When a SWAT team or a police operation damages a house, the owner is usually left with two problems at once: the damage itself — doors, windows, walls — and a house full of whatever the officers used to end the standoff. Most people assume the city pays for it, or that insurance does. Neither is safe to assume in Texas, and one case from McKinney shows exactly where each answer runs out.
What happened in McKinney
In July 2020 an armed fugitive held a 15-year-old girl hostage inside Vicki Baker’s home in McKinney. In the federal appeals court’s words, city police “employed armored vehicles, explosives, and toxic-gas grenades to resolve the situation.” Nobody disputed that the officers did what the emergency required. The house was badly damaged and much of what was in it was destroyed.
Then came two refusals:
- The city. Its claims process denied the claim in full, because “there is no liability on the part of the City or any of its employees.”
- The insurer. Her policy “would not cover any damage caused by the City’s police, including the structural damage.”
A jury later decided that $59,656.59 would justly compensate her for the real and personal property losses.
Why the federal claim failed
In October 2023 the Fifth Circuit reversed the judgment she had won under the U.S. Constitution. It concluded that “as a matter of history and precedent, the Takings Clause does not require compensation for damaged or destroyed property when it was objectively necessary for officers to damage or destroy that” property in an active emergency to prevent imminent harm to people. The Supreme Court declined to take the case in 2024.
Read on its own, that sounds like the end of it: the police had to do it, so nobody pays. In Texas it was not the end.
Why the Texas claim succeeded
The Texas Constitution’s takings clause is worded more broadly than the federal one. Article I, Section 17 begins: “No person’s property shall be taken, damaged, or destroyed for or applied to public use without adequate compensation being made, unless by the consent of such person”.
Texas courts have applied that to police operations before. In Steele v. City of Houston (Tex. 1980), police destroyed a house while recapturing escaped convicts who had taken refuge in it, and the Supreme Court of Texas held:
We do not hold that the police officers wrongfully ordered the destruction of the dwelling; we hold that the innocent third parties are entitled by the Constitution to compensation for their property.
Baker went back to the district court on that basis. Judgment was entered for her under Article I, Section 17 in June 2025, and on May 22, 2026 the Fifth Circuit affirmed it, holding that “Steele controls and precludes the City’s efforts to invoke a necessity defense in this case.”
Three limits on reading that as a rule for everyone:
- The 2026 opinion is unpublished, so it does not bind other cases. Steele is the Texas Supreme Court’s own precedent, and that is the authority the result rests on.
- Steele is about innocent third parties. An owner who was not the person the police were after is in a different position from one who was.
- Consent can be a defense. The city in McKinney lost that argument because, the court said, it failed to raise it adequately. Anything signed or agreed with the police at the scene is worth keeping a copy of.
What to do if it has happened to you
- Photograph everything before anything is moved — every room, every damaged door and window, and the residue on floors and furniture. Photograph the contents as well as the structure; much of Baker’s loss was personal property.
- Get the police incident number and the name of the agency that ran the operation. City police, a county sheriff and a state agency are different defendants.
- Ask your insurer in writing whether the policy covers damage caused by law enforcement, and get the answer in writing too. Some policies exclude it; you need to know which yours is.
- File a written claim with the city or county, and keep the denial if one comes. Baker’s case began with a denied claim.
- Talk to a lawyer before signing anything that settles or releases the claim. Takings claims under the Texas Constitution are specialist work, and the timing of a claim matters.
The cleanup itself
Chemical agents and the debris from forced entry are a cleanup job, not a repair job, and they come first. The residue from gas munitions settles into fabrics, carpet and ductwork, and a contractor should tell you what it intends to remove and what it intends to clean in place — in writing, itemized, with the cleanup separate from the rebuild. That separation matters twice: insurers and claims processes often treat the two differently, and a later compensation claim is easier to prove with an invoice that says what each part cost.
If the operation followed a violent crime against you, the state Crime Victims’ Compensation Program may reimburse part of the cleanup, after insurance and never for repairs. Separately, the same program pays up to $1,000 to replace property police seized as evidence — including property rendered unusable during evidence collection — if it is listed in the offense report. It does not pay for property damaged during the crime itself, so it will not cover a door broken in a standoff. What the program pays, and in what order. On who is responsible for the rest: who cleans up after a death or crime in Texas.
This is a summary of two court opinions and a constitutional provision, with links to each. It is not legal advice. A takings claim turns on its facts, and a Texas lawyer who handles them is the right person to ask about yours.
Each city on this network has its own page with that county’s offices and the local numbers, with the sources. Find your city.