Just recently, we covered a case involving a bogus raid of someone’s home based on nothing more than a ping from Apple’s ‘find my device’ feature. The Denver (CO) PD’s SWAT team raided the home of 77-year-old Ruby Johnson, destroying her garage door and some ceiling panels (?) in the process. The raid was predicated on a “find my device” ping from the owner of an iPhone that had been stolen along with their pickup truck.
The SWAT team made a mess, but it failed to recover any of the stolen property it was looking for. And the ping sent to officers by the theft victim showed an area that included five other homes in the same neighborhood. Johnson sued and was awarded nearly $4 million in damages by a jury.
Here we go again: another lawsuit filed by victims of a SWAT team raid predicated on nothing more than a “find my device” ping.
County police were investigating a carjacking May 26, 2023, when they used Apple’s “Find My” feature to track a pair of AirPods that were taken in the stolen car to the 1000 block of Wylin Court, the lawsuit says.
It took them to the home of Lindell Briscoe and Brittany Shamily, who were disturbed by SWAT officers banging on the door at around 6:30 p.m. A group of heavily armed officers used a battering ram to break the door and escorted Briscoe, Shamily and their five children outside, where they waited for 30 minutes. Police found nothing about the carjacking but eventually located the AirPods on the street, the lawsuit says.
Given the result of the lawsuit stemming from the 2022 Denver incident, one would expect St. Louis County to get its checkbook out in the near future.
As the lawsuit [PDF] points out, there’s a dearth of probable cause in the search warrant application, other than Detective Joseph Percich’s insistence that the location shown on the device ping could only indicate the interior of this particular residence.
At para. 6 the Affidavit states that “a witness and friend to the victims”, D.B., stated that his Apple AirPods were in the Charger, and the Affidavit further stated that this witness “assisted investigators” by using the “FindMy” application, and that “after a short time the stolen AirPods were determined to be at the home of 1022 Wylin Court, St. Louis, MO 63135.”
If the detective had more information than that, he apparently didn’t feel like it was worth sharing with the magistrate judge. And the magistrate judge was apparently equally unbothered by this lack of information, leading to a SWAT raid of a home containing zero stolen goods, but seven innocent people (including five children, one of whom is an infant).
(As a general note, law enforcement officers are supposed to use less violent means of entry when there’s evidence that children, especially very young ones, might be inside the house. They rarely take these precautions, however, which is how infants end up burned by flashbang grenades and other impressionable children develop a deep distrust of police officers.)
Lots of stuff that should have gone into this warrant application just isn’t there. And it’s likely not there because the involved officers didn’t take any of the steps they should have taken. If they had, this application would have had a lot more supporting information.
There is no indication that any investigating officers had training or knowledge regarding the accuracy of the FindMy App.
There is no indication of the meaning of “at the home,” that is, whether the Affiant or Defendant Officer Percich meant the App showed that the AirPods were on the street in front of the Plaintiffs’ home, or whether the AirPods were within the home at that address, in the yard of that home, in the street in front of that home, or at or near a neighboring house or neighboring yard.
Within the Affidavit there is no image of the FindMy map on which the police purportedly relied in determining the location of the AirPods.
There is no indication whether the App showed a blue circle around any particular area, which the FindMy App sometimes shows, or, if so, the area encompassed by any such blue circle.
The “blue circle” referred to here looks like this, and it may be bigger or smaller depending on how precise the location data is. (This was included in Johnson’s lawsuit against the Denver PD.)
There are other problems with the affidavit as well. The affidavit claims the house the SWAT team raided was apparently placed under surveillance at some point, but no information is given when the surveillance of the home started, how long it lasted, or if the officers watching the house noted anything that might have led them to suspect stolen goods would be found there.
The affidavit makes no mention of the fact that everyone involved in the car theft had already been apprehended and gave no indication they stopped anywhere to offload anything from the interior of the car. In fact, officers should have already known nothing like this happened, since a pursuit was initiated and ended with the driver crashing the stolen car nearly 6 miles away from the house the SWAT team raided.
There’s a two-hour gap between the carjacking and the recovery of the stolen vehicle, but nothing said about whether the supposed “surveillance” of the residence occurred between those hours. There’s also nothing in the application that would denote any connection between the four apprehended suspects and this residence.
There’s a lot of crucial information missing here. A second court is now going to get a chance to look at this seriously deficient affidavit and, chances are, it’s not going to be given a thumbs up by the federal court. And if there’s no probable cause to support a search — much less the raid of a home by a SWAT team — then everything that happened here is a rights violation.
While the “find my device” feature can be useful in locating stolen or lost devices, law enforcement officers, who always refer to themselves as being filled to the brim with “training and expertise,” should know better than presenting imprecise location data as probable cause for a search. It can be part of the probable cause but it shouldn’t be the entire thing.
