The Chicago Police Department’s motto is: “We serve and protect.” Philadelphia’s is: “Honor. Integrity. Service.” Dallas’s is: “One city, one team.” Atlanta’s FBI office motto might be: “Oops!”

Last week, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the victims of a bungled predawn raid can sue members of the six-member SWAT team that was looking for drug dealers. With guns drawn, the agents used a battering ram to smash the front door of, and threw a stun grenade into, the wrong house.

The traumatized occupants (including a 7-year-old at the time) of the mistakenly attacked house, now represented by the Institute for Justice, filed suit under a provision of the Federal Tort Claims Act. Congress enacted the provision 50 years ago after two wrong-house raids. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit construed another FTCA provision as precluding the plaintiffs from suing. All nine Supreme Court justices, however, said the suit could go forward. They returned it to the 11th Circuit for its “careful reexamination.”

During oral arguments in the Supreme Court, the government said: The government should not be held liable because the FBI was issuing multiple warrants that night and wanted them all simultaneously executed. And because considerations of “efficiency” and “operational security” dictated against checking the house number on the mailbox at the end of the driveway, which might have exposed “the agents to potential lines of fire from the windows.”

The Supreme Court’s decision turned on technical distinctions. Still, the fact that all nine justices rejected the 11th Circuit’s conclusion perhaps indicates a quickened interest in holding government accountable. Michael Mendenhall hopes so.

In 2023, he was arrested, handcuffed, his Denver townhouse was searched and he spent a night in jail. A judge had issued a warrant against him because one police officer told a detective that a man with whom Mendenhall had argued called 911 to accuse Mendenhall of menacing him with a baseball bat.

The accuser did not testify before the judge who issued the warrant. The officer who wrote the affidavit did not speak with the accuser. And no one honored the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, as it was for 169 years, from the 1791 adoption of the Bill of Rights until 1960.

It protects Americans’ right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. It stipulates that no warrant shall be issued unless supported by “oath or affirmation.” As Jacob Sullum of Reason writes, those three words were generally understood to mean warrants could be issued only based on the government agent seeking the warrant having “firsthand knowledge of the relevant facts,” rather than based on “the unsworn claims of another person who was never subjected to judicial scrutiny.”

The Denver police officers acted in accord with their department’s protocols. They accord with a 1960 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a police search of an apartment based solely on the unsworn claims of a person whose accusations had not been subjected to judicial scrutiny. Mendenhall, who also is represented by the Institute for Justice, hopes the court will reconsider the 1960 ruling that weakened the Bill of Rights by eviscerating the oath or affirmation clause.

In his brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, Mendenhall says: Rarely is there “a situation in which the individual is more powerless before the State than when its agents arrive armed with a warrant,” authorized to use violence and empowered to “seize persons or comb through their most private spaces.”

The Supreme Court last week decided the wrong-house raid case at a fraught moment. Americans nationwide are frequently seeing videos of raids on homes and businesses conducted by Immigration and Custom Enforcement and other government agents. The agents are sometimes masked and often indistinguishable from infantry units wearing combat gear suited for urban warfare.

Many Americans, who understand that border protections are essential aspects of national sovereignty, rejected the previous president partly because of his refusal to take care that immigration laws are faithfully executed. Now, however, many Americans are wincing when they see the measures employed by militarized police to enforce his successor’s political rhetoric.

The current administration has talked about deporting all undocumented immigrants. There are 11 million. At least 78 percent have been here more than five years. The task of extracting them from communities that value them and the workforce that needs them inflames a government that relishes flexing its muscles and disregarding due process. Hence the maximum importance of the court’s minimalist insistence that government should raid the right house.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.