Do you recall where this story was originally posted?
I ask because one of their goals are to break-up our local police forces by reducing trust between police and the community, reducing the competency of police, dumb-down police training, under-fund police departments, and to highlight stories like this in the media.
So, while this is clearly an egregious act and total incompetence by the police, and a telling decision by the courts, I'm still left wondering if there is more to understand here.
Sorry IP, I missed this post the first time through.
I first read about it while doing legal research into constitutional issues back in the mid- to late 1980s. Here's the correct cite:
Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1, 4 (D.C. 1981)
You can easily look it up at any university law library, assuming they'll let you use it. Back in those days we had to fight tooth and nail for the "privillege" of using law libraries that our tax dollars paid for. I have to assume it would be even worse now, though I haven't done any of that kind of research in quite a few years.
If you have a West Law or Lexis subscription it's available online, but those are prohibitively expensive.
I'd suggest getting the book
Dial 911 and Die from JPFO or Amazon. You may not fully trust groups like JPFO, but every citation in the book is pretty easily verifiable, so long as you can get access to a decent law library.
As far as brearking up local police forces, great idea! Get rid of all of them and replace them with private security firms. Professional government police forces were never intended to "fight crime" or protect individual rights anyway. Their primary purpose has always been to keep certain segments of society under control (mostly any segment that criticizes government). A little research into their history demonstrates this quite clearly.
They're tax parasites. Government paid thugs there to make sure individuals don't somehow get the crazy idea that they're actually the sovereigns. We don't need them. We got by quite well for close to a century without them. When they finally go, good riddance.