house with a battering ram? No, the knocked the door, asked a few questions, and left. Even though they knew the stolen property was inside that address they did nothing. They did not pursue the case any longer, and my friend was left with no recourse.
And the incident happened in the Bay Area, same area where they behaved much differently to a person who was not even a suspect. I'm not sure what to say about the inconsistency of the conduct.
Wonder if the suspects were thought to be armed. That would give some idea as to why a warrant was served in this manner.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
If Garcia and his wife had just had a walled garden this wouldn't have happened.
He better be able to keep his job. He's gonna need to pay off that phone... the receipt shows he paid $1498.84! Holy crap! & I thought my S8 was too expensive at $180 (after the credits, rebates, & trading in my S7 with a cracked screen).
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
This is not the first time that the police have been Apple's goons.
Ye, when people were shooting in Oakland, the police would not even come out.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Never open the door for the police.
Have gnu, will travel.
Cops are not obligated to read you your rights until they begin an official interrogation. As such, it is in their interests to postpone that as long as possible so that you might incriminate yourself before you are Mirandized. Anything you say will be admissible as long as they were not 'questioning' you at the time. Yes, this does suck. No, you will not prevail on appeal.
Do not talk to cops in their official capacity. They are professionals at talking to you, you are an amateur at talking to them.
Further, if you are talking and it is not being actively recorded, cops can mis-remember what you said and how you said it. Nothing can stop the dishonest cop from lying, but silence will prevent the many honest cops from mis-remembering.
So, stop talking. Seriously.
Saying 'Whoops! My bad," would at least be a start. Admitting the error is important, and it isn't always a given.
The US would benefit greatly by having mandatory reporting of activity of this type at the national level. As it is, there is not even an authoritative number for police killings of civilians each year.
"What gets measured, gets managed."
Also, "here's some cash," seems like the least they could do.
...to never buy an iPhone. Never mind, I'll remember.
How do you know you live in a police state?
When you fear the police more than you fear the people the police are supposed to be protecting you against.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Convicted felon, here.
I mostly agree with you.
I would just point out that as the judges get tougher, the stakes get higher. At some point you start to incentivize behavior that you really don't want. Not too bad at the lower levels. At the higher levels, though, perpetrators will start to rapidly escalate violence because they feel they have more to lose by getting caught. This is known in prison as holding court out in the street (apparently this is a movie reference?).
When I got caught coming out of the bank, I surrendered peacefully because I knew it would not be the end of my life. When you make a guy feel that it is the end he may decide differently.
At some point I think we need to be looking at outcomes.
That's brilliant -- every media outlet who wants to steer the narrative back on track in the US should be pummeling every public figure they interview from now on with that phrase.
As an American I feel I should throw this out there. America is one of (if not THE) most violent cultures going. Americans are prone to over-reacting and escalating, especially here in the South. It should not be surprising that the police reflect the same attributes.
Was it targeted or did the driver just leave the door unlocked while he ran inside somewhere else?
Casual thief sees the truck, jumps inside, sees a giant box with the Apple logo on the side, WOOHOO!!!
Maybe I should start reading these articles...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/art...
Similar to the sex offenders registry we shoul have a public registry with name and address of all cops who have used excessive force. Name and shame these guys.
**Life is too short to be serious**
these police stories we get from the US all the time are plain crazy.
your policy force has an image problem that reaches far beyond the US alone.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
In the *entire* EU it is illegal to arrest you without proof
Bullshit.
I mean, look at the phrasing. "You are under arrest on suspicion of ..."
No proof required.
This is so weird, this guy here, Knuth, has the same last name as the guy in the last article about The Art Of computer programming and stuff.
Do you really want to buy a product from a company which will SWAT you in return (intentionally or by accident)? I guess charging to audio jack adapters hasn't yielded sufficient profit, so now they are desperate to protect every dollar of profit.
After seeing what can happen to innocent citizens, http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/11/... and https://www.engadget.com/2017/... , I would have been terrified to see what was waiting outside the door. I know that the examples which I cited are an exception to what happens however it still is something which would immediately come to mind if I were in such a situation.
