After receiving a tip on June 30 that a man was selling large amounts of illegal fireworks in a South Los Angeles neighborhood, the Los Angeles Police Department showed up in force and found dozens of boxes of contraband stacked high in an alley. So far, so good. Police have the responsibility to crack down on dangerous and illegal activity.

But things went awry. In a widely reported fiasco, LAPD officials decided to detonate the explosives in a containment vessel at the site rather than take the fireworks elsewhere. They ended up detonating the city block. It’s the latest example of government officials causing a far bigger disaster than the one they were supposed to prevent.

“The blast destroyed much of the surrounding neighborhood, damaging 35 properties, injuring 17 people and displacing dozens more residents — many of whom have never returned,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The recently released report from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) raises serious questions about the department’s handling of the situation.

It’s perhaps the largest police-caused destruction of a neighborhood since 1985, when Philadelphia police dropped two bombs on the MOVE communal group, and killed 11 people and destroyed 65 houses in the process. LAPD’s behavior did not cause that level of destruction, but its negligence demands close scrutiny and departmental reform.

“On several occasions prior to the … detonation, Bomb Technician C expressed concern about the excessive quantity of the disposal product,” according to the report. (LAPD has not released the names of the technicians.) “They basically told me that they had already done the calculations, that they were well under the net explosive weight that the TCV (Total Containment Vessel) could handle,” he said.

The cause of the explosion, per the OIG, was basically what Technician C had predicted: the overloading of the $1-million containment truck with more explosives than it could safely handle. Police arrested the man who owned the fireworks and prosecutors have charged him with “child endangerment” and other crimes, but there’s no apparent punishment for the officials who actually endangered the residents.

The report concluded that “a lack of active supervision and a failure to utilize best practices at the scene of Bomb Squad calls had become somewhat of an accepted practice. It is the opinion of the OIG that Detective A failed to recognize numerous indicators that this incident required a higher level of supervision than that which was provided.” That’s pretty damning.

The report contains a long list of recommendations: a better notification process to the commanding officer, clearer understanding of the containment vessel’s limits, a secondary oversight check on a bomb technician’s calculations and a review of the department’s training policies. That’s fine, but a bomb technician did in fact catch the problem and issue the requisite warnings before the explosion.

As an aside, imagine what would have happened had a private company been responsible for such dangerous errors? The police department has set aside $5 million to help the battered residents and businesses. People make mistakes, but police officials rarely face serious consequence for their negligence beyond the eventual taxpayer-funded civil judgments.

This is just the latest reminder of the need for a more boisterous system of accountability for police and all government agencies.