Another example in mistake of address, which could be reported in the papers as follows:
"A Hundred Federal Agents Raid 2 Wrong Houses in Small Cul-de-Sac"
We were on a warrant in a poor, rural area of a southern state. We hit our first house and our subject wasn't there, but the person there told us where the target was. So we go to that next house and have a local TFO do the reconnaissance on the target house. We can't figure out which lot in this community is our target; everything is unlabelled. It's a dirt road nestled back in the woods, with about 6-8 houses on it clustered in close proximity. A local sheriff's deputy with us tells us that he's familiar with the community and that the last one is our target, so we walk up and they answer the door and a peaceful arrest is made. At the same time, we were walking up to 2 other houses that are clearly, from our perspective, on the same lot: they are clustered near our target house, and look to be on the same lot, separated from the road and other houses by the same fence as the target house, and use the same driveway (of you could call it that) as the target house. More notably, several vehicles out of the 24 present are vehicles that are on our seizure list, belonging to our target, and several of those are parked up against those outlying structures. They appear to be outlying structures in the same lot, you might refer to them as mother-in-law suites.
While waiting for our telephonic search warrant for the new location from the judge, the case agent tells us that those other outlying structures are completely separate lots, not owned by the target. Woops. That could've been written in a completely different light by the press looking to make a headline, but I challenge any of you to point out how we didn't act reasonably and within good faith given the information we had at the time. It was complete dumb luck that we walked up to the right house on that property and didn't detain a completely uninvolved person who was living on, technically, a different piece of property according to county records. By the end of the day my 10-agent team had gathered about 70 LEOs total from other warrant teams which had already wrapped up, to help execute the search warrant on what we thought was going to be a giant multi-building operation. That's a lot of dudes with guns who, to the average person, appear at first sight to be making incursions on the 4th Amendment rights of totally uninvolved parties living at different addresses...anyone here reading the imaginary news paper would react, "How could they be so stupid!?"
So, it's not always as clear cut and easy as your daily life might lead you to believe. We ran into the same exact issues when I was in EMS, as well.