As the courts are finally starting to take public notice of again, scale matters.

Imagine a world where housing is free, where anyone without can request a primary residence in a location of their choosing and -after twenty four hours- receive one free-of-charge that any member of today's working class would declare to be solidly of above-average quality.

In this world, would police who were tasked with destroying evidence of child molestation from the home of a convicted child molester be in error if they burned the molester's house down, rather than going through the trouble of locating just the documents, trinkets, & etc. that they were tasked with removing? [0]

I mean, what's the harm, right? The child molester can get a good house for nothing with a day's notice.

To make the analogy explicit: just because the child molester can re-use the phone doesn't make torching everything on that phone the correct thing to do. The fact that their mass destruction of that guy's property also destroyed evidence that was relevant to a civil lawsuit only makes things worse for them... maybe not legally, but definitely from a "That shit ain't right and shouldn't be happening!" standpoint.

I hope that the courts treat the relevant evidence as being deliberately destroyed, should the molester bring his civil suit.

> The court said (more or less) "that's not unreasonable: cops have better things to do than hand wipe criminals' phones of criminal evidence".

Yeah, this court is using bogus logic. If the cops don't have time for it, then they should be required to delegate to specialists. Mass destruction of one's papers and other personal effects in order to destroy a tiny slice of them is wildly out of line.

[0] The child molester lives alone, so the majority of the property in his house happens to be his... not that the torch squad bothered to check.