So the question we have to ask ourselves is: what do you do when Big Brother turns out to be very real indeed... but repeatedly gets their facts wrong?
Because that's essentially what we're faced with, at this point.
He'd have been shot on sight as soon as they broke the door down.
Hmm. If we could all agree that they were using excessive force, we could probably all agree to kick them off the force. So I guess official policy is out of the question. I wonder if there is any unofficial listing?
A quick Google and presto:
http://www.motherjones.com/cri...
Also:
http://www.ratemycop.com/
Apparently closed since 2015. Well, thinking about it, this is never gonna be functional. I know way too many criminals that refuse to take responsibility for their actions, and have completely unrealistic expectations about how LEOs treat them.
Still, nice idea, though.
Are you a corrupt cop trying to mislead people, or are you just completely ignorant of what you're talking about?
Neither, as it happens. I'm a convicted bank robber, arrested and questioned by local police and the FBI. Maybe you were in military law enforcement, cool. You have detention and Miranda all wrong.
I spent years behind bars reading case law and statutes. Some states have constitutions that provide more protections than the US Constitution but they're all different and I can't speak to those. I CAN speak about the way the federal system works, though.
A cop can stop you for investigation of any reasonable suspicion of a law being broken, for example a TRAFFIC STOP. This is a detention. Yet, miraculously, they never read you your rights during a traffic stop. If you admit to the cop that you were speeding (in hopes of earning leniency) and then try to fight the ticket in court you ABSOLUTELY WILL hear about your admission in court from the ticketing officer.
- first of all, the police are not obligated to read you your Miranda rights, at all.
Well, no. They aren't. But if they don't, they can't use any answers you give them in questioning against you. So, in practice, they always do. Unlike on television, they usually do this at the beginning of a custodial interview, not as they apply the cuffs. Any voluntary statements made before being Mirandized ARE ADMISSABLE, unless they are made in response to questions. If they are made in response to questions there will probably have to be an evidentiary hearing to determine admissibility.
It is in their interest to do so as soon as they detain you.
That's hilarious. They don't benefit from you shutting up, which is very common right after the Miranda warning. It is in their interest to give you as much rope as you need to hang yourself before they are required to Mirandize you in order to preserve the evidentiary value of your answers to questions. There is a whole body of law about how to tell if an interview/interrogation is inherently coercive (also, how 'custodial' it is).
I can't believe we're having this discussion.
This is a common misconception.
The Miranda warning only preserves the evidentiary value of answers you provide during 'questioning'. It is not a required element of either detention or arrest.
Cops can arrest you, cuff you, throw you in a car and cart you off to the pokey, all without Mirandizing you. They have to tell you that you are under arrest, and most places require they tell you what charges will be filed against you. Miranda doesn't come into it until someone tries to question you.
I definitely recommend that people find a lawyer and ask about required behavior and what they should do if detained/arrested. It is amazing what people don't know about the laws under which they live. It's really not like TV.
WAY too many bullshit incidents happen.
We need a far better way of vetting those officials we allow to hold enforcement offices.
Police need to understand that they are here to SERVE THE PEOPLE, not serve their need to feel superior!
Tell me, how in the world a stolen iPhone would warrant such extreme measures?!
Everyone from the warrant-issuing judge to the hand-job cops needs to be fired, labeled, and sued for this one!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
You have that wrong. All that started under the last administration. Remember? Trump is trying to stop it.
Imagine what he would have gone through if his wife didn't have that receipt. Or if she was mad at him and decided to not show it to them for a while.
Then, apple swatted a customer for buying it
There's quite a few people who know they're good people, and the police will never hassle them (even when they commit crimes, they're good people). These are the people who push for police violence, thinking it's only against bad people. They never think that they might be subject to a police error or anything.
In my experience, if someone's for law and order, they want order, and don't give a crap about the law.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
99.999% of all SWAT/no-knock raids fall under "This was clearly an incident that should have just been a knock and talk,"