SWAT Team Raids Innocent Family Over Stolen AirPods Dropped on Their Street
SWAT Team Raids Innocent Family Over Stolen AirPods Dropped on Their Street
St. Louis County Police have some explaining to do
Around 6:30 p.m. on May 26, Brittany Shamily was at home with her children, including an infant, when police used a battering ram to bust in her front door. “What the hell is going on?” she screamed, terrified for herself and her family. “I got a three-month-old baby!”
...
While the family was detained outside, the SWAT team "ransacked" their house, the lawsuit says. One SWAT team member punched a basketball-sized hole in the drywall. Another broke through a drop ceiling. They turned over drawers and left what had been an orderly house in disarray.
After this had gone on for more than half an hour, the AirPods were located — on the street outside the family's home.
It later came to light that one of Shamily and Briscoe’s daughters saw what was likely the stolen Charger careening through their neighborhood a little before 7 a.m. that day. (The vehicle later crashed on the 1700 block of Foley Drive, about six miles from the family’s home.) It stands to reason that someone in the Charger tossed a pair of stolen AirPods onto the street in the vicinity of the quiet house police later busted into and ransacked.
The family, represented by Schock and Erich Vieth, is suing for damages stemming from embarrassment, unreasonable use of force, loss of liberty, and other factors. The lawsuit notes that neither Shamily or Briscoe had been in any trouble with the law for at least a dozen years prior to the incident. "There was no probable cause for the search warrant and had the affidavit contained complete information, the state court judge would not have approved the warrant," the suit allege
Stolen airpods? The cops around here would not even look for a stolen car.
The article implies the swat team was sent due to an armed carjacking that morning. Someone got a warrant for search and seizure based on geolocation results from the airpods and they assumed the carjackers would be hanging out at this address.
It's a rental home. Nothing is mentioned about the identity of the owner of the home. After looking up the house on zillow though it's about 113k. It's a dead end street surrounded by homes that are valued under 100k. I didn't realize that federal minimum wage would be enough to pay a mortgage in 2024, but apparently it is possible. This isn't super relevant other than the fact i'm looking at buying a house near Boston and I did a double take that a home exists in this price range and isn't in a trailer park. 113k here won't even buy you a parking spot.
After looking up the address it looks like a group of juveniles were involved with the carjacking so names are impossible to find. The most bizzare thing though is that a couple hours after the carjacking the car was picked up 3.5 miles / an 8 minute drive from the house in wylin court with the suspects bailing from the car and the cops arresting them... I wonder when the swatting happened at 630pm who they thought they would find?
Fun fact, the murder rate in St Louis per capita is the 7th highest in the world, after six cities in Mexico. #1 in the US. 87.83 per 100k. https://www.statista.com/statistics/243797/ranking-of-the-most-dangerous-cities-in-the-world-by-murder-rate-per-capita/
I'm not justifying anything. I learned a lot that I never knew about St Louis MO and holy fuck is it rough.
downtown st louis is actually pretty nice. i wouldn't recommend too many places in the south, but st louis seemed kinda nice.
I didn’t know that about St Louis, I went there for a conference a few years ago and mostly stayed downtown but I drove around a bit one day and it just seemed like an old Southern city. I never felt unsafe but I also lived in an old Southern city with lots of crime for a while so things outside of downtown didn’t seem much different.
There are still many places in the US where you can get a decent house in the lower 100s but they are mostly all rural.
Likely someone locally influential's business got hit. They're not here to protect your car, theyre here to keep the status quo for the rich.
Cops have, from their very foundation, been about protecting the money and the people who have it.
Swat must have gotten new military hardware they wanted to play with.
good god, i hope they win the hell out of that SWAT team.
Swat teams have no business being involved in a property crime case of any sort. Law and order my ass.
They won't. Police have qualified immunity. At best taxpayers pony up, but even that is unlikely.
This is both true and awful - we, the tax payers, just paid an inept SWAT Team to cosplay doing what is essentially a military operation, to the cost of either one completely innocent family getting their house and lives fucked over or all of us paying a bunch of money to fix what they broke.
What a fucking system. St. Louis is dangerous, but not so much that they need to fucking rush in a SWAT Team without good intel. I hope these bastards at least get their toys and privileges taken away… but bringing charges against anyone responsible - I have no hopes that will happen.
Judge who signed off on this warrant should be disbarred and charged with unreasonable use of force and liable in the civil suit.
