I know physical testers who will carry a fake "get out of jail free card" that lists their own people as the point-of-contact so they can highlight the lack of verification as a weakness. If it does get verified they have a "backup" real one.

It is possible they attempted this and the police were none too happy being lied to.

It's not possible in this case, unless the news source above is misreporting the story.

> "I advised them that this building belonged to the taxpayers of Dallas County and the State had no authority to authorize a break-in of this building," Leonard wrote in the email.

> Leonard wrote that he then called the state employee to tell him his contractors had been arrested and that he didn't have the authority to authorize this.

If Leonard had called their point-of-contact and it had been fake, it would be weird for him not to lead with that detail.

Unsurprisingly, cops are assholes

It isn't only that - there are both good and a$$hole cops...But, it seems in the U.S. there isn't a consistent governance of law enforcement across all levels of government, nor across the whole geography of the nation...leading to some (many?) cops abusing their power.

It's not good enough to have an authorization- you need to have authorization from the proper stakeholder!

That is the dispute here.

The downside of having such balkanised (in that some many individual entities have their own police force) police service I suspect.

There is going to be a lawsuit and Iowa is going to settle.