Grandmother Awarded Nearly $4 Million Over SWAT Raid Predicated On A Faulty ‘Find My Phone’ Ping

Legal Issues

from the coarse-location-followed-by-coarse-shouting dept

In January 2022, 77-year-old Ruby Johnson’s house was raided by the Denver Police Department. Supposedly seeking a stolen vehicle and several guns, the SWAT team descended on Johnson’s house. The officers ordered anyone inside to come out of the house. Johnson complied, but that didn’t stop the SWAT team from attempting to destroy her house to find the contraband it was sure was located inside the home (which I guess includes the “stolen truck”). The SWAT team, with the home’s only resident in its temporary custody, proceeded to destroy her garage door with a battering ram, smash some ceiling panels (?), destroy some of her belongings, and otherwise leave her house in disarray.

The warrant was predicated on little more than a ping produced by Apple’s “Find My iPhone” feature. That ping (initiated by the victim of the truck and phone theft) managed to narrow down the location of the stolen phone to at least six homes in the neighborhood. This location data isn’t always precise. The precision depends on the settings applied by the device owner and, unless the phone is set to always share its location, the location provided by this feature is an approximation that can be off by dozens or hundreds of feet.

The Denver PD used the screenshot of the victim’s “Find My iPhone” search results to support its search warrant. This was pretty much the only so-called probable cause offered by the Denver PD before it raided this home.

Using little more than this information (a ping that originated more than nine hours before the PD initiated its investigation), the PD raided Johnson’s house. (The cherry on top of this cavalcade of errors was Officer Gary Staub’s warrant affidavit, which offered sworn statements that the find my phone pings had actually been initiated in 2021, more than year before this investigation was instigated.)

Date errors aside (this was the first month of 2022 after all), the affidavit made speculative claims about the accuracy of this iPhone feature and, without offering any supporting evidence, swore the only place this stolen phone could currently be located was Ruby Johnson’s residence.

All of this was not only stupid, but unconstitutional. There was no probable cause to support this search. On top of that, Detective Gary Staab had misled the court by portraying the find-my-phone pings as providing precise location data when, in fact, the feature was only capable of providing approximate location data — something the detective would have known if he’d bothered to dig a little deeper into the feature (or had used any of the “training and expertise” cited in his warrant request).

Normally, this lawsuit would have had to surmount the massive barrier erected by years of qualified immunity jurisprudence. But, thanks to a law passed in 2020, Colorado residents can sue police officers in local courts for constitutional violations, making it a bit more difficult for law enforcement officers to prematurely exit lawsuits containing credible allegations of rights violations.

The end result, as the ACLU (which represented Johnson in this case) reports, is a much-deserved payout to Johnson. It’s not even a hastily crafted settlement pushed out in hopes of stopping the bleeding before it gets worse. A jury awarded this to Johnson, agreeing with her and her reps that this raid (and the events leading up to it) was a severe violation of her rights.

In a precedent-setting decision under a new statute allowing enforcement of the Colorado Constitution, a Colorado jury awarded $3.76 million in damages to Ruby Johnson, a 78-year-old Montbello grandmother, on Friday after concluding that Denver Police Department (DPD) Detective Gary Staab and DPD Sergeant Gregory Buschy violated the Colorado Constitution by hastily seeking, obtaining, and executing a search warrant of her home without probable cause or proper investigation. The jury’s award included both $1.26 million in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages after concluding that the officers acted with willful and wanton disregard of Ms. Johnson’s constitutional right to be free from an unreasonable search and seizure.

Not that we should expect this payout to make the Denver PD any less likely to violate rights in the future. The state law that allows these lawsuits may deter some abuse and misconduct, but the officers sued in this case have already been cleared of any wrongdoing by their employer.

[A] spokesperson for the department said in an email on Tuesday, an internal affairs review of the incident resulted in no formal discipline for the officers. Staab and Buschy remain employed with the department, the spokesperson said.

The good news is Johnson is being compensated for the pain, suffering, and physical damage to her house. The better news is Colorado residents don’t have to tangle with cop-friendly federal courts to hold officers accountable. But the “this isn’t even news” part of this is the fact that police departments continue to protect misbehaving officers. And, for the most part, the tab rung up by the Denver PD will be paid by taxpayers who had nothing at all to do with this regrettable, completely avoidable string of rights abuses.

Filed Under: denver police, find my phone, gary staub, police raid, ruby johnson, swat team