We don't know what information they were provided.
Whoever owned those headphones must have had money to get the police to mobilize a swat team and blast down a fucking door.
Or the SWAT team was bored and looking for an excuse to wreck shit
They'd only do that in a poor neighborhood. less outrage from the public and less chance for lawsuits.
JFC reading this it’s literally that fucking gif.
Air pods are what, like $200?
Slightly misleading headline - the SWAT team used the "find my" network to locate the airpods, which had been in a car that had been stolen in (they imply) an armed carjacking. The carjackers then drove through the street the Shamilys live on and threw the airpods out the window (again it is implied but not stated that the airpods were found in the street outside the Shamily home where they landed).
So... yeah. Even calling this "circumstantial evidence" is stretching this to the absolute limit. Presumably someone in the family has an apple device on the findmy network, which would show the Shamily home as the location of the airpods (since the device was in the home, but the airpods it was detecting in the vicinity were decidedly not).
Somehow, st. louis' finest didnt stop to think about... well, anything apparently. This is fucking absurd. I hope their lawyers eviscerate the cops over this one.
What in the actual fuck? They sent swat in for a pair of AirPods. SWAT!
A pair of AirPods and what lawyers say was some shoddy police work resulted in an innocent middle-class Ferguson family having their front door smashed in by the St. Louis County SWAT team last May.
No, they were located in a stolen car, and their tracking location was used as PC for a warrant.
Still insane, corrupt, and shameful - just marginally better than having busted out the SWAT entirely for the lost pods.
Jesus fucking christ, the pigs just do not learn! There was absolutely no fucking cause for this level of force and terror, and whoever signed off on the warrant and use of SWAT force on the basis of airpod tracking location is a fucking moron. Each and every person involved should lose their job and damages should be paid from the police pension fund. Maybe then the cops would learn to use some goddamn restraint and common sense. I'm so tired of stories like this.
Find out where cops live, steal airpods, toss them in the general vicinity...
To understand why this particular case necessitated the use of such force, we must delve into the disturbingly plausible sequence of events that could arise from such a seemingly inconsequential event.
Firstly, the tracking capabilities provided by Apple's Find My feature led authorities to believe that the stolen AirPods were located within Shamily's residence. This, in turn, led to the assumption that there might be some connection between the family and the carjacking perpetrators. A potential link between the family and the criminal organization behind the carjacking meant they could possess highly sensitive information or have access to deadly weaponry.
Now, let's imagine the following scenario: if the SWAT team hadn't raided Shamily's house and seized any potentially harmful materials, it would have allowed the criminals involved in the carjacking to continue their operations unchecked. This, in turn, would enable them to carry out more successful crimes and amass greater resources. Eventually, they might acquire nuclear technology or develop other advanced weapon systems.
The newly fortified carjacking ring would then target vital military bases and steal missiles, eventually launching a full-scale global war. In the midst of the chaos, one rogue general, seeking to protect his homeland at all costs, would order the launch of every single intercontinental ballistic missile he had under his command. Retaliation from other nations' militaries would follow suit, resulting in a mutual assured destruction scenario where nuclear fallout envelopes our world.
Don't give them any ideas
Exact opposite of Canadian policing.
My friend:
My motorcycle was stolen
I know who took it
I know where it is
Here's a photo of my motorcycle sitting in his yardPolice:
We don't care! Gotta go, we just got a report of a driver not wearing a seatbelt
Maybe there's some sort of middle ground where the police could actually fight crime without a ton of collateral damage.
Launching an investigation requires a lot of work and paperwork.
Arresting someone already doing something illegal is convenient.
US cops are lazy unless it's shooting an unarmed person of color.
Maybe there’s some sort of middle ground where the police could actually fight crime without a ton of collateral damage.
Now you're just talking crazy talk!
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."
Anne frank had something to hide
Her best selling journal!! (Among other things that is)
So much wrong with these raids, it's completely ridiculous. The cherry on top though, is how unapologetic they appear to be about the whole affair. From the article:
"The day after the errant raid, Briscoe emailed one of the detectives inquiring about the department repairing his broken door. The detective agreed the county would fix it for them.
A few months later, the door still busted, the family’s landlord fixed it instead."
FTP.
Please be security minded and at the very least use SFTP if you're going that route.
Fine, I'll use protection. As long as the protection involves sandpaper and Tabasco sauce for their displeasure. 😁