At Reason, Zuri Davis runs through the failures, bit by bit, of how Tennessee cops searching for a 16-year-old suspected of breaking into cars managed to not merely end up pointing guns at a naked woman in her own home after breaking down her door because she didn’t open it within 30 seconds, but it ended up being the wrong house.
Several minutes later, the officers told Hines they had the wrong home.
How is that possible?
The police were looking for a 16-year-old in connection with some vehicle burglaries. Interim Chief John Drake confirmed in a Wednesday press conference that the address MNPD used to serve the search warrant was outdated. The department obtained the information through the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, which has not provided updates on residents since 2018, due to privacy concerns. Hines had only lived in the apartment for six months, and she had no connection to the teen.
Reaction to this cherry atop a banana split of screw-ups has reflected a curious thing. Without anyone really arguing that the cops weren’t wrong, particularly since they were clearly wrong, the fiasco has been chalked up to a “reasonable mistake.” After all, the police relied on the Housing Authority’s information, and while they should have known it was stale, such reliance wasn’t unreasonable. So, yeah, it was wrong and bad, but it was within the realm of an understandable mistake, a reasonable error.
No. No, no, no. There is no such thing as a reasonable error to rely on data that’s unverified, whether because it’s stale or because it’s simply there but unreliable. When the police obtain a warrant, whether to break into a home or seize a person, there is an affirmative duty to ascertain that the information provided in support of that warrant is both accurate and fresh. That some random clerk somewhere entered it into some governmental database at some point in the past doesn’t elevate whatever the computer screen says into sufficiently verified proof to violate the sanctity of a person’s home or body.
In the past, the basis for breaking into a home would ordinarily be direct information, whether from observation, a reliable informant or investigation that provided verification that the location was the right one, the home was the place they wanted and the person they sought could be found there. Today, we live in an age of databases, and we’ve come to believe in their efficacy, their reliability, even though we know nothing about them. We don’t know who input the data. We don’t know whether the data they were inputting was accurate or just some crap on a form. We don’t know whether they were diligent in their entry or a slacker, or worse.
We don’t know a damn thing about how the data got there. We only know it’s there. And for most of us, that’s good enough because there isn’t much else we could do to ascertain the reliability of the data. But then, we’re not cops and our use of the data isn’t to break down the door of some woman’s home. Even if Azaria Hines had been fully clothed as police rammed down her door, pointed guns at her (which occasionally “accidentally” fire), it still was the wrong house.
Is it understandable that the cops tried to shortcut their responsibility to make sure that the house they would break into was the place where their heinous 16-year-old thief lived? Is it understandable that they relied on a Housing Authority database, given that it is the government just like them, and it had the info right there on the screen, and exactly how much time and effort would one expect the cops to put in to find some kid suspected of a small-potatoes crime like stealing car stereos. I mean, really, what would you expect?
If they’re going to get a warrant, break down a door, violate a person’s home and physical well-being, you’re damned right they should be expected to verify the accuracy, the freshness, of their location beforehand. They should be expected to do their job and do it right. Relying on stale data is inexcusable, even though this time Azaria Hines didn’t die because of stale data and lazy cops.