How to Flex Your Rights During Police Encounters

Don't be intimidated by police at your door. These rules will help protect your rights and improve your odds of avoiding a home search.

No Warrant, No Search!
The Supreme Court has ruled that the home is entitled to maximum search protection. Even if they have probable cause to believe something illegal is going on inside your home, the 4th Amendment requires police to get a signed search warrant from a judge to legally enter and search.

Clip from the DVD, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police

The major exception to the search warrant requirement is where consent is given to an officer's request to enter. If, for example, an officer is legally invited into your home, any illegal items that are out in the open --  or in "plain view" -- can be seized as evidence, which can lead to an arrest. That being the case, it's always wise to keep any private items that you don't want others to see out of view of your entrance area.

College students suffer from an unfortunate lack of privacy rights in many situations. Dorms are the property of the university, thus school officials and campus police tend to feel a sense of entitlement with regards to entering student housing.

The rental agreement for your dorm room should specify when school officials may and may not enter, so make sure you're familiar with the terms of your lease and keep a copy on hand. In many cases, student housing affords less privacy protection than a standard rental agreement, so be mindful of the potential for random inspections and other intrusions that are common on college campuses.

Campus policies are written and enforced differently from one school to the next, so it's wise to familiarize yourself with the rules and the people who enforce them. Although the campus environment may reduce individual privacy, it provides great opportunities to get to know school officials and security staff. Building good relationships with the people around you is the best strategy for preventing problems before they occur.

Regardless of the specific policies and practices at your school, there's generally no harm in attempting to protect your privacy by politely refusing searches and declining to incriminate yourself. We've heard many success stories from college students who asserted their rights, so remember that keeping calm and knowing the rules will help improve your odds of avoiding problems.

Finally, we've observed that marijuana smoking is the quickest and easiest way to get in trouble in your dorm. Many schools put significant resources into catching and punishing marijuana users on campus, often resulting in severe sanctions such as arrest, removal from the dorms, suspension, urine testing, fines, parental notification, etc.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the home is entitled to maximum protection from police searches and seizures. Specifically, the court has ruled that even if police have probable cause to believe that something illegal is going on inside your home, the 4th Amendment requires them to get a signed warrant from a judge to legally enter and search.

Clip from the DVD, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police

The major exception to the search warrant requirement is where consent is given to an officer's request to enter. If, for example, an officer is legally invited into your home, any illegal items that are out in the open --  or in "plain view" -- can be seized as evidence, which can lead to an arrest. That being the case, it's always wise to keep any private items that you don't want others to see out of view of your entrance area.

As is often the case, a naïve friend, family member, or roommate may invite police into your home. So they too should be aware of their right to refuse police entry.

This depends on the circumstances. The Supreme Court has ruled that any occupant of a residence can refuse consent, even if other roommates agree to a search. Unfortunately, you must be present in order to assert your refusal. For this reason, it’s important to make sure that your roommates understand their 4th Amendment rights in case something happens when you’re not around. You may want to talk to your roommates about how to handle police visits and reach an agreement about how to handle such situations just in case.

Clip from the DVD, BUSTED: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters

As a general rule, police can obtain consent to search from anyone with control over the property. Someone who has a key, or whose name appears on the lease, can legally consent to a search of the property if no one else is present, or if no one else objects. If you rent the property, be advised that your landlord can also let the police in.

Finally, keep in mind that the courts often determine your “expectation of privacy” on a case-by-case basis. Keeping your room locked and maintaining control of your personal space can help protect you if a roommate ever lets police in. If your room is off-limits to your roommates and their friends, courts will often rule that it is off-limits to police as well.

Don't be intimidated by police at your door. These rules will help protect your rights and improve your odds of avoiding a home search.

No Warrant, No Search!
The Supreme Court has ruled that the home is entitled to maximum search protection. Even if they have probable cause to believe something illegal is going on inside your home, the 4th Amendment requires police to get a signed search warrant from a judge to legally enter and search.

Clip from the DVD, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police

The major exception to the search warrant requirement is where consent is given to an officer's request to enter. If, for example, an officer is legally invited into your home, any illegal items that are out in the open --  or in "plain view" -- can be seized as evidence, which can lead to an arrest. That being the case, it's always wise to keep any private items that you don't want others to see out of view of your entrance area.

This Saturday the National Capital Area ACLU is organizing a training day to educate the community on how to prevent warrantless police searches of their homes. Scott Morgan and I will be there representing FyR, and I'll try to get some interviews with my new video camera that I'll post online.

NorthJersey.com has an impressive piece on the overuse of SWAT teams to conduct routine drug raids in New Jersey. It's a thorough and informative discussion that includes law-enforcement perspectives as well as those of innocent citizens who've been targeted. There's a lot of revealing stuff here:

"The reporting back is on a case-by-case basis," said Deputy First Assistant Prosecutor Dante Mongiardo. "Nobody is compiling any six-month or yearly reports saying of the 100 (warrants) that we approved, drugs were found in 98 percent of them."

Capt. Robert Prause, commander of the Prosecutor's Office narcotics task force, stresses that officers are "not just randomly picking the house."

"A very large percentage of the time, we do find the contraband we're looking for," he said.

So they don't keep track, but if they did, the numbers would be impressive according to them. I think it's time for somebody to actually start compiling "six-month or yearly reports saying of the 100 (warrants) that we approved, drugs were found in [X] percent of them." Then we'd have a better sense of how often things like this happen:

In December 2005, officers with the Paterson police narcotics bureau had a warrant to look for drugs in the brown house. But before dawn, they burst into the DeCree/Clancy house instead. DeCree, 37, said he heard officers outside his closed bedroom door tell him they'd shoot him and his barking dog.

"They was nasty, making comments like they're police, they can do whatever they want, go call your mayor, your councilman," said DeCree. "I felt violated because I wanted to protect my family. All I wanted to do was physically put them out of my house."

Contrast DeCree's claim with this statement from Sheriff's Department spokesman Bill Maer in regards to an excessive force allegation from a different raid:

"Those allegations are ridiculous," Maer said. "I think the report speaks for itself. There has been no official complaint regarding any incident that occurred to the Sheriff's Department, or to the best of my knowledge, any other agency. So we don't consider any complaints or even accounts of that story as credible."

So if you don't file a formal complaint, they don't consider you credible. But according to victims of these raids, they tell you it's pointless to complain!

I think this pretty much says it all:

Unlike in many states, in New Jersey, nearly every document generated by a raid -- from the testimony that officers present to a judge to obtain a search warrant, to search warrants themselves, to the police reports detailing whether police found illegal drugs or weapons – is not public, even after the raid is executed. Most of the two dozen people interviewed spoke only on the condition that they would not be named, saying they feared officers would retaliate against family members or simply return to harass them.

The increase in paramilitary policing excesses, coupled with excellent reporting from Radley Balko and a few local papers, is finally beginning to bring some light to this growing threat to public safety. Still, as long as citizens are too intimidated to come forward, it will remain difficult to articulate the magnitude of the problem.

My favorite among Balko's recommendations for reducing the harms associated with paramilitary police raids is that officers videotape all home invasions as a matter of routine. There's an obvious mutual benefit to this in that citizens would enjoy an added safeguard, while police would be shielded from erroneous complaints.

Unfortunately, since police are rarely sanctioned for mistakes and misconduct during SWAT raids, they have little incentive to keep records whose most likely effect is to incriminate the officers themselves.

Of Course, if they're not hiding anything, why should they worry?