Police took no chances when an armed intruder barricaded himself in the home of an innocent bystander in McKinney, Texas. Following a seven-hour standoff, officers launched a shock-and-awe raid that ended with the suspect’s suicide. Then they closed the case without paying for property damage.
The city told homeowner Vicki Baker that she was out of luck. So did her insurance company, which covers natural disasters but not deliberate police actions. The broken windows, smashed doors, punctured walls, tear gas-stained fabrics, and flattened backyard fence were her problem — even though Baker had nothing to do with the crime and no connection to the intruder other than hiring him in the past as a handyman.
Normally the judicial system sanctions such shirking of responsibility. Federal courts have said for decades that forcing law enforcement agencies to pay for what they break in the course of their duties was legally impossible. But Baker tried anyway. She filed a constitutional lawsuit with representation from our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, and scored an underdog victory on June 22.
For the first time in U.S. history, a jury awarded a property owner damages under the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, which requires the government to provide “just compensation” when it takes property for public use. Now, in at least one jurisdiction, the government will have to follow the same rule as schoolchildren: “Clean up your own mess.”
Author Robert Fulghum imagines the implications in his classic essay, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: “Think what a better world it would be … if all governments had a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.” The courtesy seems obvious to Baker, who gave the police permission to enter her home but not to destroy it.
The ordeal started on July 25, 2020, when a former handyman showed up with a 15-year-old hostage and took control of the property as a hideout. Baker was not inside. She had moved to Montana and was in the process of selling the home. But her adult daughter, who was helping to get the property ready, found herself caught in the middle.
After getting permission to leave under the pretext of needing groceries, the daughter called Baker, and together, they called the police. The intruder later released his hostage unharmed, but Baker’s house sustained nearly $60,000 in damages. After hearing the facts, the jury said she was entitled to the full amount.
The decision followed a favorable ruling in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, where Judge Amos Mazzant III picked apart the city’s arguments for why it should not have to compensate Baker. Essentially, the judge ruled that when a city enforces its laws in the public interest, then the public should share the costs of intentional, foreseeable damage. The full burden should not fall on one unlucky bystander.
The courts were not so kind to Leo and Alfonsina Lech when an armed shoplifter randomly chose their Colorado home for a police standoff in 2015. A SWAT team left the property uninhabitable. But when the Lechs sued for damages, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invented a special Fifth Amendment exemption for the police, and the Supreme Court declined to consider the case.
Shaniz West also got nothing in Idaho after officers bombarded her empty house in 2014 during a search for her fugitive ex-boyfriend. And the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office initially told Robert Vansickle no in Florida when he sought compensation for property damage following a 2021 police standoff in his neighborhood.
Vansickle shamed the police in the media until local officials relented and paid for repairs. Baker needed a lawsuit and two years of legal wrangling to get the same result. Yet payment for intentional, foreseeable damage should be automatic.
The Fifth Amendment is clear: Private property shall not be taken for public use “without just compensation.” Even a kindergartner can understand the logic.
Jeffrey Redfern is an attorney, and Daryl James is a writer at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Virginia.
