from the wrong-place,-wrong-time-still-means-‘inside-your-own-home’ dept

Is it too much to ask for cops to be better? When other government employees get the address wrong, it may mean mail delivery delays or incorrect property tax assessments. But when cops get it wrong, people end up dead.

If officers are unfamiliar with the area they’ll be serving warrants in, it would make sense to engage in a little surveillance ahead of time to ensure the deadly mistakes like these aren’t made. But they never do because the government always believes the innocent people caught off guard by truly unexpected invasions of their personal space are in the wrong for reacting in ways cops somehow still don’t expect them to react.

And yet, for the most part, officers and their employers are given a free pass for killing innocent people, so long as officers believed the person they gunned down was actually the criminal suspect they were seeking to apprehend.

Here’s yet more data showing cops can’t actually be trusted with the power they’ve been given, coming to us via (of all places) UK news agency, The Guardian.

Police in Kentucky recently shot a man to death in his home while they executed a search warrant that appears to have been intended for a different address.

Doug Harless, 63, lived in London, a southern Kentucky town of about 8,000 residents, and was killed by police officers at his home at 511 Vanzant Road on the night of 23 December. However, audio from local Laurel county emergency dispatchers – and obtained by Kentucky news stations – shows that the search warrant was intended for 489 Vanzant Road, as was repeated multiple times on a recording of the audio.

The owner of 489 Vanzant Road told news station WKYT that no one had lived at that address for months.

While the layout of the neighborhood is less than intuitive (the address 511 Vanzant doesn’t show up on Google Maps), that should have told officers to be especially careful when determining which residence housed the person they were seeking.

While 511 Vanzant doesn’t appear on the map, 489 Vanzant does. Whether or not Google Maps (or a competing product) was used to determine the approximate location of the residence is, ultimately, a non-factor here. As WKYT’s reporting shows, the addresses of both homes were clearly marked on the houses’ exteriors:

While officers repeated no less than six times they needed assistance at 489 Vanzant, the actual address (511) was staring them in the face the whole time. The only recording released of this incident comes from a nearby home’s security cameras. The camera also captured audio of the incident, which began at nearly midnight, presumably for the sole purpose of making things more dangerous for everyone involved. (Standard practice on arrest warrants is to serve them during daylight hours when most people are likely to be home. Additional justification is needed to serve warrants late at night or very early in the morning.)

The recording shows officers swarming the house, followed by a lot of cops yelling stuff… immediately followed by five police gunshots.

Immediately following this killing, the London Police released this statement, which is very much exemplary of cop-speak: the exonerative “view from nowhere” where things happened to non-cops, but not because any cop was directly responsible for the end result of these apparently inadvertent actions.

On December 23, 2024, Officers from the London Police Department were following up with an investigation which started in the city limits of London. This investigation led officers to attempt to execute a search warrant at a residence on Vanzant Road in Laurel County. While doing so, the occupant of the residence produced a firearm and pointed it at officers. The officer then responded with force, which resulted in the death of the occupant.

It’s better than saying “weapons were discharged” without specifying whose weapons and who fired them, but not by much. But “responded with force” is a cowardly way to say officers shot at the man and “resulted in death” is a very dainty way to say “officers killed the man.”

With the man dead and the only released recording showing only the outside of the (wrong) home being invaded, it’s the officers’ word against the dead man’s. And, tragically, he’s in no position to counter this narrative.

The man the cops killed was Douglas Harless, a 63-year-old resident of Lily, Kentucky. The police couldn’t even be bothered to name the person they’d killed in their press release, much less provide reporters with any information about the person they were actually going after, who obviously didn’t live at the house officers raided despite it clearly and obviously being the wrong address.

And, given the statement of the property owner in reference to 489 Vanzant (“no one [has] lived at that address for months”), there’s good reason to believe officers were relying on outdated information to locate and apprehend the suspect they were actually looking for. Whatever the case may be (and new facts will definitely be slow to arrive if this thing was botched as badly as it appears to be), this was sloppy work. But sloppy means wrist slaps for cops and the loss of life for people whose only “mistake” was being in their own homes when officers came knocking.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, kentucky, london police, police killing, wrong house